UK INNOVATION

We believe every child deserves the best start in life

In the UK, there's an educational gap between children from low-income families and their better-off peers: by age 3, poorer children living in the UK are already 17 months behind in key skills like language.

It is our mission to create ground-breaking solutions that enable all children to reach their full potential, no matter their background.

We're doing this by celebrating the role of parents and providing them with the confidence and skills to be their children’s primary educator.

Guided by human-centred design, and in collaboration with key partners, we're working to deliver solutions that fit into the fabric of everyday family life.

UNDERSTANDING FAMILIES

We're dedicated to building an in-depth understanding of families’ lives so that we can design tailored solutions that have the biggest impact. This is underpinned by ongoing ethnographic research, allowing us to get to the heart of the needs, wants and challenges families face.

WORKING WITH PARTNERS

To ensure we have impact at scale, we aim to work with corporate, third sector and government partners to co-design solutions that support fun family interaction – essential for children’s healthy early development.

Our role in co-design projects is to contribute expertise in early years language development and behaviour change to the design of new products, services, and environments.

We rely on our partners to implement and deliver the solutions we co-create. We're proud to have partnered with Reason Digital and Foundry in the co-design of digital solutions that boost early language development, and aim to work across multiple channels including: consumer products, the physical environment (home and external environment), and entertainment.

• 0-9 months: talking to babies and responding to, and encouraging, their smiles, laughter, gesture and babble as much as possible – tickling, peekaboo and ‘baby talk’ all help babies learn
• 9 months-2 years: talking to babies as much as possible, exposing babies to words repeatedly in different contexts, talking about what babies are focusing their attention on
• 2-3 years: talking to toddlers as much as possible, exposing toddlers to words repeatedly in different contexts, talking about pictures with toddlers, correcting toddlers’ mistakes positively by repeating things correctly and asking toddlers open ended questions
• 3-4 years: talking to children about things that happened in the past or will happen in the future (asking questions about picture books, making up stories or doing make believe play)

If you are interested in supporting children’s early language development, we would love to hear from you. We have big ambitions for Wonder Words and we would welcome hearing from organisations that could work with us to make them a reality.

If you are a corporate, third sector or governmental organisation that would like to work together on co-design projects around early language nudges or a designer, digital developer, innovator, marketing expert or another organisation that would like to join our mission, please get in touch
at [email protected].