Funded by the National Lottery Community A Better Start programme, Small Steps, Big Changes is an activity programme aimed at children aged 4 and under in Nottingham. The programme helps children to develop their speech, language and communication skills and confidence, understand their emotions and behaviour and promotes a healthy lifestyle. Activities offered as part of the programme range from sensory play sessions to singing, speech and language and cooking sessions to wellbeing and employability sessions for parents. As well as building skills, such sessions have been an important step in helping young children who spent much of their life in lockdown to develop crucial social skills and enable their parents to meet and interact with other parents and families. In addition, support is given to new parents in their homes via Family Mentors as part of the free Small Steps At Home programme. An interim report on the programme suggested that the Small Steps at Home programme helped to narrow the gap in terms of development of skills measured via the Ages and Stages questionnaire between children in more deprived areas receiving the intervention and those in more affluent areas. It also suggested an initiative to provide age-appropriate books to children as part of the programme may help parents to interact with their children whilst reading and encourage children to ask their parents to read with them and look at books, although they were not necessarily more likely to read with their child. Engaging both parents and young children at a crucial time of their development, programmes such as this are important to early years development and helping to ease the transition into a school environment.