A large body of evidence suggests that growing up in poverty is harmful to child development and that increases in family income improve children's early school achievement.
In parallel, there is strong evidence that infancy and early childhood, especially the first 1,000 days of life, are key developmental periods, in which growth and development are most rapid and sensitive to change.
Bringing together these two bodies of research, Nesta believes that cash payments to families beginning early in life may be an important tool to improve developmental outcomes for children in disadvantaged families - helping us progress our 10-year mission to narrow the early attainment gap in the UK.
As an early step in testing the potential role of cash payments in narrowing the early education outcome gap in the UK, we set out to answer the question: what do we know from cash transfer trials about the impact of cash payments to families on early childhood development? To do this, we conducted a review of experimental evidence from high-income countries, focusing on studies that provide increases in income to parents of children who are under 5 years old.
