Unlocking the Power of Data: how to transform your Family Support programmes

Capturing meaningful data in the early years is challenging. When babies are born, their births are registered, and they are typically assigned an NHS number at the hospital. These identifiers are stored by health colleagues, and associated data from regular health checks about development, immunisations, and vaccines across the early years are captured and stored in a child’s Personal Child Health Record or 'red book.' However, the data stored in these records are often unavailable to teams within the relevant local authority who look after childcare, early learning, and family support.

In parallel, and several years later, when a child enters the state-funded school sector, they will be assigned a 'Unique Pupil Number' (UPN). This UPN is expected to remain with a pupil throughout their school career, regardless of any change in school or local authority. Its purpose is to facilitate the transfer of attainment data through the school system, strengthen procedures for target setting, and contribute to the raising of standards. 

‍UPN allocators by school type - sourced from gov.uk.

While 'state-funded' nursery settings like nursery schools will assign UPNs to children when they join typically at age 2 or 3, children who attend nursery through the private, voluntary, and independent (PVI) sector or who are looked after by childminders, or their parents or carers, will not be allocated a UPN until they begin primary school, typically at age 4 or 5.

The lack of agreements to share data across sectors and geographical lines is compounded by the challenge of managing risks to protecting children’s and families’ personal data, as well as joining up decision-making across teams and departments with different governance arrangements. This results in fragmented and imperfect information, and means that many professionals working in early education and care don’t even know the full extent of who they are trying to reach and support, let alone if programmes of services are working and having a proper impact.

It’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant; when you only have access to one piece of the puzzle or one aspect of data or information, it’s easy to miss the bigger picture and draw the wrong overall conclusion.

The Blind Men and the Elephant - sourced from Medium.

The opportunity to lead with outcomes over outputs

Understandably, team leaders, commissioners, data analysts, and strategists working in the early years will focus on what they can measure and monitor. Typically, this involves a focus on outputs over outcomes. In other words, if I can’t see who I am trying to reach and what effect services are having on them, I will instead measure how much of a service I can provide, and other associated metrics, for example, the number of professionals involved in delivering or distributing support, the number of hours spent delivering programmes or home visits, and perhaps the costs of training and resources required to deliver. All of this information is descriptively interesting and can play an important role in understanding the operational qualities of service delivery. Still, it cannot tell us very much about the impact of a service or its value for money.

The EasyPeasy approach to data and how we equip partners with what they need to succeed

Our key goal at EasyPeasy is to support impact at scale by providing an integrated digital solution for the early years. We do this through the provision of our app-based parenting programmes, practitioner training, implementation support, and the provision of real-time data on take-up and impact.

One of the key enablers for achieving impact at scale is providing more usable and actionable data to our partners to help bridge gaps in knowledge, improve their ability to effectively monitor service delivery, and measure and evaluate impact. Digital programmes possess many advantages here, including a greater ability to monitor and track data, achieve broader reach at lower cost, and ensure fidelity in the quality of delivery at scale.

This is why I’m excited to introduce a host of new improvements and developments to our data and reporting system for local authorities and other partners delivering EasyPeasy as part of their local family support programmes, based on extensive feedback and co-design with our partners.

These EasyPeasy reporting developments include the ability to:

• analyse take-up at the ward level with an interactive map
• export ward and postcode data for further analysis
• identify children reached from disadvantaged areas through data matching with lower super output areas (LSOAs) used in the government’s Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index
• view reach to children by age group
• view parental engagement in EasyPeasy programmes according to Ages & Stages (ASQ) child development areas

Accountability of data and reporting to the DfE

‍As the financial year comes to a close, we know that many of our partners are focused on understanding the impact of the services they have commissioned, both for their own internal assessments and to satisfy reporting requirements for the Department for Education. We are supporting our partners in the preparation of data returns through the provision of quarterly data in easily exportable formats. We are also delighted to have begun working on the development of data-sharing agreements to support the matching of EasyPeasy data sets with local authority-held attainment, attendance, and exclusion data, and health-held ASQ data - helping to strengthen procedures for target setting and ultimately to drive improvements in child development outcomes.

Partner with EasyPeasy for your Local Authority area

‍In our mission to support babies, children, families, and early years practitioners and carers nationwide to lay the foundations for a happy and healthy life, EasyPeasy is proud to partner with councils to enhance the development and delivery of integrated, local early years delivery plans and strategies. Find out more, download an EasyPeasy commissioning guide, and get in touch with us today!