It’s really important that families’ experiences are at the heart of our fairer start mission. As families face a range of challenges (including negotiating having children in the pandemic and the cost of living crisis), we wanted to hear directly from families with children aged two in Wales and build projects in response to their experiences.

By better understanding what makes a difference to parents and carers of young children, we can explore how best to support them at this vital time in their child’s development.

We wanted to better understand what matters to parents with young children, the challenges they face and their views about the support and services they receive. We conducted this qualitative research study to explore these themes. We hoped that by doing this research, we’d be able to better understand what makes a difference to parents and carers of young children and what else can be done to support them at this vital time in their child’s development. This work contributes to Nesta’s work on ‘building parenting capabilities’, as well as to our early years local service design innovation projects.

We were also interested in learning about the different experiences of families who do and don’t receive Flying Start services. These included additional health visitor appointments, extra parenting and speech, language and communication support, as well as free part-time childcare for children aged two. Services in Wales are changing and the Flying Start childcare offer is currently being expanded to reach more children. We wanted to learn about the different experiences of families who do and don’t receive Flying Start services so we interviewed families with two-year-olds in Flying Start childcare. Some of these families received Flying Start services since birth, others were new to the programme. We worked with Flying Start services and childcare settings in Cardiff and Flintshire to invite families to join the research.

We worked with Capsule Research and Evaluation to interview parents and carers of children who had recently started Flying Start childcare in Flintshire and Cardiff. By working in two very different areas, we hoped that we’d be able to explore different experiences of being a parent or carer of a young child.

We talked to parents and carers about:

• their experiences and perceptions of the services and formal support they’ve received since pregnancy
• what they think and feel is important about their child’s learning and development and the role that they can play
• the challenges that they face, as well as the people, programmes and products that support them

We drew what we learnt from the interviews to create a report. We hoped that this would be useful to local services across Wales and to those making decisions about early years support in Wales. We’ll use this report to help shape our own innovation projects and future research at Nesta. Whilst the sample was relatively small (around 25 parents and carers), we hoped that these rich insights, direct from families’ lived experiences, would make a valuable contribution to our collective knowledge and help shape future work.

We shared the results this work more widely with others working to support families with babies and young children in Wales.