Digital campaign boosts language outcomes
Nicole Weinstein
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Joint council intervention focuses on improving early language outcomes for the lowest performing pre-school age children, with low-income families specifically targeted through health visitor contact.
ACTION
Hungry Little Minds Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent is a digital campaign aimed at supporting parents of children aged two and under to develop their child’s language and communication skills.
The joint-partnership initiative, launched by Staffordshire County Council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council in September 2020, focuses on reaching the bottom 25 per cent of children in Staffordshire who are identified as being unlikely to meet the expected level of development in language and communication in the early years foundation stage profile (EYFSP) assessment at age five.
Parents who sign up to the service, either through the website or via a QR code, receive personalised emails with their baby’s name and age, along with video tips, advice and suggested games and activities to help with early communication. Emails are sent out via GovDelivery, an email communications platform supported by public sector software company Granicus.
The campaign builds on the success of the government’s Hungry Little Minds national campaign, now referred to as Start for Life, launched in 2019 to improve early literacy and language skills in the years before children start school. It also works in partnership with the BBC’s Tiny Happy People, which provides accessible video-led content for parents of pre-school children.
“We tailor the content to reach our local audiences, bringing together the local health, social and education offer by providing links and invitations to baby groups and parent and toddlers sessions, with reminders when health checks are due,” explains Natasha Moody, assistant director for wellbeing and partnerships at Staffordshire County Council.
“The message is simple,” she says. “The more a parent speaks to a child, the more likely the child is to develop the required levels of communication when they start school.”
The campaign received funding from the government’s Early Outcomes Fund, launched in November 2018 with the aim of increasing the number of local authorities that prioritise young children’s language development.
It was developed with input from early education settings, voluntary community providers, family support services and health services across both local authorities, with each carrying out their own roll out and collecting impact data.
“We work closely with health visitors to help identify families that might benefit most from the service,” explains Moody. “When visiting the family households, they actively encourage parents to sign up using the QR code.”
Hospitals and midwifes also share information about the Hungry Little Minds campaign with parents, but the majority of parents choose to sign-up following the email they receive after registering the child’s birth, Moody says.
Since the launch of the programme, more than 5,000 Staffordshire parents have subscribed to the campaign, 20 per cent of which are from low-income families.
Although the key aim of the programme is to reach parents from low-income households, where there is a clear link between levels of deprivation and the early development of communication, Moody says the digital platform “costs no more if every parent across Staffordshire signs up”.
IMPACT
Analysis of the data in Staffordshire also reveals that of the 51,821 emails that have been delivered to subscribers’ inboxes, there has been an engagement rate of 81 per cent, which demonstrates that the “content is valued”, Moody says.
The emails are also successfully driving parents to take key actions, with 87 per cent stating that they have been inspired to try an activity with their baby during the last month, according to a subscriber survey undertaken in November 2022.
Currently, 67.5 per cent of five-year-olds in Staffordshire are at the “expected” level for their overall development, slightly higher than the national average in England, which is 65 per cent. However, Moody says that a quarter of children are still not at the required level of development in language and communication.
She says: “We know parents are starting to take practical steps towards communicating more with their children, through nursery rhymes, songs, reading books and talking more throughout the day.
“Next year will be the first year we can track the impact of the campaign, as the first cohort of children move through the system and are assessed under the EYFSP at the end of their first year in school.
“We are looking forward to seeing if the campaign has led to long-term benefits in children’s language development,” she adds.
