Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Evaluation of Children's Centres in England (ECCE) was commissioned by the Department for Education and carried out by NatCen Social Research, the University of Oxford and Frontier Economics. The aim of the evaluation was to provide an in-depth understanding of children's centre services, including their effectiveness in relation to different management and delivery approaches and the cost of delivering different types of services. The evaluation involved data collection with children's centre staff, local authorities, parents and children. A longitudinal survey was carried out with parents who had an infant registered with one of 128 children's centres selected to participate in the study. The first survey of parents was conducted face-to-face in 2012 when the selected child was aged 9-18 months. These families were followed up through a telephone survey in 2013 (when their child was aged about 2), and were interviewed for a third time face-to-face in 2014 (when their child was aged about 3). The survey collected data about use of children's centre and other services, parent and child health, parent and family dysfunction, family socio-demographic characteristics and child cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. The survey data has been reported descriptively to demonstrate differences in service use over time and was also used in the analysis of the effectiveness of children's centres.

Further information about the study can be found on the gov.uk Evaluation of children's centres in England (ECCE) webpage.


Main Topics:

The longitudinal survey collected data on use of children's centres, other service use including childcare and early education, parent physical and mental health, family functioning, child health and diet, child cognitive and social-emotional development and socio-demographic characteristics.