About the project:
Birmingham City is the third most deprived city in England and has stark levels of educational inequalities and child poverty. It is also the largest local authority in Europe: 15,000 children completed reception year in Birmingham in 2022 (GOV.UK, 2022). Of these, 4,937 children were eligible for free school meals (around 33% of the cohort) and only 55% had a good level of development at age five, as measured using the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (1) (GOV.UK, 2022). This is substantially lower than the national average for all children, with 67% of all children in England reaching a good level of development in 2023 (GOV.UK, 2022). If the outcomes of children in Birmingham on free school meals were brought in line with the national average, then an additional 576 children would be ‘on track’ at the end of their reception year.
This project explored whether better linkage and use of local administrative data offer insights which support action to address these challenges. We identified where and how locally held data can be better used to build a more detailed understanding of areas in Birmingham that have the poorest early years outcomes and lowest take-up of early years services for children aged 0-5 years old. We also explored whether such analysis might be supported long term by a bespoke early years data tool that can be built in Birmingham’s data systems and process the most recent outcomes and service use data to provide meaningful city-wide insights.
There were two strands of work with two subaims:
- Strand 1: To understand what can be learnt from single snapshots of existing data about areas where children aged 0 to 5 years old are experiencing the poorest early years outcomes and have the lowest take-up of early years services.
- Strand 2: To co-design and produce a ‘design brief’ for an early years data tool that more regularly brings together data about early years outcomes and service use to inform service improvements in the longer term.
A more detailed description of the methodology can be found in the Appendix.
