A child’s experiences in their first five years play a crucial role in their current and future socio-emotional, cognitive, and physical development and wellbeing. While these early months and years are challenging for most families, the varied nature of children’s parenting experiences and context, including socio-economic circumstances. can influence their life opportunities and outcomes across the lifespan. To give children the best start, there is dedicated government funding for universal perinatal and early years services, ‘targeted early help’ for families with multiple/complex needs, and more specialist social work/social care intervention, including safeguarding, where particular vulnerabilities emerge. Yet the accessibility and quality of provision, and its fit with the needs of children under five and their families needs to improve. This would be helped by gathering rigorous evidence on the effectiveness and transferability of existing social care and related services for young children and their families, and the feasibility of promising innovations.

To address this knowledge gap, the NIHR have newly funded a research programme on early years and parenting as part of the ARC Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Led by Prof. Michelle Lefevre and Dr Jeri Damman from the Department of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Sussex, this programme will (co-)produce new knowledge for practice which foregrounds the needs and voices of vulnerable or marginalized families who are currently poorly represented in the evidence base.

The programme will start in April 2026 with full stakeholder consultation and engagement. In advance of that, this colloquium will begin a conversation about the nature of unmet need for young children and their families, in order to start setting an agenda for practice innovation and research. The event will begin with a sequence of brief perspective-settings from project team members, other researchers working in this field, and local stakeholders. Please join us to add to the agenda-setting for this research programme.

*Online attendance: please contact SocSci-Research Team SocSci-ResearchTeam@sussex.ac.uk

Back to event list

By: Mike Davy
Last updated: Thursday, 22 January 2026