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.
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To lead a project, you can:
- be an organisation of any size, including those based in the EU, EEA or internationally
- work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from business, research organisations, research and technology organisations, or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)
Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.
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Projects must:
- start on 1 September 2026
- end on 31 August 2027
- last 12 months
- have total costs of between £200,000 and £500,000, inclusive of VAT
Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service.
Contracts for Innovation competitions involve procurement of R&D services and are not subject to subsidy control criteria (i.e. costs can be 100% covered).
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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.
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
We are open to a broad range of projects using technology, design, system redesign, or innovative delivery models to create a wraparound model of support for children and families experiencing homelessness.
In this competition homelessness includes people with no home, those who cannot remain safely in their home, or those living in insecure, temporary or unsuitable accommodation. This includes those at imminent risk of losing their home.
Your project must have:
- a clearly identified target audience with evidenced rationale for why this group has a specific need for the proposed solution
- a clear theory of change, highlighting how the solution will lead to improved children’s learning and or development outcomes
- a well articulated and feasible delivery model
- a robust monitoring and evaluation plan to measure impact on education or development outcomes
- strong safeguarding plans and protocols when working with children and families
- established partnerships for effective testing, delivery, spreading, scaling of the solution within the contracted period, where required
Projects funded through this competition must have a clear and credible route to real world use. Applications should demonstrate how the proposed work will move beyond concept development and into delivery, adoption and impact. In particular, applicants must:
- demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, including plans to commercialise or otherwise embed the solution within existing systems or services
- develop a tangible output, such as a product, tool, framework, service model or platform, rather than undertaking purely exploratory or conceptual work
- set out clear plans for delivery and spreading, scaling, including who the end users are and how they will access or adopt the solution
- show readiness to work with delivery partners, including public services, education or housing organisations, where relevant
- commit to working collaboratively with UKRI and Department for Education (DfE) colleagues to support potential adoption, integration and wider take up of the solution following the project
You must define your goals in your application and outline your plan for phase 1.
At this stage contracts will only be given for phase 1.
In a potential phase 2 we will ask successful applicants from phase 1 to continue the development of their solutions.
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UKRI will hold an online briefing at 2pm on Thursday 21 May: click here to register for a place. A recording and slides will be available afterwards.
If you want help to find an organisation to work with, contact Innovate UK Business Connect.
If you have any questions about the scope requirements of this competition, email OpportunityMission@ukri.org.
Innovate UK's application and funding process
If you need more information about how to apply, please read our funding support pages. For additional support, reach out to our team of innovation experts who are ready to help you navigate the application process and maximise your chances of success.
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Accessibility and Inclusion
Innovate UK welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.