£80m Life Chances Fund opens to early years bids
Gabriella Jozwiak
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Early years organisations delivering high quality, evidence-based interventions can apply for a slice of funding worth £80m, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Cabinet Office have announced.
The Life Chances Fund aims to tackle social problems by contributing around 20 per cent of costs to locally developed projects led by social investors.
Contracts will be funded through payment-by-results models, such as Social Impact Bonds (SIBs). The government expects local commissioners to pay the remainder of outcomes payments.
The fund will support projects working across six themes, of which early years and young people are the latest to be announced.
It is currently seeking expressions of interest from projects focused on early years that address attainment and behaviour, health and wellbeing and prenatal care and infant health.
For the young people strand, it is interested in backing projects helping those not in education, employment or training, and tackling youth unemployment and juvenile crime.
A DCMS document says the department will consider projects that deliver outcomes evidenced to create better life chances for children.
It wants to see scalable projects, but will also consider interventions seeking to test an innovative approach.
It states: "We would particularly like to see projects that involve service users, their families and immediate support networks in the design, application, delivery, governance and reporting stages, where appropriate."
Inappropriate projects are those with "one-size-fits-all" approaches, those focused only on improving parents' outcomes, or projects that only address short-term results, it adds.
The DCMS's requirements for applications in the young people category stipulate that projects involve young people, have measurable outcomes and are holistic approaches working in partnership with other services.
The application process has two stages. The first expression of interest phase will close on 31 March 2017.
The government launched the fund in July 2015, when it opened applications for the children's services and tackling drug and alcohol dependency themes.
It will open the remaining two themes of the fund - healthy lives and older people's services - in June 2017.
