Mapping early years practice
A new method of clustering local authorities to help identify variations in practice that drive early years outcomes
Introduction
Nesta’s fairer start mission is for every child to have a fair start in life.
Our mission is to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average.
To achieve this goal, we want to learn from practices in English local authorities (LAs) that are already driving good early years outcomes for children eligible for free school meals. In this project, we are trying to find out what LAs where children on free school meals reach a Good Level of Development in their early years foundation stage profile (EYSFP) are doing differently from others.
The fundamental question is: why do local authorities with similar demographics and circumstances have different results in the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP)?
Exploring the maps of England below, we can see that trends in early years outcomes seem not to be related to geographical location, or whether a local authority is a major city or a predominantly rural area.
If you hover over the LAs, you can see the actual percentage of children on free school meals (FSM) who reach a Good Level of Development (GLD). We have used data from 2019 as this is the latest year in which national data was available. The maps show that neighbouring LAs can have very different outcomes and that these differences persist within London (Figure 2).