The PaIRS team at Blackpool Better Start share how they embedded a system of knowledge, relationships, and culture that enables babies and families to continue receiving support long after original programme funding has ended.
When we think about giving babies the best possible start in life, we often focus on practical support, health, and development. Yet one of the most powerful influences on a child's lifelong wellbeing begins much earlier: the relationship they develop with their parent or caregiver.
Strong parent-infant relationships help babies feel safe, understood, and secure. These early experiences shape emotional development, resilience, and future relationships. Recognising their importance, Blackpool Better Start invested in the development of the NHS Blackpool Parent-Infant Relationship Service (PaIRS), creating a specialist service that became a cornerstone of Blackpool’s early years system supporting families during the earliest years of life.
Like many innovative programmes PaIRS faced a challenge: how do you ensure positive change continues when time-limited funding ends?
For Blackpool, sustainability was about embedding the knowledge, relationships, and culture that enable babies and families to continue receiving support long after original funding.
Planning for sustainability from the beginning
One of the important lessons from the Blackpool PaIRS journey was that sustainability should not be a final-stage conversation.
From earliest planning, the team focused on building evidence, demonstrating impact, and understanding how parent-infant relationship support could become an integral part of the local system. Research into feasibility and acceptability, alongside ongoing evaluation, helped build a picture of what was working and why it mattered.
Blackpool recognised the importance of measuring outcomes that reflected what mattered most to babies and families, rather than focusing solely on service activity. Our Measuring What Matters work helped us choose outcome measures that demonstrate the true value of this support and our feasibility and acceptability evaluation sought to understand changes in parent-infant relationships, parental wellbeing, and family experiences. Our evaluations have been critical in making the case for continued investment and highlighted both the immediate and longer-term benefits of the service.
Equally important was the development of strong relationships with commissioners, strategic leaders, and partners across the system. Conversations about future commissioning, long-term priorities, and what success looked like for decision-makers were woven into the programme from the outset.
This meant that when Better Start funding began to transition, a solid foundation of evidence and shared ambition already existed to build upon.
Investing in people, not just services
Specialist services matter, but one of the most sustainable investments Blackpool made was in people.
PaIRS has consistently focused on workforce development and supporting practitioners across the wider early years system to develop their understanding of infant mental health and parent-infant relationships.
Providing opportunities for practitioners from different organisations across the town, and further afield, to develop shared skills and approaches through training, consultation, reflective practice, and supervision has created a common language around infant mental health.
Art at the Start is an example of such opportunities where early years professionals were trained to help families explore their relationship with their babies through sharing art together. PaIRS continues to offer a range of training opportunities that equip practitioners to recognise, promote, and champion healthy parent-infant relationships within their own services.
This approach fosters a legacy in Blackpool’s workforce that will continue to benefit families for years to come.
Making parent-infant relationships everybody's business
Sustainable change happens when responsibility is shared across the system rather than sitting within a single service.
By embedding parent-infant relationship thinking across multiple services; Family Hubs, health visiting, maternity services, early help, children's social care, and the voluntary and community sector means practitioners across the system are better equipped to notice babies' emotional needs, understand the importance of early relationships, and support families at the earliest opportunity.
Embedding approaches like Better Start ‘s Think Baby Toolkit helps ensure that babies remain visible, supporting a culture where parent-infant relationships are everyone's responsibility.
This collective approach means that support for babies and families is increasingly becoming part of the way the whole system works.
Using new opportunities to strengthen what works
As Better Start funding transitioned, Blackpool was able to build on the foundations already established through PaIRS. New opportunities, including mental health investment and Best Start in Life funding, have helped strengthen and enhance the offer available to families.
The introduction of trainee parent-infant therapists through Health Education England funding and other workforce development initiatives has increased capacity, while supporting the next generation of specialist practitioners. Additionally, Best Start in Life funding has enabled continued innovation and service development whilst keeping the core vision the same: improving outcomes for babies through nurturing, secure parent-infant relationships.
Looking back on Blackpool's journey, four key lessons stand out:
- Start planning early. Sustainability should be built into programme design from day one.
- Measure what matters. Demonstrating impact requires a focus on the outcomes that reflect the quality of parent-infant relationships, parental wellbeing, and family experiences to build the evidence needed to secure long-term investment.
- Leave a workforce legacy. Skills, knowledge, and confidence can continue to benefit families long after individual funding streams change.
- Build a movement, not just a service. The greatest impact comes when parent-infant relationships become embedded across the wider system, creating shared responsibility for giving babies the best possible start in life.
The story of Blackpool PaIRS demonstrates that lasting change is possible when sustainability is viewed as an ongoing process of embedding, and growing what works. By investing in people, partnerships, and systems, the legacy from Better Start continues to benefit babies, families, and communities well beyond the original programme.