Covid-19: understanding the impact, supporting the response The Covid-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social restrictions defined 2020/21, and represent the biggest change in the conditions facing children, young people and families in generations. While the pandemic has meant an increased public focus on many of the issues EIF has long centred its work on – such as mental health, educational attainment, child vulnerability and family relationships – it was immediately clear that Covid and the government’s response were extraordinary and important factors to understand in their own right. Through an initial set of projects focused entirely on the pandemic and its impacts, and through later work to capture the views, concerns and priorities of those working to support children, families and communities, we have developed and shared our understanding of how Covid-19 has shifted the ground for early intervention in the UK.
What did we do? We identified a set of immediate priorities for EIF: • To understand what works in providing early intervention remotely, via virtual or digital approaches, as lockdown conditions forced services to significantly reduce face-to-face provision. • To gauge the scale and speed of adaptation among programme providers in response. • To collate initial experiences from local authorities and frontline service leaders, to understand the impact of the pandemic. • To provide additional guidance to services for reducing parental conflict, to strengthen an important national programme supporting families under increased stress and pressure. To address these needs, we produced a series of Covid-focused reports through spring and summer 2020, and put the pandemic front-and-centre in our research projects throughout the year.
16 | Early Intervention Foundation / Annual Report 2020–2021
