With the launch of Nesta’s new 10-year strategy earlier this year, early years and education forms one of three focus areas – our ambition being to increase the number of children from disadvantaged backgrounds who reach a good level of development at age five. Putting our strategy into action, we have started by working as an innovation partner to three local authorities to improve school readiness levels – a new way of working for us which involves using innovation approaches in a more applied way to create social impact.
When developing our strategy, one of the challenges councils told us they faced was a lack of internal capacity to do the discovery work, solution building and evaluation which turns innovation into impact. As an innovation partner to councils or other delivery organisations in the early years, we provide a dedicated team to enable our partners to find new solutions which ultimately contribute to better child development outcomes. Our multidisciplinary team includes data scientists, designers, experimental researchers, alongside behavioural science and collective intelligence experts, using this expertise to help organisations working on the ground who have the local and contextual knowledge to make the partnerships a success.
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