In May, the Children’s RPB meeting looked at early years, the period from pre-birth to age seven. In addition to the Children’s RPB members, we invited members of the Children’s Stakeholder Group and the Regional Early Years Partnership to join the workshop.
How can we work better together to give all children the best start in life?
We started by asking – if all children had the best start in life, what would success look like? The answer was:
- children who are happy, healthy, thriving, and secure
- families who have the information and support they need from a confident and skilled early years workforce
- organisations that work together and share information well
- in the long term, every child reaches their full potential and grow into adults with good emotional and mental health.
Our strengths are our highly skilled workforce, established partnership and regional working. We have successful models like Flying Start, Family Information Services (FIS) and Family Centres and good practice and evaluations from the early years Pathfinder programme (innovation and transformation). Along with a culture of being adaptable, reflective, and committed to early years.
The challenges we need to overcome are around funding including difficulties associated with short-term grant funding, complex pathways, increased complexity of need, the capacity of our workforce and information sharing.
Our assets include the voice of children, parents, and early years workforce. We have access to some funding pots and established interventions we can build on.
With all that in mind, we discussed the actions we’d like to see happening.
- An early years charter with agreed priorities and a shared language. Setting out our interpretation of national guidance and how we can best meet children’s needs locally. Including a joint plan for how we will use funding.
- An early years workforce strategy, linked to the North Wales Workforce Board. To look at workforce planning, qualifications, skills, training, retention, and professional development.
- Communication plan to share our vision for early years, key messages and details of the support available.
- Improve information sharing between organisations.
- Work with Welsh Government to improve the stability and consistency of funding streams.
Final thoughts from participants were that they had enjoyed the session and there is a lot of enthusiasm for this work. But the most important thing is that we need to make sure change happens.
For more information, please email us at childrensrpb@denbighshire.gov.uk
