Ten years of A Better Start: lessons for the Early Years

About the study

A Better Start (ABS) was a ten-year (2015–2025), £215 million programme set up by The National Lottery Community Fund. Five partnerships, in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham and Southend-on-Sea, worked with local parents to improve babies’ and young children’s diet and nutrition, communication and language, and social and emotional development. ABS was place-based and also aimed to achieve lasting systems change: improving how organisations work together and with families, and shifting attitudes and spending towards preventing problems that can start in early life.

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) led the national evaluation from 2021 to 2026, in partnership with the University of Sussex, Fortia Insight, Research in Practice and the National Children’s Bureau. The evaluation explored whether, how and why ABS contributed to change for children, families and local Early Years systems. Over its lifetime, ABS supported 194,677 people, including 88,737 pregnant women and children aged 0–3, and delivered 253 services alongside 5,380 workforce development sessions.

Two final outputs are published here: the final report of the national evaluation, which tells the story of ABS’s contribution across three child-level and five systems change outcomes; and the second and third local evidence syntheses, which review 87 evaluation reports produced locally by the ABS partnerships on implementation and impact.

Findings

ABS made a positive contribution to many of the processes and relationships that underpin long-term improvements in outcomes for children and families. Families and practitioners consistently valued support that was relational, non-judgemental, culturally relevant and tailored to families’ circumstances, and many families experienced clear and meaningful benefits. The strongest evidence relates to these mechanisms of change. Evidence of sustained, measurable child-level impact across ABS areas was more limited, and how far new ways of working have been embedded beyond the funding period varied. Overall, ABS strengthened important foundations for long-term change in the Early Years.

• Confidence in ABS’s contribution: across eight outcome areas, confidence that ABS contributed to change was rated medium for six (all three child-level outcomes, joined-up working, parental engagement, and adaptive and evidence-informed services) and low–medium for two (the shift to prevention, and adoption beyond ABS areas).
• Diet and nutrition: ABS helped many families start and sustain breastfeeding and build confidence and practical skills for healthy feeding, although the cost of healthy food, fuel poverty and housing pressures limited what some families could sustain.
• Communication and language: this was the strongest child-level evidence. A small number of local evaluations, including a feasibility trial, found measurable improvements in children’s language development and home learning environments, and families described lasting language-rich routines such as shared reading.
• Social and emotional development: play groups, peer networks and relationship-based support were linked to stronger parent–child relationships, more confident children who were better prepared for nursery, and less isolation for parents.
• Children with additional needs: ABS gave families valuable interim support while waiting for specialist services, helping to prevent difficulties from escalating.
• Joined-up working: shared referral routes, multi-agency triage panels and shared measurement systems created more coherent local offers, although families’ experiences varied.
• Parental engagement: co-production and peer-led roles such as Parent Champions and Family Mentors built trust in services. 
• Adaptive services: feedback loops, data and test-and-learn pilots helped partnerships refine services, but these practices were often informal and applied inconsistently. 
• Sustainability: some services continued through new funding, adoption by statutory services or legacy vehicles, but many faced uncertainty as funding ended, and staff turnover remained a persistent barrier.
• Lessons for policy: future Early Years policy will be strongest when it combines long-term investment in relational, adaptive and preventative approaches with better data infrastructure to support robust evaluation.

Methodology

The national evaluation used an approach aligned with the principles of contribution analysis, a theory-based method suited to complex, place-based programmes. Evidence was brought together into a ‘mosaic’ and tested against eight contribution claims (three child-level and five systems change outcomes) drawn from the ABS theory of change. Each claim was given an overall confidence rating, from low to high. The published evidence draws on:

• qualitative interviews with 99 ABS practitioners and service managers, 22 Early Years practitioners not involved in ABS, and colleagues from The Fund;
• longitudinal qualitative research with 29 families across the five areas over four years, involving 199 interviews and creative methods with children such as photography and map-making; and
• syntheses of local evaluation evidence. The second and third syntheses, carried out together in 2025, identified 137 documents and reviewed 87 reports published between late 2023 and summer 2025. They used systematic review principles with narrative synthesis. 

A quasi-experimental impact analysis and a cost-consequence analysis were also carried out. NatCen and The Fund jointly agreed, following an independent peer review, not to publish these findings. This was mainly because very few consented beneficiaries’ records could be linked to administrative data, and wider data quality issues meant the results were not robust enough. The final report sets out the full methodological journey and lessons for future evaluations.