Leading and delivering early childhood services: 10 insights from 20 places across England and Wales

• Report authors: Ben Lewing, Jean Gross, Donna Molloy

• Published by: Early Intervention Foundation, February 2022
  

Early childhood is recognised as a critical period, determining physical, cognitive, social and emotional, and behavioural development in ways that have lifelong effects.

The right support for families during this time can fundamentally change lives. The landscape of support services in maternity and early years, however, is complex and often fragmented. Local authorities, together with their NHS and other local partners, have the task of bringing local services and communities together to ensure that families can get the right intervention at the right time from people with the right level of expertise.

Key findings

The report gives 10 insights for maternity and early years services for local leaders and national policymakers, based on the learning from the 20 local areas in England and Wales that engaged with EIF in 2021.

The report highlights examples of innovation and good practice, as well as the conditions and support required to enable progress to continue to build. The 10 insights are:

1. Drive the quality of local strategic planning

2. Plan with the whole local resource in mind

3. Get the leadership right

4. Support communities to drive change

5. Get the most out of evidence-based interventions

6. Make multi-agency working work

7. Face the challenges of sharing personal data

8. Information for families is a right not a gift

9. Step up on measuring outcomes and experience

10. Build a research practice partnership.

The insights are illustrated with more than 50 practical local examples across the four dimensions of a well-functioning local early intervention system as set out in the maturity matrix:

• Plan: How local areas are taking forward strategy, commissioning and workforce planning.
• Lead: How local areas are setting up governance arrangements, and engaging leaders and the wider community.
• Deliver: How local areas are taking forward the delivery of services and interventions, and sharing information
• Evaluate: How local areas are understanding impact and using and generating evidence.

Implications for local and national policy and practice

The report outlines what local and national stakeholders can take from the experiences described in the report as they plan for Covid recovery and seek to improve services.

1. There are some key features at the heart of effective local multi-agency planning for maternity and early years systems, which should be embedded in local arrangements:

• A good understanding of where you are starting from, using population needs assessment, local system assessment, and an analysis of other existing evidence and research

• Clear and inclusive partnership structures and processes for delivering local partnership strategy, emphasising family and community involvement

• Common approaches that support co-ordinated working, including a focus on multi-agency support pathways, common processes, sharing of personal data, information for families, workforce development and alignment of resources

• Common approaches for learning, and for measuring improvement, including defined outcomes, valid and reliable measurement tools, collaboration on evaluation, and creating a local learning culture.

2. There is an important role for national governments in removing barriers to the development of effective local systems, and in creating the conditions that enable good local system planning by:

• Building local capacity through an explicit focus on the key functions and roles that drive forward local system planning; and a commitment to funding across financial years so as to enable good local recruitment and workforce stability

• Removing obstacles by providing national leadership on population needs assessment, workforce planning, information sharing, and outcomes

• Focusing on evidence by incentivising use of evidence-based programmes, promoting support pathways, mobilising the What Works Network, brokering relationships with academic partners, promoting use of valid and reliable measurement tools, and considering how inspection and regulation frameworks could do more to reinforce local use of evidence

• Raising and maintaining the profile of maternity and the early years in national policy, signalling the importance of the connection between maternity and early years, and the relationship with wider family policy; simplifying the specification, funding, and reporting requirements of initiatives in maternity and early years; and requiring local areas to publish a local maternity and early years strategy which responds to national policy, and is built around the success factors for local system planning.

The research concluded that providing high-quality services during pregnancy and the early years is a lifetime commitment for many of the people who took part in using the maturity matrix. Yet local partners are also under pressure and facing symptoms of national challenges. There are fundamental issues to address at national level if local areas are to respond effectively to the ongoing challenging context of inequalities, resource constraints and the consequences of the pandemic.

Read more in CYP Now’s Early Help Special Report