Spend local growth funds on parent-led early years support, says think tank

• UK Shared Prosperity Fund and Levelling Up Fund cash should support community-led pre-school services in deprived areas, argues think tank NPC.
• NPC research into community-led early years services like baby banks, parent-led nurseries, and toddler groups found that they helped improve lives in underserved communities.

New research on community-led early years support argues for that it should be supported with regional growth funds to close the gaps between what’s on offer in the richest and poorest areas.

Cash from pots like the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and Levelling Up Fund could pay for micro-grants to help parents and communities set up their own activities and connect them with state services.

The recommendation comes from NPC’s new report ‘Understanding the role of community-led early years support’, published today with support from the Local Trust.

Researchers found that community-led approaches were effective where they kept their informal and welcoming ethos and gave community members different ways to get involved, but remained connected into other services.

The report’s other policy recommendations include:

• Central government should support local authorities to take steps to understand existing early years provision, and support community provision to address unmet need. This includes using Local Growth plans to map schemes and setting up joint referral pathways.
• The Department for Education and funders should fund research to understand what works, and work to share best practice.
• Funders should proactively seek to support community-led early years provision and capacity-building. This should include long-term funding to support capacity-building and considering micro-grants with lower requirements which can be accessed by groups offering more informal provision.

Claire Gordon, report author and NPC Principal for Funder Evaluation and Learning, said:

‘The range of community-led and parent-led early years activity is really inspiring and plays a vital role in reaching groups who might not feel comfortable with other forms of support.  But at the moment it’s too concentrated in richer areas with more of what we call ‘social infrastructure’.

Our research shows that many of these local groups only need a small nudge to get going. We argue for using money from local growth funds because we know better early years provision will drive growth in these areas through improvements in health and school results.’