How funders can reduce inequalities in early years

The first five years of our lives have a significant impact – not just on our short-term development, but on a range of longer-term outcomes including learning, resilience, health and relationships.

Our recent work looking at early years outcomes in the UK suggests there are two key areas where funders can do more to support children aged 0-5:

• Invest in accessible community-led projects, including through micro-grants
• Support systemic approaches

More widely, our recent work has underlined the need for funders who want to see long-term positive outcomes for children and young people to invest in early intervention and prevention during the early years.

The decline of government funding

Local Authority spending on early intervention (including children’s centres and family support services) fell by 48% between 2010-11 and 2019-20. It was the most deprived areas that saw the biggest cuts.

While Government has expanded free entitlement to early years care throughout the 2000s, the proportion of early years support explicitly targeted at low-income families in 2022 was just 22%.

Unless we address it, this lack of support for those families most in need will continue to worsen existing childhood inequalities.

The sector simply does not have enough money at present to reverse this trend. The government has signalled that it cares about these outcomes – Keir Starmer’s ‘Plan for Change’ emphasises the importance of making sure children are ‘school ready’. But there’s little sign of the scale of support that many in the sector feel is required to achieve.

While funders alone cannot, and should not, fill the gaps left by Government, they can help support the ambition of the ‘Plan for Change’ by focusing on these two areas.

How funders can help

Invest in accessible community-led projects, including through micro-grants

Our new research looks at the role of community-led provision in the early years eco-system. This is a diverse sector, encompassing parent-led nurseries, parent and toddler groups, online parental peer support networks, and baby banks, all led by local residents.

Our research found that community-led approaches are particularly valuable in engaging groups who might feel less comfortable accessing state services. They can also help communities form a strong sense of agency and ownership within their local areas.

But while community-led provision is a vital part of the early years ecosystem, it often goes ‘under the radar’ compared to statutory services.

Community-led projects are effective in supporting positive outcomes for children and parents. But one of the biggest challenges they face is finding stable sources of funding. It’s a constant challenge for the people running these services, who are often parents themselves.

We are calling for funders to do more to pro-actively support community-led programmes. This includes offering long-term capacity building support.

Crucially, it also includes offering more micro-grants with low requirements to support grassroots groups. They may only need a small amount to operate, but have limited capacity for applications and monitoring.

If we’re serious as a sector about reaching the communities most in need and overcoming barriers to accessing support, it’s vital to build a strong infrastructure of more informal, trusted provision.

Support systemic approaches

Previous NPC research looked at what an alternative system supporting children’s development might look like—a system that effectively prevents child poverty and supports children’s physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development.

Key to this vision was effective collaboration between early years organisations. If funders are interested in supporting this kind of systemic change, they should consider supporting ‘collective impact’ approaches.

What does this look like? Often, a ‘backbone’ organisation coordinates delivery between multiple partners. Well-known examples include Thrive at Five, Early Learning Communities and A Better Start, but there may be others that lack the necessary funding to get off the ground.

These approaches provide holistic support to children and families in a particular local area, meaning they can address multiple needs at once. This is important because our research found that for families experiencing deep poverty, interventions addressing multiple needs were most effective. For example, interventions looking at nutrition, parenting skills, and employment are more likely to make a positive, long-term impact than those looking at nutrition alone.

Investing in these coordinated, collaborative approaches is crucial in providing the infrastructure needed to make sure each part of the early years system (e.g. schools, nurseries, family support services) can work together effectively.

The importance of early intervention and prevention

For funders working in the children and young people sector, our work shows that investing in a preventative approach (through funding early years support) can reduce the severity and prevalence of issues such as mental health challenges.

Our recent research on children and young people’s mental health shows that early intervention is more effective than treating mental health difficulties after they present.

Supporting good mental health in the early years, such as making sure children under five experience loving and nurturing environments and relationships, helps them develop skills that support good mental health later in life.

However, both statutory services and charities are struggling to prioritise this with increasingly stretched resources.

It’s in areas like this where focusing on more early intervention work could have a huge long-term benefit by reducing these pressures.

We will be digging into the issues surrounding children and young people’s mental health support in more detail through a new research project. If you are interested in finding out more about this work, please get in touch.

Conclusion

We know that good-quality early years support is vital for children’s future outcomes. At the moment, there aren’t enough resources in the sector to ensure this support is available to the families who most need it. Ultimately, more targeted, long-term support from government is essential. But funders can play a vital role by supporting systemic approaches and community-led projects, and investing in early intervention to prevent issues developing later in life.