Project outline
The aim of The Developing Child UK PSP is to identify unanswered questions about community-based provisions that formally support all levels of needs within the social and emotional development of babies, toddlers, and preschool children, as well as the services and workforces delivering this support. The PSP will centre upon a child’s development from conception through to school entry, to focus on research, practices, services and settings before compulsory education begins. By gathering insights from parents/caregivers and practitioners, we will prioritise the questions that all agree are most important for research to address.
This PSP intentionally will not cover the support offered for the physical development of babies, toddlers and pre-school children. We broadly define the ‘formal support’ that focuses on social and emotional domains as being those in which it is possible to observe, measure and address a child’s developmental trajectory across key developmental domains including self-regulation, executive and cognitive functioning, social and emotional development. This formal support may include other areas of a child’s development, such as early caregiver-child communication and infant feeding, which also focus on the interaction between caregiver and child.
The objectives of the PSP are to:
- Work with a diverse and inclusive range of parents and caregivers, and practitioners, commissioners, and policymakers to identify what they believe are the most important unanswered questions about community support for the social and emotional development of babies, toddlers, and preschool children, including the services and workforce involved.
- Agree a shared list of the most urgent areas where research is needed.
- Share the results of the PSP and how they were reached with the public.
- Take the results to the NIHR and other research funders to inform future funding decisions.
Methods: James Lind Alliance Method for Research Priority Setting. Find out more on the James Lind Alliance website.
