Webinar: Can early years support impact children’s social care?

Abstract

There is high demand on children’s social care (CSC) from families with young children: one in five children will be referred to CSC services before age five. Given these pressures, understanding whether early years programmes can reduce demand is crucial. This webinar will feature findings from two studies to measure the impact of place-based early years services for families of 0-4 year olds living in disadvantaged areas in Wales and Northern Ireland. Using de‑identified administrative data covering all children born in Wales and Northern Ireland, we examine the outcomes of children born in areas that received Flying Start or Sure Start services.

We leveraged interesting policy features in both programmes which created groups of identical disadvantaged areas — some of which received early years services whilst others did not. This creates natural comparison areas and allows us to see what the effects of being born in a Sure Start or Flying Start area are. Our work collectively provides rare comparative evidence across two systems with different national contexts and approaches to early years.

We will discuss findings from both studies on the impact of these policies on children’s social care at a time when social care systems face rising pressures and high rates of intervention for under‑5s.

Biography

Dr Meng Le Zhang is a research fellow at Cardiff University. He leads on two ESRC-funded evaluations of Flying Start in Wales and Sure Start in Northern Ireland. He specialises in evaluations using quasi experimental designs and place based interventions, with prior work on net-zero, housing and migration policies.