Nursery World - Interview - Ivana La Valle - Director of NCB Research Centre

The DfE has announced 26 trials in local authorities of payment-by-results for Sure Start Children's Centres. The NCB, with the National Foundation for Educational Research, carried out the initial study, which looks at how the scheme might operate and analyses the pros and cons of different measures.

What sort of measures did you consider?

The DfE already had 20 measures they were thinking of using. Our job was to look at them from a technical and economic perspective and look at what would work, and then get the local authorities' views about how viable they would be and how practical it would be to collect the data.

From an economic perspective, there was evidence linking outcomes the DfE wants with some of the measures - for example, school readiness. We suggested that the take-up of good quality early education would be a good measure for this. Breastfeeding is also a good measure of children's outcomes in later life.

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