Dear colleagues,

We hope that you and your families are keeping well during these challenging times, and thank you for your continued hard work to support families that are more in need of our support now than ever.

We are writing to give you an update on the Hungry Little Minds campaign and some further guidance and resources that have been published for parents.


New guidance and resources

We have published some new content on gov.uk to support parents with children in the early years on supporting their children’s learning at home during the Covid-19 outbreak.

It aims to provide clear answers to the most common things we know parents are worried about. The intention is to reassure parents that we are not expecting them to be early years practitioners or teachers, but to support their child’s wellbeing and learning as much as possible.

The content signposts parents to the Hungry Little Minds campaign website, which remains our primary vehicle for offering practical ideas of activities for parents to try to support their child’s early learning at home. You can view this guidance here.

We have listed some online educational resources on our Hungry Little Minds website to help pre-school children to learn at home. These have been brought together by some of the country’s leading educational experts and are free to use. You can also find a link to these resources for all age groups on GOV.UK.


Hungry Little Minds

We have updated the Hungry Little Minds website, to ensure all the activities are in line with the current social distancing guidance and to give families some more inspiration for activities they can do whilst they are at home with their children.
We have some PR work going live over the next week or two, with celebrity talent and micro-influencers posting about the campaign on social media and using the hash tag #HungryLittleMinds. Look out for the hash tag on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

We are also developing some additional social media content, which we will share with you once it is ready. We would be grateful if you could continue to support us on social media using these new images. We will send another email with the new images when we have them.


Help us to learn how families are coping with COVID-19

A team of academics from the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Reading have published a survey aiming to understand how families with pre-school children are coping with the challenges of COVID-19.

The survey focuses on the mental and emotional health of families and their children and is aiming to engage with 5,000 families across the UK.

We would be grateful if you would promote the survey through your channels.


I hope this update has been useful for you, and we are grateful for your continued support to promote the Hungry Little Minds campaign, which is now more important than ever.

Best wishes,
Department for Education Home Learning Environment policy team

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