What we do

Putting our approach into practice to support early years development

We bring local communities, parents and carers together, in the places where families face some of the biggest challenges, to support every child and build a national model that can benefit children in every community. Here’s how we do it.

Unlocking the power of parents and carers

Strengthening the network of community organisations around children and families

Being guided by evidence and data

Achieving a good level of development by age five

Focusing on five steps towards a good level of development at age five

Building a systematic approach

Through our pathfinder areas, we are testing, learning, creating and refining a best practice approach to build into a framework of how a community can support positive child development.

There are three phases to our approach;

Discover:

mapping existing support services and assets, along with the views of all those in the community including parents and carers, and those working in the early years system.

Co-design and implement:

working together with parents, carers and the early years system to put ideas, evidence and learnings from the Discovery phase into practice.

Improve and embed:

monitoring, measuring and refining our approach, and building a national model to support children, parents and carers across the UK.

Creating a playbook for every community

We are working with the Isos Partnership to consolidate what we are learning into a practical and continually updated playbook that can be used across the UK to help young children and families thrive in their communities. Our emerging playbook sets out how to replicate the approach with different communities, including how to adapt the elements of the approach to local needs and context.

Sustaining community-level change

It takes time to make a real and lasting difference with the communities and families that face the most difficulties. We commit to seven years of support through our local teams and embed change that can be sustained, through trusted partnerships with parents, carers and local organisations.

Where we work

Join a mailing list

Join the Thrive at Five community of parents and professionals by joining one of our mailing lists below.

Send us an email

Use our contact form to ask us a question and we’ll connect you with the right member of our team.