New policy brief aims to provide direction on local authority Early Years spending
New policy brief from Dr Erin Dysart and Professor Louise Tracey aims to address how local authorities can assess the needs within their communities to strategically invest Government funding.
The Government’s Early Years strategy for England ‘Giving every child the best start in life’, outlines Local Authority funding to ensure that children are ready to start school by the age of five.
The strategy outlines how the funding should be used to develop and implement family hubs and invest in Early Years settings to ensure that they are delivering high quality childcare. To do this, Local Authorities must first assess their local needs to strategically invest the funding where it is needed the most.
However, there is currently no direction on how Local Authorities should aim to assess their local needs. This new policy brief suggests that this can be done effectively by using the ‘Population Needs Assessment’, a guide developed by the Foundations What Works Centre (Davie et al. 2024). This stresses the importance of using different types of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, to gain a fully comprehensive overview of local needs. This overview allows Local Authorities to critically assess their needs and make holistically informed decisions.
The Government’s Early Years strategy outlines that Local Authorities must implement interventions which are based in evidence to provide families and Early Years settings with the necessary tools needed to support children in gaining a good level of development before they begin school. It is therefore essential that Local Authorities are able to critically assess available evidence around these interventions which entails not only assessing the reliability of this evidence, but also whether these studies are applicable to their local area and to the needs of the population within that area.
The policy brief published by the School of Education’s Dr Erin Dysart and Professor Louise Tracey presents several recommendations for Local Authorities and for the Department for Education in order to bolster the support that is already available, and to ensure that resources are invested strategically.
Local authorities are urged to ensure they take sufficient time to fully assess the needs of their locality. It is recommended that the ‘Thinking about your local population needs’ guide from the Foundations What Works Centre for Children & Families would offer an efficient method of doing so. They are also encouraged to seek a variety of types of evidence, as while quantitative data is useful to assess a starting point and outcomes, professional knowledge and lived experiences are essential for development, monitoring and evaluation.
Recommendations made for the Department of Education pushes them to allow Local Authorities adequate time in order to gather and analyse the data which drives their changes, and to provide them with support to build the technical infrastructure which is needed to gather and fully assess this. It is argued that these changes will, in the longer term, enable Local Authorities to make better decisions pertaining to where their resources are needed most.
