What we do
We work in communities facing hardship to strengthen early years systems and improve children’s developmental outcomes from pregnancy to five.
Our work spans the whole of a child’s early journey, from strengthening support for families in the earliest months, through to improving the quality and consistency of early years provision and the wider systems that shape children’s developmental outcomes. We operate across the breadth of the health, education, public, private and voluntary sectors to help ensure children receive consistent, high-quality support at the right time.
Our Approach
Our work is guided by a clear theory of change. We recognise that improving children’s developmental outcomes means strengthening the key factors that shape early development at the same time — from parent–infant relationships and parental wellbeing to early communication and high-quality early education and care. Lasting improvement depends not on a single intervention, but on coordinated action across the whole system.
Locally recruited backbone teams bring additional capacity and coordination into each place, supported by Thrive at Five’s central team, trustees and Advisory Council. Together, this combination of local delivery and national expertise is strengthened by robust data, independent evaluation and shared learning through our playbook.
Parents, communities and relationships
Strengthening the network of community organisations around children and families
Guided by evidence and data
Achieving a good level of development by age five
How we deliver our programmes
Through our programme 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.
Our work develops across three phases;
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.
Being guided by evidence and data
Being guided by evidence and data is integral to our approach. We use robust data and independent evaluation to inform decisions, monitor progress and continuously refine delivery. This includes external evaluation by Centre for Evidence and Implementation, further strengthening our commitment to learning and ensuring insight is used to improve how evidence-based support is implemented, at scale and over time.
Our central expertise and national insight, including from our trustees and Advisory Council, strengthen this further, bringing specialist knowledge, research and best practice to support decision-making, inform delivery and enable learning to be applied consistently across places.
Creating a playbook for every community
Alongside delivery, we are committed to learning and continuous improvement. We capture insight from every place we work to develop a practical, experience-informed playbook, helping to strengthen our own work over time and support others to improve early childhood outcomes in communities facing similar challenges.
Where we work
Stoke-on-Trent
Redcar & Cleveland
Middlesbrough
Scotland
Our supporters & partners
Thrive at Five is having a positive impact on the life and learning of children from pregnancy to five with the generous investment of funding and resources from our national and local supporters, and the skills, expertise, and partnership of our collaborators.
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