The A Better Start (ABS) programme evaluation has now concluded.

We are pleased to share the learning from the Final Report of the A Better Start Evaluation and our final practitioner briefing exploring its findings. 

A Better Start was a £215 million programme by the National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. The five partnerships were based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham, and Southend, supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life.

Over the past decade, the partnerships have worked with local parents to develop and test ways to improve children’s diet and nutrition, social and emotional development, and speech, language, and communication. The programme’s work is grounded in scientific evidence and research. The ABS programme was place-based and enabled systems change, aiming to improve how organisations work together and with families to support preventative work that responds to and addresses issues early in children’s lives.

The national evaluation of A Better Start (ABS) was undertaken by the ABS national evaluation team led by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) with their partners: University of Sussex; Research in Practice; the National Children’s Bureau; and RSM from April 2021 to March 2026.

The final ABS evaluation report has now been published.

Alongside the final report, we’ve also published our final practitioner briefing. It shares insights from the final evaluation report, which tells the story of how ABS has contributed to the lives of families with young children and across the UK early years sector. The briefing is for early years practitioners, parents, carers, and community volunteers, and brings the key messages together in two sections:

• Child-level outcomes and key learning for practice
• Systems change to support better practice environments

Key learning on child-level outcomes and systems change

ABS aimed to improve outcomes for children, and the partnerships supported this aim through a range of practical approaches. The final practitioner briefing describes how these approaches were applied across diet and nutrition, communication and language, and social and emotional development. While the approaches varied, some common themes emerged, including hands-on, interactive activities that engaged parents—for example, informative events on food and nutrition.

Another achievement of ABS highlighted in the practitioner briefing was helping practitioners make sure resources, knowledge, and skills could be brought into the home. In communication and language, this means encouraging families to create book corners and baskets at home and weave songs and rhythms into everyday activities.

Systems change was a key component of ABS. The final practitioner briefing highlighted approaches to achieving this by involving and supporting practitioners, services, and organisational policies.

The briefing highlights examples of how partnerships achieved this. These included joint working across services, implementing collaborative decision-making, and using working groups to support coordinated responses. 

A common approach to this shift involved ensuring that parents and families were engaged and placed at the centre of services. This included creating opportunities for parents to contribute to services, such as helping to shape activities, ensuring services were culturally and linguistically appropriate to encourage engagement, and making them adaptable to needs, for example by offering various modes of contact, including in-person and telephone, and by using home-based support.

Reflective questions are included throughout the briefing, prompting professionals to draw on learning from ABS to strengthen their approaches to creating system changes.

ABS programmes have provided valuable lifelong learning, particularly in parental engagement, systemic change, and early childhood development.

You can find previous practitioners' briefings at A Better Start: Practice Briefings.

For further learning from A Better Start, the National Children's Bureau has published a suite of learning resources, evidence summaries and best practice guides that capture insights from across the programme's ten-year journey. These include guides on school readiness, prevention and early intervention, place-based partnerships, maternity and antenatal care, workforce innovation, and reducing inequalities.

Additional evidence, evaluations, insight reports and research findings are available through The National Lottery Community Fund's A Better Start evidence library, which brings together learning from the programme's national evaluation and partnership-led research.