Supporting children and young people to get the best start in life
- Through our Children’s Centres we will provide support to new parents to meet the challenges of bringing up children. This will include using new technologies to provide mentoring, as well as advice and support on health, well-being and early years education.
- Despite hundreds of Children’s Centres closing across the UK due to government cuts, we will not close our Children’s Centre Hubs. Instead, we will continue to invest in our early years’ services, and we will look to support community initiatives that deliver affordable childcare for 0–5-year-olds. We will work with schools and community organisations to develop services for children with Special Educational Needs in more of our children’s centres.
- Where children, young people and their families are struggling, we will ensure early intervention services are available to help avoid these situations escalating. We will continue to embed trauma informed practice, and we will provide access for children and families in our Borough to get the best possible advice and support, when they need it. We will also continue to improve our response to child exploitation.
- We will work with young people to help target our funding so it supports their positive emotional health and wellbeing, and we will seek new funding to align youth work with projects like our ‘Natural Health Service’.
- We will establish the first ever ‘Young person’s commission’ in West Cheshire. It will be led by young people so that we can co-produce changes to our services that support young people so that they are relevant and respond to their needs. This will include the development of our 10 by 10 Programme, which will see all children in our Borough get to experience ten exciting things by the time they are 10 years old. The commission will also help the council to improve its approach to issues facing young people, like mental health, obesity, drug abuse, anti-social behaviour and bullying.
