The educational gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their well-off peers in the UK is a stark one: at age 3, a child from a low-income group is on average 17 months behind those from the highest income group in key learning skills.

Research shows that the country has the strongest link among OECD nations between poor literacy and unemployment; children who sustain persistent poverty in early life are at a higher risk of experiencing delays in their language development.

Wonder Words, founded in 2016 and led by the charity Save the Children, aims at narrowing that gap with interventions informed by human-centred design that transform the early language development of children growing up in low-income households across the UK.

Service design

Wonder Words brings together research into parental behaviours that are supportive of early language development. It does this by optimising its messaging through a behavioural science approach that draws upon insights into families’ everyday lives, which is underpinned by ethnographic research.

“Our aim is that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are starting school with the age-appropriate language and communication skills that they need to thrive,” said Jane Devine, Innovation Officer at Wonder Words.

Parental involvement in a child’s early years is crucial, and what parents do is particularly important, as low-quality early home literacy environments negatively impact the variance in a child’s speech, language and reading development. So while socio-economic factors are important, they're not the only factors that might impact a child’s language development.

“Studies show that it's around certain behaviours that parents do, so it’s not about who a parent is or how much they earn, but about confidence, skills, and behaviours," Devine said.

"Obviously experiencing poverty can impact the ability to display all these. The Wonder Words program is all about celebrating the great things parents already do and building their confidence and skills so that they do as many of key behaviours with children in those early years,” she added.

To accomplish this, Wonder Words collaborates with both public and private partners to deliver tailored solutions that are guided by the communities they are meant to serve.

"Nudges" are employed to remind and encourage parents to do more of the good things that they already do, and recognise what "good" looks like. One approach has been to embed early language prompts into everyday products, routines and environments to nudge parents to talk, sing and play more with their children.

The program has so far developed a range of ideas and prototypes that have provided children more opportunities to succeed.

One nudge was carried out in December last year with advertising firm JCDecaux, which helped run a test campaign across 60 sites in the Tower Hamlets borough of London. It focused on localised billboard advertising aimed at celebrating parents’ role in boosting early language development.

The sites comprised of street furniture advertising space located at bus stops, with three images that used motivational messaging: a Dad/Child ad with the strapline "The more we play, the more we learn", and Mum/Baby and local Family ads that nudged viewers to talk to babies and children.

The street surveys and subsequent focus groups for the campaign yielded rich feedback for Wonder Words. The imagery used was well received and communicated their message positively and authentically, was relatable to the majority of the audience, and representative of the community.

Another nudge campaign was Mimi and Co, an interactive app and a chatbot for children and their parents to help develop vocabulary and language recognition. The outcome of a partnership with London's Hackney Learning Trust in 2016, the app promoted fun language enhancing tips, games and activities in a home learning environment.

Combining data across tests of target word vocabulary appearing in games within the app revealed that 95% of children sampled made gains of 10% or more following at least 40 minutes of app play.

Other prototypes include baby products with motivational messaging, such as baby-changing mats that encourage parents to chat to their babies while changing nappies.

Diverse insights, diverse solutions

Partnerships have ranged from corporates such as Johnson & Johnson, which provided a wealth of commercial insights to create a better understanding of caretaking population segments, to collaborations with Reason Digital and Foundry in co-designing digital solutions to boost language development.

“We’ve been doing a lot of capacity building over the last few months, so are at an exciting time where we are beginning to implement our updated skills to carry out human-centred design and design sprints with partners,” said Devine.

“This will create products and solutions that can reach families at scale.”

For example, a recent design sprint with the company Star Editions yielded two exciting product prototypes which received very promising feedback from families, both in terms of being fun and appealing and nudging positive behaviours, Devine said.

One central question for the program is whether parents don’t know that language development is important, or if they simply need reminding to play their part in it.

Devine believes it has more to do with awareness. “People get a lot of information around pregnancy about health-related issues, but not so much around language. People seem to think that language is something that happens naturally. It does, but quality interaction from adults is key to this development happening,” she said.

Essentially, it is about “ensuring people know that play and communication are worthwhile things to do, and that play is something that adults need to be involved with.”

Keeping up-to-date with real human insights is crucial as Wonder Words evolves. As a result, the program has dedicated more time and resources in 2019 to focus on ethnography studies, while continuing to apply Google Ventures Design Sprint methodologies into their innovational approach.

Guided by human-centred design and drawing on various skills and partnerships, Wonder Words plans to continue delivering ground-breaking solutions that increase high-quality engagement between parents and their children, which enable all children to reach their potential – no matter their background. — Amar Diwakar

(Picture credit: Unsplash)