What is the problem?
Thrive at Five is a collective impact initiative, aiming to help children in disadvantaged communities achieve improvements in school readiness. Progress against this outcome is measured by the National Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) assessment of a child’s physical, social and emotional, and cognitive development at the end of the Reception Year. The results of the EYFS assessments are collected, monitored, and verified nationally.
Children from low-income families are less likely to develop positively across social, emotional, cognitive, and physical measures by the end of their reception year compared to their more advantaged peers and are on average 4.6 months behind by the end of Reception.2 There are signs that the pandemic has further widened the gap: a generation of children have missed out on significant time in nursery.
How does Thrive at Five address this problem?
Thrive at Five aims to make a difference to outcomes for children in their early years by:
• harnessing the power of parents and communities to provide support for their own children and for
their peers, and by ensuring parents’ views are used to inform strategies for early years support
• providing dedicated capacity to support effective collaboration between the public, private and voluntary sectors
• changing ways of working locally and nationally to improve and strengthen the provision of help for parents and children
• ensuring that local early years strategies are informed by evidence and science.
As a neutral third party Thrive at Five can build trusted relationships both with local communities and with the decision-makers from the public sector, acting as a bridge between the two.
Together with the Early Intervention Foundation (supported by the Department for Education) Thrive at Five is developing a sustainable model that can be replicated nationally.
