The recipe for a powerful home learning environment (HLE) strategy

As key stakeholders in early years support and children’s service provision, you are on a mission to provide comprehensive support to families that is not just delivered through early years settings but extends to support families within their own homes. We all know the great importance of the home learning environment (HLE) in shaping children’s early outcomes, alongside parent’s well-being and mental health.

However, with a diverse range of families all having unique needs, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. How can you effectively address the key priority areas of parent support and home learning environment, and ensure that every family has access to essential information and tools they need to support wellbeing and nurture their children’s development?

At EasyPeasy we’ve partnered with many Local Authorities to help them develop and implement effective HLE strategies. From our experience, these four ingredients provide a solid foundation for a successful HLE strategy.

1: A clear goal

A vital aspect of any HLE strategy is to establish a clear goal. Andrea Leadsom’s “The Best Start in Life: A Vision for the 1,001 Critical Days” report, and the Healthy Child Programme 0-19 public health services gave rise last year to the Family Hubs Programme, the government’s major policy programme providing £28.7m in funding to LAs to design and deliver a cohesive offer of HLE support to parents with preschoolers in the area. The guidance suggests that funding should aim to support education recovery for young children who were babies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They suggest it could be invested in evidence-based interventions which train practitioners to support families with the HLE.

Within the early years, Good Level of Development (GLD) is the nationally recognised assessment of children’s educational development measured at the end of reception. The pandemic has in many cases widened the gap in GLD between children of different backgrounds. Understanding these gaps in your local area is a strong place to start to identify goals around narrowing these inequalities. With a clear goal or goals in mind, you can then consider how you can best meet it.

2: Start with an understanding of local needs

There are so many different barriers that families can face to creating positive home learning environments. Some parents may lack knowledge about the importance of positive interactions with their children to help lay educational foundations. Others may know it’s important but lack the confidence, ideas, and inspiration they need to get more involved. In other cases, lack of time may be the greatest barrier or parental well-being and mental health may be at the core of their support needs.

Understanding what challenges parents are facing in your area is the first step to finding a solution. By gaining insights into their habits, needs, and aspirations, you can respond with interventions that respond to their needs. One thing that is for sure is that families across your local area will have a wide diversity of needs. One way that we support our local partners is by providing aggregated data on the most searched and viewed topics of local parents on the EasyPeasy app, providing insights into what support needs exist in the locality. In our local programme delivery, we also tailor and recommend specific content collections to parents to respond to those needs, helping to address gaps in support and provision, and helping to start unlocking more positive interactions between parents and children at home.

Example of data in an EasyPeasy Impact Dashboard

3: Collaborating to achieve awareness and reach

Improving home learning environments across diverse and large household populations is no small task and collaboration really is the key to success. In our experience, an area of collaboration that we have understood to be absolutely key is being able to effectively combine digital and face-to-face services in order to effectively reach families in different situations.

For many parents, the challenge of finding out about face-to-face services, or making time to come into centres to seek out support is unfortunately not a high enough priority in their day to day, meaning that many families don’t get to benefit from the often excellent services available in their local area. Digital and virtual channels play an important role in providing support to these families in a way that fits into their schedules and day-to-day lives. Digital can also play a valuable role, then, in signposting families to support available around them, once they are engaged. Equally, in some cases, face-to-face, personal relationships with a practitioner or home visitor will suit families better or may be necessary in cases of certain support needs. In such cases, practitioners can also refer to digital resources parents once a visit is over, providing wrap-around support and help with monitoring progress.

Through our EasyPeasy training, we work with health visitors, early years practitioners, nursery workers, and other stakeholders to embed EasyPeasy into referral pathways, home visits, and centre-based activity as well as partnering with VCS organisations like NCT, HomeStart and Speech & Language UK to integrate wraparound content from their programmes into the app.

4: Using effective tools to monitor and measure impact

Monitoring and evaluation are so important to make sure that all the hard work and activity that goes into implementing your strategy is actually paying off. With a clear understanding of the goal you are aiming towards, you can identify the steps along the way that will help you understand if you’re progressing properly. Start with commissioning programmes that have received positive independent evaluations, and adopting practices internally that are based on evidence from those who have tried them before. Once we get going into implementation, make sure that you are capturing data along the way that you can use to check in on progress and course adjust where necessary.

At EasyPeasy we provide local partners with a bespoke impact dashboard that provides real-time data so they can see how many households are registering for the programme and receiving support, as well as a wide range of demographic data to understand not just how many, but who, is being reached. An integrated survey means that our partners are able to hear directly from their parents and families about impacts on confidence levels, and HLE including aspects like increasing play, reading, conversations, and talking at home, and reducing stress levels.

Combining some qualitative data can also be really useful to provide depth and context to quantitative data and is also recommended. We collect regular qualitative feedback from local parents to help us learn more about local parent behaviours, habits, and problems that we can then address together at the strategic level.

EasyPeasy's Family Hub & Start for Life offer

Local authority teams specialising in early years, family hubs, and children's development play a vital role in empowering families and nurturing the well-being of children. Despite the inevitable challenges, by setting clear goals, understanding local needs, fostering collaboration, and utilising effective monitoring tools, you can create a powerful parenting strategy that positively impacts families in your community and helps to close the inequality gap for our youngest children.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can support your HLE strategy through the Family Hubs Programme, we have created a helpful Commissioning Guide that sets out our approach and offer. Download the guide on our website or get in touch with us at hello@easypeasyapp.com to find out more.