Nesta ECEC / ELC and family support integration - Provider call for evidence

Aims of the project

This research project, commissioned by Nesta and carried out by Isos Partnership, is seeking to explore the ways in which early education and childcare (ECEC) in England and early learning and childcare (ELC) in Scotland is and can be better integrated with support for families. We want to gather evidence about existing approaches that have brought together ECEC / ELC and support for families in England and Scotland. These findings will be used to inform policy recommendations to our steering group (which includes representatives from Department for Education and Scottish Government) and in our final published report. Full details about the project can be found here.

This call for evidence

One of the ways we want to gather information for this project is by hearing directly from ECEC / ELC settings about approaches with which they are involved that bring together delivery of ECEC / ELC for younger children and support for families. This call for evidence is aimed at individual early years settings who are involved in providing support to families directly or other approaches that bring together ECEC / ELC and support for families. It contains a series of questions about the different ways in which the delivery of ECEC / ELC and support for families might be brought together to deliver a more joined-up, holistic offer of support for children and families. In this call for evidence, we are particularly interested in hearing about examples of effective practice at the level of individual settings. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Terminology

In this call for evidence, we use the term “early education and childcare” in the context of the system in England to refer to the delivery of formal early education and childcare entitlements for children below statutory school age.  We use the term “early learning and childcare” in the context of the system in Scotland to refer to settings (whether LA, private or third sector) delivering funded and regulated early education and childcare entitlements for children below statutory school age.

We use “support for families” to refer to a range of supports / services for families. While some supports / services may cover families with children of all ages, in this research we are specifically interested in integration of supports / services for families of children below statutory school age. These supports / services include practical, wellbeing and financial support for families – for example, support for early childhood development (health visiting, language development), ante and postnatal services, parenting support programmes, family wellbeing services, early help services, services that seek to address poverty or increase employability.

In this context, use the term “integration” to mean the joined-up delivery of ECEC / ELC and support for families to provide holistic support for children and families. This includes settings delivering ECEC / ELC for children and support for families as part of their offer, as well as joint working between settings and wider family support services.

Confidentiality

Responses to this call for evidence will be treated in confidence. Individual responses will be held and processed by Isos Partnership and Nesta, but will not be shared outside the research team. An overall analysis of responses will be used to inform the findings of this research. Statistics summarising the responses to this survey or anonymised quotes may feature in the final published research report, but the latter will not be attributed to individuals or organisations.

With permission, we may wish to publish some short case studies of effective practice. For this reason, we have asked those completing the survey if they would be willing to provide their contact details. These will be used solely to check details of examples of good practice and to seek permission for these to be included in our final report. Beyond that, all contact details gathered through this project will be disposed of six months after the project has been completed.