Who we are
What is an Early Learning Community?
Save the Children’s Early Learning Communities (ELC) programme aims to work together with local communities to improve early learning outcomes for children growing up in poverty in the UK. Bringing local partners together, ELCs aim to bring people, experts, and organisations together to explore ways to create sustainable changes that can result in the narrowing of the achievement gap between children growing up in poverty and their better off peers. ELCs are place-based projects looking for systems change to local issues. They are a collaborative space, where partners bring expertise and together test and innovate solutions, with the aim of improving the lives of children and their families. This approach looks to empower organisations working for and with children, to maximise resources, share relevant data, find better ways of learning from each other, and together address the root causes of issues affecting local families.
What is unique about this approach?
Early Learning Communities focus on systems change. Systems change is an integrated long-term approach to finding solutions with local experts. It looks to learn from the local system and together, embed a new way of working together. The programme focuses on working with the best evidence available to learn, test and ultimately affect policy in a way that has positive and long-term impact on local families. The approach not only includes experts and local organisations, it also aims to include the voices of local staff, volunteers, families and children to find the best way to work together.
See who we work with on our Partner page.