Last month, NCB convened a summit of over 100 senior representatives from organisations providing or supporting early years services, which aimed to help the government shape its ambition to give babies and young children the best start in life.
One of the participants was Steve Crocker, a member of NCB's Board of Trustees. Steve has over 30 years’ experience in social work and children’s services, and was the Director of Children’s Services for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight until April 2023 and in February 2025, he was announced by the Department for Education as one of four new non-executive directors to provide independent challenge as well as support to ministers and senior leaders.
In the latest of a series of reflections from the NCB Summit, Steve shares his takeaways from the event and points to local partnerships as an essential building block of effective early years reform.
Steve Crocker, NCB Trustee, at the NCB Summit: A shared vision from conception to reception
It was a pleasure to attend the NCB summit: A Shared Vision from Conception to Reception last month.
As a trustee of NCB, it was great to see the convening power that NCB brings and the focus on this critical area of work which the government has put at the forefront of its plans to change children’s lives for the better.
The role of neighbourhoods in delivering a better start
Other participants who have attended have written about Justin Russell’s keynote speech and the development of policy in this area. I wanted to focus on something that is more small scale but of equal importance and that is the issue of neighbourhoods and local partnerships and how these can be central to the delivery of a great start in life for children.
I was fortunate enough to be seated at a table with a range of practitioners, including one of the leaders of the Blackpool Better Start partnership. I was struck in particular by their experience of galvanising agencies and local communities in a specific area in order to deliver high quality, multi-agency services for young children under one roof in an area of high social deprivation.
One of the big takeaways from our table discussion was the crucial importance of bringing local authorities, the NHS, schools, the voluntary sector and local families together to shape and design those services.
However, we don’t currently have a well-defined and universally accepted notion of a ‘neighbourhood’.
Designing services around neighbourhoods
In his report on children’s social care, published in May 2022, Josh MacAlister (now Labour MP for Whitehaven and Workington) wrote convincingly about designing family help services around neighbourhoods (around 30,000 people).
Equally, the NHS is developing its Integrated Neighbourhood Teams community programmes based on neighbourhoods of a similar size.
But do these slightly different conceptions of neighbourhood (often based on adult needs) actually overlap, and do they work for children?
Schools, for example, are often linked to each other in catchment areas or areas but are often not a clear fit with other definitions of neighbourhood.
The opportunity is there for small, local programmes to fill the space; to help those large organisations define what we should mean by local services, by developing meaningful local partnerships that can deliver services to children, families and communities in need.
Moving parts create opportunities
This comes at a time when there are a lot of moving parts in the national picture...
- Local government reform is going to have a big impact on large swathes of the country in the next few years.
- The NHS, as is well documented, is being reformed at rapid pace.
- Schools are also set to respond to changes in inspection and expectations around inclusion and disabled children and children with special educational needs.
- And the voluntary sector continues to be challenged by a funding landscape that is still highly restricted due to the strictures of financial austerity over the last 15 years.
This doesn’t seem like a very optimistic picture on the face of it, but I think that there is an opportunity here.
While large organisations are in the throes of major change, the opportunity is there for small, local programmes to fill the space; to help those large organisations define what we should mean by local services, by developing meaningful local partnerships that can deliver services to children, families and communities in need.
Those large-scale organisations need to listen and become enablers of local, neighbourhood developments, and not seek to pre-determine places, services and leadership.
From the conversations that were sparking around the room at the NCB Summit, the early years are in the vanguard and the room was full of people passionate about their work and pressing on regardless of the various national changes.
We need to support them and help them to turn ambition into reality.