BCC Early Years - NESTA project
Birmingham City Council 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 Birmingham.
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 Birmingham City Council, Public Health and Birmingham 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 Birmingham 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 Birmingham
- 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 Birmingham.
The project benefits
- Birmingham’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 Birmingham’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.
Read more about improving outcomes for families in Birmingham through better use of data
If you have any queries, or require further information, email: EYNESTAProject@birmingham.gov.uk
Project Update - August 2023
The collaborative project between Birmingham City Council 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 Birmingham 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 Birmingham 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 Birmingham’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 Birmingham City Councils’ 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
