The Maternal and Child Health Network warmly invites you to join our lunchtime webinar series, which will showcase existing evaluations of policy in the early years. This will include work in progress as well as completed projects from across the 4 UK nations. Presentations will focus on evaluations of policies using routine and administrative data or secondary analysis of existing data.

The webinar series is open to anyone with an interest in child and maternal health including academics, policymakers, administrative data controllers, third sector organisations.

Each webinar will feature a 12-minute presentation followed by 10-15 minutes for questions and discussion.

This webinar will take place on Thursday 28th April at 12.30pm. Tony Whiffen will speak about Flying Start, the Welsh Government’s flagship Early Years programme for families with children aged less than 4 years of age.

Linked administrative data for Flying Start in Swansea was used to investigate the potential impact of the Flying Start programme in terms of healthcare utilisation, school absence and school readiness, including trends over time. They also examined the amount of free childcare children received under the programme and the potential effect of ‘dosage’ on school readiness in terms of baseline assessment on entry to school.

Tony is a Linked Data Analyst based in the Administrative Data Research Unit (ADRU) within Welsh Government. He manages linked admin data research in the SAIL Databank related to the Early Years and Housing themes as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Visit the MatCHNet website: https://matchnet.sphsu.gla.ac.uk/ and follow on Twitter @MatCHNet_

Exploring the impact of the Flying Start programme in Wales