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BCC Early Years - NESTA project

Â鶹ÊÓƵ is working in collaboration with the charity NESTA, on an early years project focused on the school readiness of children aged 0 to five years across Â鶹ÊÓƵ.

The ambition of the project is to:

  • close the educational gap at age five between children growing up in disadvantage and their peers
  • increase families’ engagement with early years services.

Designed to link existing 0 to 5 years data held by Â鶹ÊÓƵ, Public Health and Â鶹ÊÓƵ Forward Steps, the project will identify gaps in engagement and lead to a more targeted approach.

By better understanding the demographics, attitudes and experiences of communities in Â鶹ÊÓƵ facing the poorest educational outcomes, and the lowest uptake of early education and early years services, we can ensure an improvement in outcomes, and a long-term narrowing of educational inequalities.

NESTA are offering their expertise free of charge.

What we want to achieve

  • a list of co-designed, data-informed and literature-informed solutions that could plausibly increase uptake of early years services for our priority groups
  • a data tool that can be updated and replicated within our existing data system(s) to give a “real-time” profile of families and children aged under five in Â鶹ÊÓƵ
  • analyse where and how locally held data can be better used to understand variation in early years outcomes across the city, and differences in uptake of early years services for families in Â鶹ÊÓƵ.

The project benefits

  • Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s children/families will benefit through the long-term narrowing of educational inequalities for children across the city
  • increased levels of school readiness for children entering school and more children reaching “good level of development at the end of the early years foundation stage
  • a more joined up approach for early years services and those holding data across Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s statutory services, leading to improved targeted support as required.

The project will end at the end of August 2023 and further updates will be shared when they are available.

If you have any queries, or require further information, email: EYNESTAProject@birmingham.gov.uk

Project Update - August 2023

The collaborative project between Â鶹ÊÓƵ and NESTA is now coming to an end.

Below is a summary of learning from this project:

What we learnt

By combining available data we:

  • identified six wards in Â鶹ÊÓƵ that had the poorest early years outcomes and lowest take-up of early education entitlement
  • learnt that these wards differ considerably in their sociodemographic characteristics, namely ethnicity, religion and main language spoken
  • demonstrated the value of bringing together early years outcomes and early education entitlement data to better understand and support service delivery
  • demonstrated the possible additional value that could be achieved if these datasets were brought together to create an early years data tool

Through interviews and a series of co-design workshops with stakeholders across Â鶹ÊÓƵ we learnt that:

  • there is a shared vision for the creation of an early years tool, including a shared aim to have a public-facing platform in the tool that sits on Â鶹ÊÓƵ’s City Observatory
  • co-developed a design brief that sets out a plan for the creation of the early years data tool
  • set up an implementation steering group that will now develop the tool in Â鶹ÊÓƵs’ data system(s)

This knowledge will be used by the council in our development of the early years data tool and in our activities to improve outcomes and increase take-up of early education entitlement.


Page last updated: 18 September 2023