Start for Life North East Visit

As the Government’s Early Years Adviser, I work with a team of civil servants to roll out the Family Hubs and Start for Life Programme to those local authorities who were granted transformation funding at the 2021 Spending Review, as well as supporting the rest of England’s local authorities in their own efforts to ensure every baby gets the best start for life.

Of those funded authorities, fourteen are ‘Trailblazers’ we have identified as able to go further and faster in their delivery than most, and I am travelling the length and breadth of England to meet with the professionals, volunteers, parents and carers who are part of the journey to a better, joined-up set of services with the needs of the baby right at the centre.

In May I travelled to Sunderland, Durham and Northumberland to visit Family Hubs, and at one of these I spoke to an early years worker who met a young couple who were living in poor conditions, both smoking and using alcohol, and with very little understanding of what impact that situation would have on their unborn baby. She had visited them at their home on a number of occasions, guiding them to see their baby as another human being, and that knowledge encouraged them to both stop smoking and work to create a proper home for their impending arrival.

I could give a great deal more detail, but suffice to say that this kind of one-to-one support for parents – including dads – helping them to understand what the future holds for them and their baby is truly transformational. For me, to see this new service being offered from a Family Hub as part of the local Start for Life offer was really heartening and tells me that, little by little, we really will change lives, and society, for the better.

I look forward to continuing to visit other local areas and seeing at first hand the transformation of services for families and their newborn babies.