Blackpool Better Start wins Children and Young People Now Award

Blackpool Better Start’s Community Connector service scooped the early years prize at the Children and Young People Now Awards 2024. The team look at what the programme has achieved.

The Community Connectors seek to remove obstacles that prevent local families from accessing vital local support. Since the service began in September 2017, the Connectors have made over 15,000 contacts with families and helped over 4,000 individuals in Blackpool.

They focus on supporting local families overcome obstacles that may have previously prevented them from accessing universal, early help and specialist services. This includes help with parenting, building parent-child relationships, encouraging belief in self-worth, and offering social support. At the same time, this service aims to reduce the pressures brought on by substance abuse, domestic abuse and social isolation.

The Connectors have four priority activity areas:

1. Helping families to access support and services relevant to their needs.
2. Connecting families to early years programmes and activities to increase engagement and support more seamless pathways in and out of services.
3. Sharing consistent early years messages and resources to support early child development and family well-being outcomes, in a way that resonates with families.
4. Supporting early years services to be inclusive and encouraging local families to develop strong links within their community. In turn this should help them to get involved in local decision making and the co-creation of local services and activities.

The CYP Now Award recognises this vital work in the Blackpool community, which has resulted in the following outcomes:

• Actively engaging with local dads.
• Distributing vitamins to improve dietary health.
• Referring families for help with speech and language development.
• Gifting books to assist with learning.
• Providing activity cards to aid with parenting and child development.
• Sharing oral health resources and access to local dentists.

Helpful statistics:

• 400 families have been supported by the Community Connectors with the Cost of Living.
• Since the launch of the service, the Community Connectors have had contact with over 15,000 parents, 50% of whom live in the most deprived wards in Blackpool.
• They have distributed over 3,000 vitamins to families.
• They have supported a 25% increase in parents on low income accessing the Healthy Start Scheme.
• They have distributed oral health resources to families across the town which has supported a 11.3% drop in children under 5 having obvious dental decay.

Blackpool Better Start Director, Clare Law, commented: “What an honour it is to win this award. Our Community Connectors do amazing work in their communities and I’m so happy their hard work is being recognised. Congratulations to everyone else who won an award; this showcases the incredible work that’s happening to improve outcomes for young people all over the UK.”

About A Better Start

A Better Start is a ten-year (2015-2025), £215 million programme set-up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

Five A Better Start partnerships based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham and Southend are supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life. Working with local parents, the A Better Start partnerships are developing and testing ways to improve their children’s diet and nutrition, social and emotional development, and speech, language and communication.

The work of the programme is grounded in scientific evidence and research. A Better Start is place-based and enabling systems change. It aims to improve the way that organisations work together and with families to shift attitudes and spending towards preventing problems that can start in early life. It is one of five major programmes set up by The National Lottery Community Fund to test and learn from new approaches to designing services which aim to make people’s lives healthier and happier

The National Children’s Bureau is coordinating an ambitious programme of shared learning for A Better Start, disseminating the partnerships’ experiences in creating innovative services far and wide, so that others working in early childhood development or place-based systems change can benefit.

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Visit the A Better Start website to find out more.