Best Beginnings

Jodie Reed, co-CEO of Home Start UK, joins George to talk about what 9,000 trained volunteers do for over 60,000 families every year and why that work can't be replicated by statutory services. They cover why family isolation is a structural trend that didn't recover after the pandemic, what the data reveals about the families Home Start reaches, why most families will never engage with a formal p...

Dr Ingrid Katz, Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, joins George to talk about one of the most important questions in public health and early years: why don't people use support that's free and available? Drawing on 20 years of research in perinatal HIV clinics in southern Africa, she explores trust, stigma, community co-creation and the practice of humble inquiry — and what all of i...

Lauren Seager-Smith, chief executive of the For Baby's Sake Trust, talks with George about the programme working at the intersection of domestic abuse and the first 1001 days of a child's life. In this episode, they discuss why pregnancy is a critical window for intervention, why working with fathers protects babies and what the evidence says about love, connection and the prevention of violence....

George spoke to Anna Heuschkel, policy researcher and early years lead at the Centre for Young Lives, about the state of childhood in England and what it will take to close the gaps. From the dismantling of Sure Start to the risks inside the government's 75% school readiness target, this is an honest conversation about what the evidence shows, why it keeps being set aside, and why getting early ye...

Reading enjoyment among children is at a 20-year low. Only one in three children now say they enjoy reading in their free time. So what will it actually take to reverse that decline and why does it start in the earliest years? In this episode, Babyzone CEO George Looker is joined by Laura Henry-Allain MBE, creator of Jojo and Gran Gran, the first Black British animation produced for CBeebies, Nati...

The 1001 Critical Days Foundation is one year old. In that time it has allocated £1.5 million in grant funding, published screen time guidance that has been cited internationally, supported the nationwide rollout of Dad Matters and begun advocacy work in Norway and South Africa. For Will Quince, its first ever Chief Executive, it is only the beginning. Will spent nine years as MP for Colchester an...

Before a baby says their first word, they have already been communicating for weeks. Tracking faces, directing gaze, passing objects back and forth and waiting to see what happens next. These are not random behaviours. They are the foundations of everything language will become. Professor Paul Seedhouse is Emeritus Professor of Human Spoken Interaction at Newcastle University and one of the world'...

Sophie Livingstone MBE, CEO of Little Village and Chair of the Baby Bank Alliance, joins George Looker to talk about what essential items really mean for families experiencing poverty. From slings to high chairs, Sophie explains how practical support changes lives, why dignity is central to everything Little Village does, and what it means to design early intervention around families rather than s...

Most parents questioning whether they are getting it right are already doing well enough. That is not reassurance. That is what the science shows. Dr Martha is a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with children and families. She trained at UCL and the Tavistock, spent 18 years in the NHS and has built an Instagram community of over 290,000 people. Her Sunday Times numbe...

What is fast-paced screen content actually doing to your child's brain? And why does every parent recognise the mood their child comes off a screen in? Professor Sam Wass is Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of East London, leader of the Baby Dev Lab, and one of the psychologists from Channel 4's multi-award winning series The Secret Life of 4 and 5 Year Olds. In...

What does money have to do with how a child develops? Everything, argues Alex Christopoulos, Director of the Aviva Foundation. In this episode, Alex joins George to explore how financial insecurity shapes the environment children grow up in, affecting parental stress, presence and responsiveness in ways that directly impact early development. Alex draws on his background in international children'...

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...