We are pleased to announce that our research on the short- and medium-term effects of Sure Start on children’s outcomes has been awarded the Impact of Analysis Award as part of the ONS’s 2025 Research Excellence Awards.
The awards celebrate ‘excellent and innovative analyses carried out’ and promote ‘best practice research methodologies and data matching or linking’. They aim to show the ‘public good achieved from statistical analyses of the data’.
The award-winning report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, brings together the findings of a comprehensive programme of work that IFS has led on the short- and medium-term impacts of Sure Start on children’s outcomes. Using a robust evaluation methodology and a suite of administrative datasets, this research produced estimates of the impact of having had access to a Sure Start centre between ages 0 and 4 on a wide range of outcomes, including educational attainment, hospitalisations, youth offending, special educational needs and interactions with children’s social care. This capstone report brings these results together and produces a comprehensive cost–benefit analysis of the programme.
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