Our missions How we work About Latest content Help me innovate A fairer start Our mission is to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average. The challenge The circumstances of our childhood set us on a trajectory that affects the rest of our lives, with children born into disadvantage being far more likely to experience poorer health, lower earnings, a shorter life expectancy and lower levels of happiness than their peers. Taken together, the early years (ages 0–5) and secondary school period (ages 11–16) account for the development of 80 per cent of this divergence in life outcomes. We know that investing in early childhood can vastly improve outcomes for our poorest children. Yet progress to narrow the gap in early years has stalled, with trends once again worsening, and made even more stark by COVID-19. Fragmented service delivery, the distributed nature of national early childhood policy, an overstretched early years workforce and lack of support for parents all combine to leave many children without the resources they need in their early years. Our goal By 2030, our goal is that the UK will have eliminated the school readiness gap between those born into deprivation and their peers, with similar gains at age 16 among students receiving free school meals. Where we're focusing our efforts Primary focus: Early childhood Additional focus: Secondary education Browse content from A fairer start No results for your chosen filters. Stay up to date Get our regular newsletter and tailor your updates on our missions, programmes and events Sign up Press Jobs Privacy Terms of use Accessibility Contact us © 2021 Nesta Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales 1144091 and Scotland SC042833. Our main address is 58 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DS. You can reach us by phone on 020 7438 2500 or drop us a line at information@nesta.org.uk. All our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, unless it says otherwise. We hope you find it useful. Cookie Control We use cookies to help us improve this site and your experience. Find out more. Accept recommended cookiesSet cookie preferences