The Daycare Trust’s Parent Champions initiative in Liverpool ran from October 2011 to March 2012. It focused on some of the most deprived areas of the city where child poverty levels are high and employment levels and take-up of pre-school care are low.
Parent Champions - parents who had positive experiences of using childcare and/or supporting their child’s early learning - worked with Liverpool Childcare and Family Information Service, along with Vauxhall Children’s Centre in Merseyside, to raise awareness of the free entitlement among other parents in their community and encourage take-up.
An independent assessment of the initiative and a detailed analysis of the Social Return on Investment (SROI), an analytical tool for measuring and accounting the value created through investing in a project, revealed how Parent Champions benefited parents, children and the tax payer.
Social Return on Investment incorporates social, environmental and economic costs and benefits into an analysis of the outcomes for individuals, organisations and the state.
The final calculation from the project showed that the total benefit to society was £1,075, 567, more than a 12-fold return on the total original investment of £84,092.
The assessment concluded there was a wide range of important outcomes:
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