Nursery World - Working with Families

How organisations across the country have been maintaining A Better Start during the pandemic. By Frances Lyons, assistant director at the National Children’s Bureau

A Healthy Living Platform ‘Cook and Eat’ session in Lambeth

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic coincided with the fifth birthday of the A Better Start early years programme. A Better Start is a ten-year funded programme set up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK. The programme funds local partnerships in five areas of the country to test new ways of strengthening support services to families in order to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life.

With the spread of Covid, the partnerships have been working hard to understand the changing needs of local families and respond effectively. As well as reacting quickly to emerging needs, the partnerships have taken care to base their responses on sound evidence of need in each area at this time.

Services have been adapted to ensure that families continue to receive the vital support that they need. Adaptations include switching to online delivery; adding regular telephone check-ins; and providing practical resources.

LANGUAGE AND LITERACY

Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP)

To support home learning, LEAP’s communication and language leads compiled resource packs full of fun activities to promote the Prime areas of the EYFS both indoors and outside. The packs were added to food parcels distributed by LEAP nutrition partner Healthy Living Platform, and Children’s Centres.

The group’s early literacy quality and improvement officer supporting the Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) programme devised literacy packs, including books and props, which were delivered to families involved in the project and followed up with phone calls and emails.

LEAP’s programmes – Supporting Babies’ Next Steps (focusing on developing communication and language) and Sharing REAL – have been delivered virtually, and parents were sent resources so they could participate practically in the sessions. The groups are now looking at a blended approach.

LEAP’s partner, Doorstep Library, offered story sessions online and sent out books to families enrolled in the service. Although it still can’t visit families, it is swapping books with the families on their doorsteps and having small-group and individual family story sessions online.

Meanwhile, the speech and language therapists from Evelina London Children’s Hospital and Community Services have been offering phone support to parents and virtual one-to-one meetings. ‘Chattertime’ sessions went online and parents are able to access support from LEAP’s Facebook page and the Evelina website.

SUPPORTING PARENTS

Small Steps Big Changes in Nottingham

The widespread switch to digital delivery during the pandemic has been promoted in the Small Steps Big Changes (SSBC) programme in Nottingham, which has adopted virtual means of delivery across a number of its services.

The ‘Read on Nottingham’ early literacy hub (which distributed books and activities via local food banks during lockdown) has recruited and trained 26 digital literacy champions to support families online with early reading activities at home during the pandemic.

Several other projects supported by SSBC’s local Ideas Fund have gone online too, using Zoom to reach families, including pregnancy yoga sessions, and movement and music scheme Funky Tots.

A special Covid-19 Ideas Fund was also introduced, enabling local organisations to bid for funding to support families. Successful bids included a doorstep theatre offering ‘In Search of Teddy Island’ from City Arts.

The SSBC family mentors continue to support local families in many ways through virtual delivery of the Small Steps at Home Programme, which helps families to share their experience of parenting. Family mentors have been able to continue to help parents complete Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQs) during these contacts, which has offered some reassurance to families concerned about childhood development.

The service has also ‘flexed’ to focus on families’ well-being and immediate needs during the pandemic, with more regular calls in some instances, signposting and providing activity packs to support play and child development.

Southend: consistency and reliability

Practitioners across A Better Start Southend (ABSS) continue to deliver services while maintaining social distancing rules, and are providing adapted versions through online platforms and telephone calls.

In most cases, services continue support in the same vein as pre-Covid as far as possible, with practitioners aiming to provide families with consistency and reliability. However, some services have taken on new work in response to the pandemic, such as developing activity play packs and supporting families outside the ward where ABSS works.

Blackpool and Bradford: redeploying staff

Aside from digital delivery, the A Better Start workforce has been repurposed to use the wide range of expertise available to meet the changing priorities within communities during the pandemic.

For example, at Blackpool Better Start (BBS), staff have been redeployed to support Corona Kindness Hubs across the area. The hubs provide telephone wellness checks to those in isolation and support co-ordination of food deliveries and support networks. A social worker and a health worker have also been redeployed to children’s social care services, where the health worker is supporting new social workers with risk assessments of vulnerable babies. Health visitors in the team are also supporting colleagues working outside the BBS wards to produce Covid-19 guides, with key messages for families.

Neighbourhood workers for Better Start Bradford have continued to contact families during the pandemic, referring them to the projects while also connecting them with the council’s emergency hubs for support.

Blackpool: trauma-informed care

The Blackpool Trauma Informed Care Working Party has refocused work towards sharing trauma-informed learning with schools on how best to support families and children during the pandemic. This includes live streaming of a film about family resilience and specially written webinars for schools.

The group has also worked with schools, council leisure and parks services, and Blackpool Football Club, to establish open-air spaces that can be used by nursery and Reception children for outdoor activities based around a Forest School approach.

Bradford: creative activity ideas

Staff in Better Start Bradford services found that many families had no access to creative play resources for their under-fours. In response, they developed activity packs with art and craft materials, activities and information, and collaborated with more than 15 local voluntary organisations to distribute them via local emergency hubs and their own existing networks.

Seven hundred and fifty families in the area benefited from the packs, and there was heartfelt feedback. One parent said, ‘Thank you so much for the amazing bags, kids loved it. We truly appreciate your care and love!’

Lambeth: feeding families

At LEAP, the Healthy Living Platform (HLP) has been instrumental in the emergency food response in Lambeth. The HLP team has enabled local distribution of food parcels (more than 400 per day out of one hub alone at the height of the crisis) to vulnerable and shielded families. The team is also providing meals to families across the borough when they arrive home from hospital after having new babies.

KEEPING FAMILIES INFORMED

The A Better Start partnerships are redoubling efforts to ensure that families have access to the information they need during the pandemic. Blackpool and Bradford, for example, have both created specific Covid-19 support pages on their websites.

The Blackpool team has also worked in partnership with Oxford University Department of Psychiatry to create a parent video on how to talk to children as young as two about coronavirus. The video also helps parents to understand their child’s behaviour and emotional needs, and that even babies pick up on parent stress.

In one of its projects, Better Start Bradford worked with local radio station Pulse FM to create adverts on simple play activities, such as indoor den building and creating a simple obstacle course. The ads signposted local people to a web page, which included activities and key messages about health, communication and social and emotional development. This page will almost certainly outlive the pandemic and become a standard resource on the partnership’s website.

SSBC in Nottingham identified that locally, only 67 per cent of eligible families accessed the Government-funded Healthy Start Food Voucher scheme to provide a nutritional safety net for families in receipt of some benefits. To increase uptake, it spread the word about the scheme via its own and partners’ social media channels and some 7,000 flyers, which were distributed via food banks and other organisations such as Children’s Centres.

These are just some of the ways that A Better Start has, alongside the early years sector as a whole, adapted to a rapidly changing set of circumstances and challenges, and its partnerships will continue to learn and adapt to make sure the needs of these families and communities continue to come first. A Better Start Southend has worked with the University of Essex to generate new evidence on how Covid has affected families.

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