Hackney – Reframing “Readiness for School” through a shared approach to outcomes

Hackney’s story starts much earlier than family hubs. Their model grew out of long-standing children’s centres and the aim of reaching 0–5-year-olds at greatest risk of underachievement. Historically, Hackney’s children’s centres (and later family hubs) were oriented around school readiness, with Good Level of Development (GLD) as the specific goal. However, as national frameworks such as Supporting Families and early help performance measures became more dominant, the system moved more towards tracking processes and outputs rather than outcomes.

Joining the London Family Hubs Community of Practice common outcomes working group gave Hackney a way to re-centre on outcomes, not just compliance. They used the London shared outcomes framework to reframe the GLD target within a positive, shared view of outcomes for children, mostly spanning the Learning, Healthy and Happy domains – and then started asking, “what are the indicators and metrics that sit beneath this, across the early years pathway?”

The London shared outcomes framework language helped the team explain to colleagues that GLD isn’t just an education metric; it’s a proxy for whether children are:

  • Healthy (e.g. early years checks, speech and language, healthy development milestones),

  • Learning (early cognitive, language and communication skills), and

  • Happy / Engaged (relationships, confidence, participation).

Hackney began to use the framework to revisit GLD  data analysis and gain insight on  those children who are not achieving GLD. This surfaced specific cohorts including Charedi  ( Orthodox Jewish) boys as a specific group for focus: GLD scores suggested underperformance, but conversations with the community revealed a different story, a different learning trajectory, with English acquired later. The framework allowed them to say: our outcome is still “Learning” – but we might need different indicators and metrics for this community.

Hackney is now layering education data with health data (health visitor checks, 2–2½-year checks) at neighbourhood level, again using the framework to make sense of the journey from birth to age five across Healthy, Learning, Happy and Safe. A joint working group with the local health provider is tackling information sharing head-on, with the aim of building a reusable, shared outcomes framework-aligned data model and Data Protection Impact Assessment to enable data sharing across partners to enable the model to be populated.