From Percentages to Headcounts. What changes when Local Authorities target a number of children not a fraction?

Nathan Hodson · University of Warwick · September 2026

Every council in England has been given a good-level-of-development target for 2028. The plans that turned it into a headcount have a huge advantage over plans that left it as a percentage.

In July 2025 the Department for Education set out its ambition that 75% of five-year-olds should reach a good level of development (GLD) by 2028 (Giving every child the best start in life). Each council then received its own pair of targets — an overall percentage and a percentage for children eligible for free school meals — and, per the December 2025 implementation note, had to publish a local plan by 31 March 2026 saying how it would get there. I have now read about 150 of those plans. The single most revealing thing about them is what each council did with its number.

From a percentage to a headcount

Croydon called its whole plan “Closing the 356 gap”. Three hundred and fifty-six is the number of additional children who must reach GLD each year for the borough to move from 70.4% to 78.3%. The plan goes further: 1,250 children missed GLD in 2024/25, and 389 of them live in five named wards. It also states the uncomfortable counterfactual — “On current trend, Croydon would not reach 78.3% GLD until 2032.”

Croydon is not alone. Havering writes that “an additional 242 children each year must achieve GLD”. Essex needs 1,260, tabulated by district in an appendix. Nottinghamshire needs 757, a 14% increase. Gloucestershire 538. Durham 488. Sheffield 473. Somerset 426, Cornwall 417. At the other end, Bracknell Forest needs 105 children overall but only seven more FSM-eligible children; Westminster needs 61. When you line these up (Figure 1), Essex’s number is twenty times Westminster’s — and yet both are, in percentage terms, a climb of around eight percentage points.

Figure 1. Additional children who must reach GLD each year to hit the 2028 target, as stated in each plan.

I love the headcount framing. A percentage is just a fraction – headcount is a number of real children. It makes every child ‘count’. Even the term headcount makes sense to me as a CAMHS psychiatrist: it’s the number of children’s brains being boosted by these policies!

US President Lyndon B Johnson is often quoted as saying "The first rule of politics is to learn to count." He meant that you need to know exactly how many people you want to win over, and then you can go and find them and persuade them. This is the same approach schools have taken to pushing children over grade thresholds for the last twenty-five years. Applying the same focus to Good Level of Development is equally exciting.

Whether local authorities are looking for the 1,260 children or 61 children at risk of falling short without our added support, this framinig means they can find those children and tailor interventions to reach them. When Local Authorities are using our Pause app to promote Good Level of Development, we report back real numbers of children reached, with detailed demographic details so that the Local Authority can ensure they are getting results for the families they most need to reach. In a follow up blog I’ll discuss how Local Authorities are identifying the families they most need to reach.