Despite substantial investment in early years services, there remains inequality between different children's development when they start school. There is an urgent need for new ideas and new approaches that will give every child a fair start in life.

The Knee High Design Challenge was created by Design Council in partnership with Guy's and St Thomas' Charity and Lambeth and Southwark Councils. It is a three-year open-innovation programme to find, fund and support entrepreneurial people with ideas that aim to make a real difference to children under five years old.

Since September 2013, entrepreneurial people from across different sectors and communities were selected to be part of the Challenge, to build, test and make their ideas with families. After 12 months of mentoring, support and funding there are six new products and services about to be launched.

All of the teams can be viewed here.

The programme has been developed in partnership with both Lambeth and Southwark Councils and Public Health teams. Here are three key aspects of our learning so far:

We need new ways of looking at public health problems. If we keep asking ourselves the same questions, we'll never find new answers. It's time to reframe the challenges we face everyday, look at them from a different perspective and identify new opportunities.
For example, we turned the question:?How can we get more families using our services more often? Into:?What would enable more families to leave their houses and connect meaningfully with the people and places around them?

We need families, children and practitioners to be at the heart of early years services. The experts are not the people sitting in meeting rooms making decisions. The experts are the people dealing with the everyday realities of bringing up children. It's time to bring meaningful collaboration to the public sector where people with the lived experiences are central in the making, testing and delivery of new approaches.

The entrepreneurial teams in the Knee High Design Challenge included parents with young children who wanted to use their experience to make life better for others, mothers who had experienced postnatal depression and wanted to transform the experience of mother in the future, and early years practitioners who wanted to change the system in which they work. They've demonstrated how compassion and determination can make real change happen.

We need more space to experiment and try new approaches.
The public sector is under increasing pressure to deliver within tighter constraints. It is hard to find the resources, the time and the support to try something new when you don't know if it will work. We need to bring different people together to investigate, invent and experiment. It is through these collaborations that we'll find the opportunities for change.

Design can teach us how to test ideas quickly and cheaply, how to better understand human behaviours and motivations, and how to seek out hidden answers to complex problems.  

When used well, we believe that creativity and design has a significant role to play in changing society for the better.


If you're interested in finding out more:

Ella Britton is programme lead at the Design Council
Email: ella.britton@designcouncil.org.uk
Visit:  http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/projects/knee-high-design-challenge

Come along to the Knee High Design Challenge launch on 21 October 2014.
Visit event page for more details.