There is now a wealth of evidence showing that parenting interventions can benefit families when delivered at scale, supporting children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development from their earliest years. However, scaling up these programmes and making sure they reach the families who need them the most continues to present real challenges. Nesta’s new market analysis, ‘Parenting support at scale’, published this month, explores how to overcome these.

What did Nesta find?

Nesta’s findings are based on a systematic review of 135 parenting interventions from birth to age 5 and a quantitative analysis of their potential impact. The report concludes that when the most effective parenting interventions are carefully scaled and delivered to the right families, they can play a ‘substantial role’ in improving outcomes for children. However, making this happen in practice, across different communities and local systems, requires delivery teams to navigate many practical and structural barriers. Nesta identify the following key barriers in their report:

1. Carefully matching interventions to families’ needs. Programmes must be designed, selected and implemented with real-world family needs and preferences in mind, particularly for caregivers from minoritised and disadvantaged backgrounds. Factors like local delivery capacity, funding constraints, and the wider social and political environment can limit the potential of even the most promising interventions.
2. Navigating a diverse and fragmented market. The market for parenting evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in England is complex. Intervention developers rarely work directly with families; instead, they rely on local authorities to deliver parenting programmes. Local commissioners must make difficult choices about which EBIs to support, often with limited budgets and short-term funding from central government. This can lead to a preference for more flexible, lower-cost options, even when there is stronger evidence for other approaches. Practitioners may also lack access to clear, accessible information about the evidence behind the interventions they are tasked with delivering.
3. Building a robust evidence base is costly and time-consuming. Randomised control trials (RCTs), are the ‘gold standard’ for assessing a programme’s causal impact on parenting practices, but they can be expensive and resource-intensive. Nesta’s report suggests that this can discourage developers and local authorities from testing and improving newer models. As a result, some programmes may be rolled out before there is a solid understanding of how they work in different local settings.
4. Limited feedback loops between design and delivery. The disconnect between programme design and local delivery can limit opportunities for feedback and learning. Without clear data on which families are engaging, whether needs are being met, and how outcomes are changing, it becomes difficult to improve delivery and ensure programmes are making a real difference.

What needs to change?

Nesta’s report sets out several important recommendations:

• Supportive national policies. Stronger backing from central government would give local leaders the flexibility to adapt and deliver programmes in ways that work for their communities while pursuing shared national goals.
• Increased and sustainable funding. Investment is needed not only in programme delivery, but also in building the necessary infrastructure, training and supervising the workforce and supporting ongoing implementation. Additional funding can help professionals build trust through outreach, address barriers like stigma and improve awareness of how to access support.
• Building a better understanding of ‘what works, for whom, and in what circumstances.’ This requires robust data on family engagement, participant experiences and child outcomes, helping developers and services understand how interventions work in different real-world settings and for different groups.
• Improved access to evidence for decision-makers. Commissioners and local leaders need clear, accessible information about the evidence base and design of parenting programmes. Feedback loops that enable real-time learning and adaptation are key to improving impact over time.

The Changemakers programme

Changemakers is an innovative programme that aims to increase the effective use of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in local areas in England through the support of local evidence leaders (LELs) as a key mechanism for supporting increased evidence use in their local systems. The programme is was developed by Foundations – What Works Centre for Children and Families and is funded by Foundations, in partnership with the Department for Education and the Youth Endowment Fund.

Changemakers is a ground-breaking attempt to address the gap between what the evidence tells us is effective and what is being put into practice for children and families locally. It was launched in 2024 and anticipates Nesta’s emphasis on understanding which parenting programmes work, for whom and in what circumstances. Changemakers funds LELs in four local authorities: Merton, Stockport, Wirral and York and the interventions these areas are implementing - Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities (EPEC), Family Foundations and Triple P Resilience - all feature in the Nesta report.

Our role in evaluating Changemakers

We are proud to be leading the implementation and process evaluation of Changemakers. Our evaluation is exploring:

• How effectively the LEL role has been operationalised in participating local areas and whether it has enhanced EBI implementation.
• The role played by local leadership, local adaptation of EBIs for delivery and the relationships with key partners across the local partnership.
• Barriers and facilitators to implementation, including local leadership, adapting EBIs for delivery and relationships with key partners
• The impact of LELs within local areas and its contribution to championing evidence-based practice.
• The sustainability of funding and maintaining the LEL role and EBIs beyond the programme duration.

Our evaluation takes a mixed-methods approach comprising an interim fieldwork and reporting phase from March to November 2025, followed by a final phase from December 2025 until August 2026. We are already over halfway through the interim phase, having held workshops with key stakeholders from each local area including all the LELs, strategic leads and EBI providers. You can read more about our approach in our evaluation protocol, which is available here: Evaluating the Changemakers programme: evaluation protocol

The next step for this phase is a workshop in August with the Foundations Practice Development team supporting the LELs. Our final report will be published in late 2026.

Let’s keep the conversation going

Our evaluation of Changemakers is ultimately about helping local systems to use evidence more effectively to support families. By learning together what works, for whom, and in what settings, we hope to strengthen parenting support across England.

If you have any thoughts or questions about this evaluation, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact Louise Ashwell at louiseashwell@cordisbright.co.uk. To find out more about Changemakers please visit Foundations’ website, or contact Nimal Jude, Head of Practice Development at Nimal.Jude@Foundations.org.uk.