There is a moment when a practitioner realizes that a three-year-old in front of them is already behind. This can happen in community centers in South Wales, nurseries throughout the north of England, or underfunded children’s settings tucked into the corners of housing estates. Not even a little behind. According to data from the National Literacy Trust, they are a year and a half behind their more affluent peers in the development of basic language skills. The goal of OMEP UK’s New Leaders in Early Years Programme was to comprehend and, more urgently, address that silent and devastating gap.
The program wasn’t created in a vacuum. Disadvantage affects a child’s health and development from birth, as researchers and policymakers have long recognized. The question of whether the method we use to quantify that disadvantage is truly helpful has been less clear, and new data is starting to support this. Area-level measures of deprivation, such as those based on postcodes and index scores, tend to underestimate the extent to which disadvantage affects individual children, according to a scoping review based on 86 UK studies. It’s possible that the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which is widely used and easily connected to administrative data, presents a more accurate picture than reality actually does.
That distinction is more important than it may seem. Geographical information, such as which ward is the least deprived and which postcode is the most deprived, is frequently used by local authorities to plan interventions. However, two kids who live on the same street may encounter very different situations. A household may be dealing with both parental unemployment and food insecurity. The next could be socially isolated but financially secure. All of that is reduced to a single figure by area-level data, and interventions based on that figure may not reach the kids who most need them.
This complexity was taken into consideration when creating OMEP UK’s New Leaders in Early Years Programme. It was funded by the Department for Education and implemented in some of the most underprivileged communities in Britain. Approximately 400 Champions were trained practitioners who were placed in settings where children’s developmental gaps were already apparent before formal schooling started. Roughly 40% of the developmental gap between underprivileged teenagers and their peers has already developed by the time a child turns five. The Education Policy Institute’s statistic is the kind that ought to put an end to any discussion.
The program deliberately employed a cascade model. Rather than being a one-time professional development event, champions were trained first and then equipped to train others, creating something more akin to a living network of practice. Every six weeks, Communities of Practice convened. Because research consistently demonstrates that the home learning environment is one of the best indicators of a child’s future outcomes, there were online modules, accredited qualifications, and a focus on assisting practitioners in interacting with parents. It’s one thing to instruct a practitioner. It is a completely different task to assist that practitioner in altering what takes place in a kitchen on a Tuesday night.
Whether these cascading models can continue to have an impact after official funding expires is still up for debate. Nearly all early years initiatives in the UK are plagued by this uncertainty. An estimated 30,000 children were reached across participating settings, and the 1,400 practitioners who finished the program went on to earn Level 3 qualifications in language and literacy despite the program’s two disruptions due to COVID-19. These figures are noteworthy. Researchers will be keeping an eye on whether they result in quantifiable long-term outcomes.
The program’s underlying premise—that targeted investment in underprivileged communities, backed by practitioners who are truly well-trained and locally embedded, can start to close gaps that policy documents have been promising to close for decades—seems more difficult to refute. The EYPDP’s expansion to 50 more local authorities, partially in response to the disruption caused by the pandemic, indicates that the government at least believes the model is worthwhile.
But underneath all of this is a more general uneasiness. Better policy is being hampered by a structural issue when the evidence base indicates that individual-level disadvantage indicators are more strongly associated with poor child health outcomes than area-level ones, but individual-level data is still more difficult to access in administrative systems. It’s possible that addressing that data issue—making individual disadvantage indicators more regularly accessible—would alter which kids are reached and at what age.
