Skip to main content
Language Translation
Language Translation requires Additional Cookies enabled
  1. Home /
  2. Integrated Care Partnership (current) /
  3. Our Strategy (current) /
  4. Our strategic priorities (current) /
  5. Priority 1: Prioritising prevention and improving future health outcomes through tackling health inequalities (current) /
  6. Enabling the Best Start in Life for Children and Young People (CYP) (current)

Enabling the Best Start in Life for Children and Young People (CYP)

We want to be a system that ensures children have the best possible start in life, where seamless, collaborative and evidence-based care is delivered to enable all children and young people to have the best start as a foundation for happy, healthy, safe, and productive lives, with effective and timely interventions in place when expected outcomes are not being met. 

Greater focus and attention will be given to the children and young people’s agenda, ensuring all our young people receive the right support at the right time. This includes children and young people who may be more vulnerable or require additional support, including Looked After Children and children with special educational needs, for example autism or learning disabilities, ensuring that they receive the additional care and support they need to thrive and make a strong start in life.
 

What are we doing already? 

We are seeing increasing population growth and diversity of needs amongst Coventry and Warwickshire’s young children; services will need to expand and adapt to increasing numbers and complexity.  

Warwickshire are establishing a Children and Young People Partnership (CYPP) sub-group of the Health and Wellbeing Board, the purpose of which is to provide strategic oversight to the children and young people’s agenda, facilitate integration and collaboration across Warwickshire and take a holistic population health approach. Priorities and activities of the CYPP will be evidence-based and informed by the JSNA. 

Coventry has a Children and Young People Partnership Board that reviews the Coventry Children and Young People Plan to deliver and provide the best support possible for children, young people and their families. There is also a multiagency Early Help Strategic Partnership focused on reaching children, young people and families when the need first emerges.

Some children and young people require additional support, care and protection either due to disability or specific vulnerabilities that mean they are at risk. This includes for example those experiencing homelessness or substance misuse, Looked After Children and children or young people on the edge of the youth justice system. 

Coventry and Warwickshire are committed to supporting continued quality improvement to ensure that all children and young people are safe as well as healthy and that those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities achieve the best possible outcomes through having every opportunity to take control of their lives, be as independent as possible and achieve their full potential.  This requires strong partnership working across health, education and social care, with staff who take a holistic view of the child or young person that they work with. 

The ICS offers the opportunity to further align the great work already happening across Coventry and Warwickshire, led by the local authorities, through collaboration and a partnership approach.  Ensuring the best start in life begins before conception and involves a wide range of partners and agencies across the system that contribute to children and young people’s health and wellbeing. A focus on perinatal services is particularly important from a prevention perspective, including for example interventions to reduce smoking in pregnancy. There are several key strategies and programmes of work across the system that set out evidence and objectives to progress the children and young people’s agenda. These include:

Our local activity is informed by national policy, in particular The Early Years Healthy Development Review Report, and First 1000 Days of Life. We are working to implement the CHILDS framework for integration, applying a population health management approach to our health and care provision for children and young people.  NHS England’s Core20PLUS5 approach has recently been adapted to apply to children and young people, which will support the reduction in health inequalities for this age group. 

 

What will change in our ways of working?

  • There will be clear pathways in place across the system for communication and identification of need, with transformation of services that enables re-investment in sufficient capacity in the right place to respond to need. 
  • We will ensure all-age pathways are in place across services to support the transition to adulthood and prevent unnecessary or ineffective transfer between services. 
  • We will adopt a strength-based approach to working with children and families across all services.  
  • We will invest in evidence-based quality support programmes, create school networks which collaborate to provide effective peer support systems and make a local commitment to workforce development, to improve school readiness and education outcomes.

 
What actions are we prioritising?

  • We will establish a system-wide Children and Young People Board and develop a Children and Young People Health and Wellbeing Strategy. 
  • We will prioritise investment in children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing services, with a specific focus on the current and future needs for 18–25-year-old people. 
  • We will establish a process to collect and share insight and intelligence efficiently and effectively about health inequalities and the needs of children and young people across the system. This will be used to inform service provision and preventative work.
  • Resources will be pooled, through joined up planning and integrated working around children and their families, including healthcare, children’s services & education, pre-maternity and maternity care, peri-natal mental health, health visiting, Early Help, and special educational needs & disability.
  • Services will be co-produced to ensure the voices of children, young people and their families are heard and are at the heart of decision making and prioritisation. 
  • We will work with all partners to ensure that services for children and young people are poverty proofed.
< Previous Page
Next Page >