Pillar 2: The places and communities we live in

Giving every child the best start in life is crucial to reducing health inequalities across the life course. The best start in life begins with a loving and secure relationship with parents, carers, and family. This underpins a child’s brain and language development, their ability to learn, their emotional wellbeing, and their capacity to form and maintain positive relationships with others.

Achieving the best start for children also means reducing childhood poverty, providing access to affordable housing, good education, jobs and sustainable transport. This is key to reducing inequalities. We want to create a safe environment that ensures children and young people have the best foundations, are ready to start school, and can thrive and develop skills enabling them to achieve their full potential.

A focus on early years will help improve our breastfeeding rates, support a reduction in childhood excess weight and maintain the uptake of childhood immunisation. It will also help reduce the risk and the impact of adverse childhood experiences, enabling the people of Cheshire West to have longer happier lives.

In addition, improving children and young people’s mental wellbeing will have a positive effect on their cognitive development, learning, physical and mental health, and social and economic prospects in adulthood.

We want to join up further early help services based on a clear understanding of local needs, including emerging national challenges such as child exploitation. Risks to positive emotional health and wellbeing must also be addressed, including parental substance misuse, the impact of parental conflict and domestic violence. Mental health services need to be available and accessible.

We will:

• increase breast feeding rates
• increase the numbers of children who are a healthy weight
• ensure our trauma informed approach and practice model ‘Our Way of Working’ supports and underpins all our priorities for children and young people
• increase the timeliness of health assessments for children in our care living outside of the borough
• increase the percentage of children in our care who have timely dental checks
• working with Cheshire and Merseyside ICB, improve Oral Health for children, working collaboratively with Health Visitors and those within Early Years settings
• support our young carers
• enable and support families to provide the best care and support they can to their children and when this is not possible, support families to being committed to acting as responsible and responsive corporate parents to children in our care and to care leavers
• act locally to reduce child poverty
• intervene at the earliest stage possible to prevent problems for children, young people and their families escalating
• strengthen our trauma informed approach to supporting children and families
• make sure that the crucial role of the Community Sector is maximised
• review inequitable outcomes in early years and bring the system together to ensure equitable early intervention, involving all partners (e.g., education, social care - children's services, communities and Community Sector, children’s boards, public services, NHS, Local Authority)
• assess early years provision and parental support and provide further support for early years settings in more deprived areas and in collaboration with communities in these areas and / or for example, families with disabilities, or with English as a second language
• assess how the Adverse Childhood Experience agenda links to the early years approach and ensure families voices are included in this agenda
• move towards a neurodiversity approach for children and young people to focus on addressing and meeting needs inclusively
• work with the Core20PLUS5 model to support an integrated care system approach to driving action in health inequalities improvement to reduce healthcare inequalities for our children and young people.