The UK government’s mission to ‘Break Down Barriers to Opportunity’ means there is renewed urgency to scale up effective policy interventions that support children’s early development.
Parenting programmes, which generally support parents to have warm and stimulating relationships with their children, are among the most promising policy tools available. Many programmes show strong evidence of improving important outcomes like children’s socioemotional and cognitive development, in some cases for years afterwards. However, a complex and convoluted market for choosing and implementing parenting programmes presents many challenges in getting effective interventions to families who could benefit most from them.
In this project, we take a bird’s eye view of the market to focus on the availability, evidence base and popularity of different types of parenting programmes, and use our analysis to understand what could be done to make the market work better.
What's in the report
- We provide an overview of the market for parenting interventions through a largely quantitative approach, including analysis of available interventions and their potential impact.
- We conduct a rapid but systematic analysis of 135 parenting interventions, focusing on early-years programmes that directly target socioemotional or cognitive development.
- We conduct new modelling of the impact of various parenting programmes on the Good Level of Development measure in England.
- We describe potential issues in the market for parenting support by focusing on the flows of information between intervention developers, policymakers, commissioners, and families.
- In addition to exploring the strength of evidence underpinning different kinds of intervention, we explore what features of parenting programmes appear to be related to their popularity in the UK.
Findings/recommendations
Our analysis finds that parenting interventions could have a substantial impact on the likelihood of children reaching a Good Level of Development, especially for those children most at risk of falling behind; if effective interventions were implemented at scale, 8,000 more children could hit this milestone at age 5 per year. However, commissioners are unlikely to have enough easily interpretable information on interventions themselves, their effectiveness and how well they might be suited to families’ needs and preferences.
Our analysis of 135 interventions then finds that while there are many types of intervention available, some of those that are most popular in the UK do not have reliable evidence of effectiveness. Instead, the most popular interventions seem to be those that are easiest to implement and adapt to local contexts.
As such, many of our recommendations focus on creating a better information environment: through more evaluation of new interventions, more critical appraisal of existing evidence, and through better information on family needs and preferences.
