Welcome to the Summer 2026 edition of the Isos Partnership newsletter. We’re delighted to tell you about the work we’ve been doing in recent months, and to share some of the things we have in the pipeline.

If you want to chat to us about anything featured in this edition, or to engage with the discussions we’re having as a team, we’d love to hear from you.

In June, we published a landmark report with Nesta exploring the ways in which early education and childcare are currently integrated with support for families in England and Scotland. We were pleased to see our conceptual framework for early years integration featured in the UK government’s Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies guidance for local authorities in England. To learn more about our findings, read our final report or come along to our webinar with Nesta on 23 July.

We are supporting Hull City Council over the next three years as an evaluation and learning partner as they deliver their Best Start Local Plan. Alongside other local authorities across the country, Hull have been set an ambitious target to increase the proportion of their children making a Good Level of Development by summer 2028. The first stage of our work with Hull was to develop a theory of change, capturing all of the programmes, interventions and services they are delivering which support children’s development in the city. We were pleased to see our theory of change feature in Hull’s Best Start Local Plan.

As part of the DfE-funded What Works in SEND programme and working alongside the Council for Disabled Children, we recently supported eight local authorities to develop and strengthen approaches to youth participation within local SEND systems as part of a Youth Voice Learning Community. Through a series of structured engagements including workshops, peer learning, and regular check-ins LA participants tested and refined their approaches in real time. You can read the full report here, or watch some highlights from our final learning event which brought together local authority teams and young experts.

We republished three of our What Works in SEND effective practice case studies, with reflections from a group of young experts. Our young experts are drawn from youth voice and participation groups across the country and work with us to provide structured feedback on What Works in SEND case studies. We ran facilitated workshops with the young experts to explore their views on the strengths and limitations of the case studies, and to identify key areas of development they would like to see reflected in SEND practice and system design.

We were commissioned by the Local Government Association and the County Councils Network to provide an independent analysis of national SEND reform, informed by the views of local government captured through a survey and workshops.

We conducted an independent review of Alternative Provision for Bristol City Council, to understand how the AP system currently functions in the city and how it can be as robust, responsive and agile as possible so that the most vulnerable children and young people can access the support they need before they reach crisis point. Our final report drew on discussions with school stakeholders, interviews and visits to existing APs, online consultation events and four in-person group discussions with children and young people who are currently being educated in AP.

You can see all of our recent publications here.

Sam spoke at the annual Children & Young People Now Evaluation, Evidence and Impact conference about our Funding Futures research into the drivers and enabling factors behind closing disadvantage gaps in the early years.

Natalie and Simon spoke at the AEPA Annual Conference about our work on building and strengthening area-based education partnerships - a key component of the government’s 2026 Schools White Paper - including insights from our current projects with Southwark and Southampton.

Sam ran a workshop at the CDC National Online Event SEND Reform: Planning for the future, describing how we ran our Youth Voice Learning Community and some of the key lessons that emerged from the work. You can see Sam’s slides here, or watch the workshop here.

With the government’s SEND reforms underway, we have been directly supporting four local authorities to formulate their SEND Reform Plans, and have advised a further six local authorities through the planning process. Our work with LAs to formulate their plans has provided us with valuable insights into how local areas are setting up their Experts at Hand (EAH) service, and the common questions and concerns being raised locally in response to the SEND reforms.

Following the success of our Youth Voice Learning Community, we are getting underway with three new learning communities as part of the What Works in SEND programme, in partnership with the Council for Disabled Children. This year we will be working with 18 local areas across three themes relating to the SEND reforms: developing the Experts at Hand offer; working with schools and trusts to build inclusive approaches, and working with parents and carers to build and sustain trust during the reform process.

We’re carrying out a study into how the Cambridge Science Park can make a meaningful contribution to Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) education for disadvantaged young people in Cambridge and the wider region. We’ve spent the early summer engaging with the local authority, schools and colleges and third sector organisations, including the Cambridge Science Centre.

We are working with local authorities to review their Section 19 support for children who cannot attend school due to illness, exclusion, or other reasons. As part of this work we are exploring changes in the profile of needs, consistency in approaches to in-school support and joined-up approaches to inclusion and attendance.

The early years are currently the subject of significant policy attention and reform, and local authorities are playing a more significant role than ever in this vital area of service delivery: overseeing the rollout of the Best Start Family Hubs and Healthy Babies programme, driving progress towards highly ambitious GLD targets as part of the Best Start in Life strategy, coordinating a significant expansion of funded childcare places and the growth of school-based early years provision, and ensuring young children with additional needs receive the support they need to thrive within their community.

Drawing on our strong track record of supporting local authorities with various aspects of their early years role, the latest findings from our own research, and insights drawn from work we are currently undertaking with local authorities across the country, we are developing three early years support packages for local authorities.

In the autumn we will be sharing details of a webinar on Experts at Hand: from theory to implementation, drawing on our ongoing research in this area, our experience of supporting a number of local areas to develop their EAH offer, and the emerging findings from our Experts at Hand learning community.

If you want to follow up on anything we’ve covered in this edition of the newsletter, or discuss some ideas we might be able to help with, we’d love to hear from you. Or feel free to reach out to an individual member of the team. In the meantime, we wish you a restful break over the summer ☀️.