The third annual report for the national evaluation of A Better Start
Event
A Better Start – National Evaluation Annual Report Webinar
This webinar is the third in an annual series of events, presenting the findings from the national evaluation of A Better Start.
Register
A Better Start (ABS) is the ten-year (2015-2025), £215 million programme set-up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. There have been five ABS partnerships based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham, and Southend-on-Sea, with a focus on supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life. The Fund have commissioned NatCen and partners from the National Children’s Bureau (NCB), Research in Practice, RSM and the University of Sussex, to carry out the national evaluation of ABS. The national evaluation has been running since 2021 and will continue until March 2026.
This is the third annual webinar presenting findings in progress from the national evaluation team. Practitioners, policy-makers and others working in the Early Years sector will find this session of interest, to understand the outcomes of the ABS programme and how the ways of working across ABS can influence outcomes. For parents and carers, the session will help to demonstrate and explain the impact of how the ABS programme has had on the lives of families with young children.
For those with an interest in large-scale, complex evaluations, this webinar will illuminate the methods used in the project, particularly how the team are using contribution analysis to build the mosaic of evidence from A Better Start.
Speakers
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Mari Toomse-SmithDirector of Health and Biomedical Surveys National Centre for Social Research
Mari is the Director of Health and Biomedical Surveys at NatCen. She leads a large team of researchers working on some of the most important health surveys in the country: Health Survey for England, National Diet and Nutrition Survey, Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. She is responsible for quality assuring outputs from the team’s surveys to a National Statistics standard, designing new survey solutions for customers, winning new work and holding key client relationships. She has a particular interest in survey methodology and seeing through innovations on existing surveys
Mari has extensive experience of successfully managing complex social surveys across a variety of modes and topic areas. Before starting as a Director she led new business development at NatCen's Survey Research Centre and oversaw our web and telephone survey work. -
Thea ScheiResearch Director National Centre for Social Research
Thea has over ten years’ experience in conducting social research and evaluations, including systematic reviews, pilot studies, experimental, longitudinal, and quasi-experimental studies. She has extensive experience of using statistical methods such as multilevel modelling, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, measurement development and validation, and mediation models. She has a special interest in mental health, women’s health, obesity and nutrition, and has led research focusing on the efficacy of psychiatric diagnostic applications, impact of moral framing on food consumption, and improving symptoms of reproductive health conditions using digital health approaches. Thea holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge.
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Makenzie UglowResearch Director National Centre for Social Research
Makenzie is an experienced evaluator and project manager. She has contributed to the design and delivery of several evaluations, with a particular focus on theory-based evaluations of complex interventions, as well as delivering implementation and process evaluations accompanying impact evaluations. She also has experience as a Principal Investigator on a large efficacy trial. Makenzie is a mixed-methods researcher, with expertise in qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews and focus groups, and the design and delivery of surveys. Makenzie works across the different policy areas of NatCen but has a particular interest in conducting research to improve educational outcomes for children and young people, particularly through improvements to quality through practitioner professional development, support and training.
Prior to joining the Centre for Evaluation, Makenzie was a Senior Researcher within the Centre for Children and Families. During her time working in Children and Families, in addition to her work as Principal Investigator of a large trial for the EEF, she also managed large-scale qualitative research studies. Examples of this work include a study with active and former childminders, to explore challenges, retention, views on childminder agencies and childminder assistants for the Department for Education, and a large-scale listening exercise as part of ongoing Covid-19 Inquiry.
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Natasha PhillipsSenior Researcher National Centre for Social Research
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Janet BoddyJanet's research is concerned with family lives and with services for children and families, in the UK and internationally. She also has a long-standing interest in methodology, particularly in relation to complex evaluation, qualitative, longitudinal and narrative approaches, cross-national research, and research ethics and governance. Janet co-leads Objective 3.
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Beth YoungBeth is an Associate Director in RSM’s Social Policy team. She has over 15 years’ experience of managing and conducting research and evaluations on behalf of a range of public, private and voluntary sector clients. She has extensive expertise in project managing large scale, complex evaluations and stakeholder engagement exercises and reporting the findings in a clear and concise manner. Beth is leading RSM’s work on Objective 4 of the ABS National Evaluation. Objective 4 aims to evidence the contribution the ABS programme has made to reducing costs to the public purse relating to primary school aged children.
