Access to high-quality early childhood education has an established positive impact on child development. Evidence also shows that integrated family support can improve children's life chances, particularly for children living in poverty. Currently, however, little is known about how early education and wider family support services can and should be joined up to improve the overall support that families with young children receive in England and Scotland.

What’s in the report

The report seeks to fill the knowledge gap by drawing on evidence from nine local area deep dives, an online survey of 65 local authorities, and responses from 57 early years providers. It maps current integration practices and essential ingredients to effectively integrate early education and care (ECEC) in England and early learning and childcare (ELC) in Scotland with wider family support services.

Findings

ECEC/ELC settings have evolved into a critical first port-of-call for families, with most settings reporting that they deliver direct support to families on the ground. Daily parent contact allows staff to build trust and more easily spot when a household is struggling. This expanding role of ECEC/ELC settings is rarely the result of a planned national policy. Settings are partially absorbing these extra responsibilities by necessity, to fill the vacuum left as community services shrink their delivery models due to funding constraints.

Support given to families by ECEC/ELC settings is not uniform. It can involve direct support (support directly delivered by settings) or indirect support (connecting parents to external support) and often spans across four domains of family need: child development and home learning (direct), inclusion and additional support needs (direct), family wellbeing (direct and indirect), and financial hardship (indirect). A setting’s capacity to support families was not related to provider type (private, voluntary or independent (PV), maintained or school-based) but was thought to be shaped by the setting’s internal culture, physical space, staff capacity, and local community needs.

There is no one optimal local model of integration. Local areas organise family support around one of three main models, often depending on local geography, community need and infrastructure:

• Hub- or centre-based models are one-stop physical shops co-locating healthcare, education, and early help, which are common in urban parts of England with Sure Start legacies.
• Multi-agency locality teams are multidisciplinary teams that travel out to wrap outreach support directly around universal nurseries, common in rural areas and across Scotland.
• Setting-led models are larger community nurseries or social enterprises that hire internal teams to plug local public sector gaps.

Putting services in the same building (co-location) does not guarantee joint working. True integration requires a shared ethos, mutual respect, and routine data sharing.

Unlike schools, early years settings lack formal strategic partnership structures to aggregate and amplify their strategic voice.

Effective integration is currently blocked by three operational bottlenecks: 1) tight budgets, 2) short-term, restrictive grants tied to temporary government initiatives and 3) a lack of clear national protocols around sharing data between health boards and education departments.

Recommendations for strengthening integration between ECEC/ELC and broader support for families

1. National governments should formally recognise and define the broader role of ECEC/ELC settings in supporting families

National policymakers should formalise the unique role early years settings play in connecting families to support. This role should be a central pillar of national delivery strategies.

2. National governments should provide sustainable resourcing to build long-term capacity for ECEC/ELC settings to play a broader role in supporting families

Participants told us that short-term, time-limited grants to local authorities for ECEC/ELC often lead to siloed as opposed to joined-up working at the local level. National governments must therefore shift away from short-term grants and provide long-term, flexible funding to local authorities for the purpose of integrated working. This funding must establish a dedicated family support capacity that sits strictly outside existing classroom ratios, creating permanent local infrastructure without placing extra operational strain on staff.

3. Skills for identifying needs and supporting families should be incorporated into national and local ECEC/ELC workforce development

Identifying and exploring signs of family need sensitively must become a core component of initial qualifications and early career training pathways for practitioners. National pathways should also establish specialised, advanced qualification routes for dedicated family brokerage roles, equipping staff with the mandatory skills and professional confidence required to handle complex household vulnerabilities safely.

4. National and local governments should support the ECEC/ELC sector to act as a strategic partner in local multi-agency partnership working and in developing local integrated plans.

National policies must mandate that early years providers are treated as equal strategic partners in multi-agency planning. This requires local councils to fund and maintain accessible sector representative networks, giving diverse providers a unified, collective voice to ensure strategies are shaped by frontline reality.

5. National policymakers should develop consistent guidelines and templates for multi-agency data-sharing agreements.

National departments should design and distribute standardised guidelines and uniform templates for cross-sector data sharing. This consistent, country-wide framework will provide operational clarity and remove the administrative hesitation and legal uncertainty that currently prevent local teams from securely sharing information to protect and support children.