New commitments for babies, families and social care

What happens in a baby's first thousand days shapes their health, learning, and relationships for years to come. Every family deserves support with their care in those early months, no matter where they live.

For NCB, that means ensuring the Healthy Babies programme works for all families. Children with SEND must be central to its design and delivery, and it should be supported by wider reforms that improve early years provision so that families can access effective support.

The expansion will bring Healthy Babies services to local authorities across England, including support for infant feeding, perinatal mental health and parent-infant relationships. The Best Start Family Hubs programme is designed to bring health and family support together, building on learning from earlier Family Hub, Start for Life and Sure Start approaches. 

We have seen what this kind of support can achieve. Through implementing the Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP), and working alongside the A Better Start partnerships in Blackpool, Bradford, Nottingham and Southend, we know that investment in the early years leads to improved outcomes. As part of these partnerships, parents helped to design and shape local services, leading to more trusting relationships between families and practitioners.

Alongside this investment in early support, we welcome the continued focus on making maternity and neonatal care safer, fairer and more accountable, including the appointment of an independent Maternity and Neonatal Commissioner.

The Government now has the chance to build on what works for families.  We urge them to back this expansion with the long-term investment and workforce it needs, so that every baby, wherever they are born, gets the best possible start. 

Prevention and earlier support must extend throughout people’s lives 

The emphasis on prevention, earlier support and community-based services should not stop when childhood ends. These principles matter to children, young people and adults throughout their lives.

We therefore also welcome the Government's commitment to pursuing a National Care Service and its increased focus on the social care workforce. The Government has identified greater choice and control, improved quality and stronger integration between health and social care as central objectives for reform. 

Plans announced this week for a social care workforce plan, alongside a national collective pension scheme for care workers and a new champion for unpaid carers, are important recognition of the people who provide care and support.

Prevention, earlier support and community-based services is as relevant to children, young people, adults and their families throughout the lifecourse. For adult social care, that means looking beyond responding to increasing or acute needs and investing in support that enables people to maintain independence, relationships, wellbeing and connection to their communities. A genuinely preventative approach needs strong social care and community services alongside the NHS and needs to recognise the role of unpaid carers.

That requires a sustainable and skilled workforce. Investment in pay and conditions is essential, but so are opportunities for learning, access to evidence-informed practice and the conditions that enable practitioners to build relationships and work in genuinely strengths-based and person-centred ways.

The focus should ultimately be on enabling people to live the lives they choose, with the right support available when and where they need it.

What we want to see next

Looking ahead, several upcoming reviews and reforms will have a significant impact on children and young people.

We look forward to Alan Milburn's final recommendations on young people and work, expected this autumn. His interim report showed that whether a person enters employment, education, or training is determined long before a person reaches their GCSE examinations. His proposals for mandatory work experience, and recommendation that children begin to learn about the world of work in primary school, could open up opportunities that too many young people currently miss, but it is important that these are designed with the young people facing the greatest barriers in mind. 

Alongside Professor Peter Fonagy's forthcoming review into mental health, ADHD and autism, these reviews will give the Government a real opportunity to make sure young people can access the right support early.

We are also encouraged by early indications from the Secretary of State for Education that Ofsted reform is on the way. A stronger focus on school context would be a positive step, but we ask that any reform should keep children's wellbeing at its heart, with young people given a say in shaping it.