The Children of the 2020s study is a new nationally representative birth cohort study of babies born in England at the start of the 2020s. It has been commissioned by the Department for Education and will answer important scientific and policy questions regarding the family, early education and childcare determinants of early school success.The study is led by Professor Pasco Fearon (UCL Psychology and Language Sciences, the University of Cambridge, and the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) in partnership with Ipsos. Study collaborators include the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, the University of Oxford, and Birkbeck, University of London.  Data from Wave 1 of the Children of the 2020s study are available for research purposes via the ONS Secure Research Service.Researchers who wish to use Children of the 2020s data will need to become an accredited researcher, and then apply for an accredited research project.The Wave 1 Technical Report is available from the Department for Education website. It includes the questionnaire content as well as a description of the development, implementation, administration, and data management of the first wave of the survey.If you’ve been contacted to take part in Children of the 2020s, please head to the study website to find out more about what the study involves.The Children of the 2020s study sample has been drawn from HMRC Child Benefit records. It includes parents with babies born in September, October, and November 2021.Approximately 8,500 families have been invited to take part. The study is a five-wave longitudinal survey study of children from nine months to five years.The first wave of data collection was face to face and took place when the cohort child was nine months old (Wave 1).A second face-to-face data collection will take place at age three (Wave 3).Non-face-to-face modes will be administered using a sequential mixed mode design with online and telephone surveys when children are aged two (Wave 2), four (Wave 4) and five (Wave 5).Data collection will include assessments of:The study includes ongoing linkages to both parent and baby education and health records.Alongside the main survey, the study will collect additional data using an innovative smartphone app called BabySteps. BabySteps will enable us to capture rich developmental and home environment measures between study waves at low cost. Measures will include a combination of short questionnaires and video/audio recordings.High quality, cleaned, and fully weighted datasets, along with data documentation and guidance following each wave of data collection will be produced, alongside non-response analyses and details of the weighting system applied.The Children of the 2020s study receives funding from the Department for Education.If you’ve been contacted to take part in the Children of the 2020s study, please head to the study website at children2020s.ipsos.com to find out more about what’s involved.A nationally representative sample of approximately 8,500 babies has been recruited from across England, with boosted representation of babies in the lowest quintile of disadvantage. We are surveying participants annually. The first data collection took place when the cohort members were nine months old. The final data collection will be when the children are age five.There will be a big focus on linking administrative data to the survey data we collect. With participants’ consent, we will link education data, held by the Department for Education, and NHS digital health records to the study data.The survey data we collect will be enriched with in-home observation and smartphone apps. Phone: +44 (0) 20 7679 1244 Email: p.fearon@ucl.ac.uk Professor Pasco Fearon is a leading expert in early child development, specialising in early parenting, attachment, parental mental health and the development of children’s emotional and behavioural problems.Pasco is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor at the University of Cambridge and UCL. He is Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge and the Developmental Neuroscience Unit at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families (AFNCCF). He has extensive expertise in longitudinal research in the infancy and early childhood period, and in the measurement of the home environment and children’s cognitive and emotional development.  Phone: 020 7911 5510 Email: l.calderwood@ucl.ac.uk Lisa is a Professor of Survey Research. She has over 20 years’ experience of the design and implementation of complex, large scale longitudinal surveys.Her research areas include non-response, innovations in participant engagement, new technologies and mixed-modes of data collection, administrative data linkage and integrating bio-measures in social surveys. Lisa has strong national and international networks within the cohort studies community, is a co-ordinator for the cohort network of Society of Lifecourse and Longitudinal Studies and is involved in the European-wide COORDINATE and GUIDE initiatives. Phone: 020 7612 6231 Email: alissa.goodman@ucl.ac.uk Alissa Goodman is Professor of Economics, Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, and Co-Director of the Early Life Cohort Feasibility Study, a project funded by ESRC to test the feasibility of a new birth cohort for the UK. She is a Co-Investigator on two further new national cohort projects, Children of the 2020s and the COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities Study. Alissa joined CLS in 2013 as PI of the 1958 National Child Development Study, having previously worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where she served as its Deputy Director (2006-2012), and Director of its Education and Skills research sector.Alissa’s main research interests relate to inequality, poverty, education policy, and the intergenerational transmission of health and wellbeing. Alissa was awarded a CBE for services to social science in 2021. Email: sandra.mathers@education.ox.ac.uk Sandra has a strong track record in policy-relevant research on early years education and care (ECEC), with a strong focus on educational inequality. Her experience includes longitudinal studies (A Better Start, Millennium Cohort Study (MCS)), evaluations of government initiatives (Early Education Pilot for Two-Year Old-Children, Graduate Leader Fund (GLF)), early language intervention (URLEY, Talking Time, Texts for Talk) and measure development (the OLP tool for assessing knowledge of oral language pedagogy).Sandra is a leading expert in the assessment of ECEC quality, and in training and leading observation teams as part of large-scale studies (MCS, GLF, Early Education Pilot, URLEY). She is highly knowledgeable about both policy and practice and has advised the Department for Education (e.g. Expert Panel on EY apps/Hungry Little Minds, EYFS revisions), the Education Endowment Foundation (e.g. EY toolkit, EY Literacy Guidance Report) and Ofsted. Sarah leads on Education, Children and Families research at Ipsos-MORI and has 18 years experience in survey research. She has extensive experience directing longitudinal studies involving families. She directed the Flying Start evaluation surveys of parents (two waves) which involved implementing child assessments from the British Ability Scales. She directed the Better Start evaluation pilots among parents of young babies and she oversaw the development phase of the Millennium Cohort Study age 14 and 17 surveys. Sarah sits on the Public Affairs Management Committee at Ipsos-MORI.Adele Bearfield (Ipsos)Tania Borges (Ipsos)Kavita Deepchand (Ipsos)Chris Ferguson (Ipsos)Kevin Pickering (Ipsos)Emma Rimmington (Ipsos)Konstantina Vosnaki (Ipsos)Prof. Julie Dockrell (UCL Institute of Education)Dr Marialivia Bernardi (UCL Psychology and Language Sciences)Dr Laurel Fish (UCL Psychology and Language Sciences)Prof. Lindsey Macmillan (UCL Institute of Education)Prof. George Ploubidis (UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies)Prof. Jacqueline Barnes (Birkbeck, University of London)Dr. Claire Crawford (University of Birmingham)Prof. Claire Hughes (University of Cambridge)Prof. Lane Strathearn (University of Iowa)Prof. Terrie Moffitt (King’s College London)Prof. Paul Ramchandani (University of Cambridge)Kevin Lowe (CoramBAAF) Find the latest developments and insights from across all our longitudinal studies.The CLS Bibliography is a searchable database of published work based on our cohort studies. Search by keyword, author, date range and journal.Data from our studies are mainly available through the UK Data Service. We run training to support researchers who are interested in using our studies in their work. Centre for Longitudinal Studies UCL Social Research Institute20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0ALEmail: clsdata@ucl.ac.uk