Best Beginnings

What if the secret to raising curious, confident children was already in your kitchen cupboard? Sergei Urban is the founder of The Dad Lab, one of the most followed play based learning platforms in the world. With over 10 million followers and 3 billion YouTube views, his content is used in classrooms worldwide including by the Australian government. He has done all of it without a science degree,...

What can we actually know about a child's development in the first year of life? And what should parents do with that information? Professor Emily Jones is Professor of Neuroscience at King's College London, leads the BOND lab at Birkbeck University and is Principal Investigator of BASIS, the British Autism Study of Infant Siblings, which has followed hundreds of babies from six months through chi...

Neil Leitch has spent decades fighting for the early years sector to be taken seriously. As CEO of the Early Years Alliance, the largest early years membership organisation in England, he has seen what happens when families don't get the support they need in the earliest years of life and what changes when they do. In this episode we talk about a freedom of information request that took two and a...

1 million new neural connections form in a child's brain every single second during the first three years of life. By the time a child turns two, more than 80% of their brain architecture is already in place. And yet, as a society, we invest the least in the years that matter most. That's what Best Beginnings is here to change. In this opening monologue, George Looker makes the case for why the ea...