Early years practitioners play a crucial role in improving the Home Learning Environment (HLE). We...
As we look ahead, we want to invite your views to help shape our development roadmap for 2024. Since the very beginning, the development of EasyPeasy has always been a collaboration with parents and with our local authority partners, emphasising listening and engagement, and taking a human-led approach to design. The priorities we set internally are highly informed by the feedback we collect from our community, whether that’s through partner conversations, user reviews on the App and Play Stores, user testing, or our parent and practitioner impact surveys.
Below, we share some of the key features and improvement ideas that the community has asked for this year and that we hope to make in 2024.
Family information services
In 2023, we ran a pilot to signpost EasyPeasy parents to information services including health and safety and outdoor play based on interest from our local authority partners. Rolling out signposting to trusted national brands like NHS Healthier Families via the EasyPeasy app could help keep communities well-informed and supported.
Universal health check reminders
We know that many of our partners face a considerable challenge with missed appointments to mandated health checks in the early years. Sharing appointment reminder notifications with parents via the EasyPeasy app through integrating with birth register data could help to increase attendance.
Additional support for SEND
The EasyPeasy app is already full of content appropriate to support children with SEND, but, through working with SEND experts, we can curate EasyPeasy activities for specific types of SEND and build in additional guidance; empowering parents and practitioners alike to better support their children.
Collective impact dashboard
We’ve always known that achieving our mission to close the gap in early child development isn’t something we can do alone. A dashboard showcasing what is happening across EasyPeasy areas could generate and share actionable insights and learning, especially for regional and statistical neighbours, supporting our collective impact on children and families.
Ward-level data and insights
The EasyPeasy Impact Dashboard currently displays registration data by postcode for our local authority partners, but we understand that displaying this data by ward could be more meaningful for stakeholders alongside maintaining access to the downloadable CSV file offering a full postcode breakdown.
Additional language translation features
The EasyPeasy app already supports content creation in over 70 languages supported across Android and iOS devices, but we want to go further. An option to change the display language on the user interface would make EasyPeasy an even more accessible and inclusive space for families and caregivers.
EasyPeasy for Practitioners
We understand from a range of feedback that a practitioner registration route could improve practitioners’ experience including allowing the selection of multiple child age groups, rather than a single date of birth, as well as web access to EasyPeasy to make it easier to view content on work devices.
Partner with EasyPeasy for your Local Authority area
We’re excited to continue to improve EasyPeasy as a community in 2024 by working together and sharing feedback. We hope you will take part and add your voice by voting in the poll, and we look forward to sharing the results with you and keeping you updated on our next steps!
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!
