UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will invest up to £2 million from the UKRI Breaking Down Barriers to Opportunity Mission in this Contracts for Innovation competition. Children and families experiencing homelessness, particularly those living in temporary accommodation, face multiple and often compounding challenges. These challenges can significantly disrupt routines, stability, access to services, and opportunities for learning and development at home and at school. These experiences can have long lasting impacts on children's health, wellbeing, and educational outcomes. Despite this, support for families in temporary accommodation is often fragmented, inconsistent, or not designed specifically with their lived reality in mind. There is a pressing need for wraparound, coordinated, flexible packages of support to enable children and young people to flourish. This competition will fund organisations to develop, adapt, or further validate innovative approaches that improve educational outcomes and wider wellbeing for children and families experiencing homelessness. We are seeking innovative, evidence informed approaches that may include, but are not limited to, those focused on: improving access to safe, suitable, and consistent spaces for learning within temporary accommodation or unstable housing contexts learning resources, digital tools, and educational materials that are adaptable to overcrowded or transient living conditions strengthening coordination between education, early years, housing, health, and local support services to better identify children experiencing homelessness and respond to their learning needs enabling parents or carers in unstable housing situations to better support children's learning, development, and educational continuity improving the capacity of educational and early years institutions to better respond to the needs of children experiencing housing insecurity reducing practical barriers to learning participation, including those related to travel, transport, frequent moves, disrupted routines, or limited proximity to education and support services supporting the specific needs of single parent families experiencing homelessness The aim of this competition is to progress innovations that improve home learning environments, educational outcomes and wider wellbeing for children and families experiencing homelessness. By the end of this phase projects must demonstrate robust evidence for future solutions, improving real world applicability, or enabling wider adoption across services and settings. This is phase 1 of a potential 3 phase competition. The decision to proceed with subsequent phases will depend on the outcomes from previous phases and assessment of separate applications. Only the successful applicants from phase 1 will be invited to apply to take part in phase 2. In applying to phase 1 of this competition you are entering into a competitive process. This phase of the competition has a funding budget of up to £2 million, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects. Any adoption and implementation of a solution from this competition would be subject to a separate, possibly competitive, procurement exercise. This competition does not cover the purchase of any solution. We expect to receive a high volume of applications and will not be able to fund them all. We expect to award a maximum of 10 contracts.
