Data, impact, and insights
Data
Coventry’s early years system is underpinned by a strong intelligence and data infrastructure. The citywide Intelligence Hub brings together datasets from sources including the ONS, LG Inform+, health, education and local surveys, providing a robust foundation for evidence-led decision-making.
This is complemented by shared dashboards and aligned reporting, developed by Coventry City Council’s Data Team, which provide a single, system-wide view of children’s health, development, education and family wellbeing. Together, these enable the Best Start in Life partnership to monitor trends across population, health, deprivation and outcomes, and to respond proactively to emerging need while strengthening joint accountability for delivering Bold Start and Bright Futures.
At a service level, Best Start Family Hubs contribute high-quality performance data through well-established collection processes and dashboards. This information supports the planning, delivery and evaluation of services, ensuring they remain responsive and effective for families.
A shared approach to timely, lawful and transparent information sharing underpins an integrated ‘no wrong door’ offer. Families can tell their story once and receive coordinated support at the earliest opportunity, enabling quicker identification of need, smoother transitions between services and the development of joint plans across partners.
Impact
A Best Start in Life, Local Area Plan outcomes framework will underpin performance, evaluation, and targeted improvement, identifying inequalities, strengthening early identification and enabling rapid response to emerging needs.
Insights and research
The Best Start in Life Strategy is informed by learning from practice, evidence, and research. It builds on local delivery experience, robust data, and evaluation, alongside the best available national and international evidence on early childhood development. This is strengthened through collaboration with Coventry University and the NIHR-funded Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC), ensuring that both academic research and insight into the wider determinants of health inform priorities, commissioning, and service design.
By combining what the evidence tells us with what families and practitioners say works in practice, the Strategy commits to continuous learning, reflective improvement, and the scaling of approaches that have the greatest impact on outcomes for children and families. Over time, further system learning and improvement will be driven by population-level insight on outcomes, inequalities, and demand, alongside ongoing research and evaluation, to inform future commissioning and enable a more evidence based, responsive system.
Privacy, consent & trust
Partners will operate within existing information sharing agreements, GDPR/UK DPA, safeguarding and consent protocols, using data responsibly and proportionately. Where new arrangements are required to improve data sharing, this will be sought as a part of the Local Area Plan.