The Cradle to Career programme brings together residents, local services, professionals, and community leaders to support the children and young people of North Birkenhead.
It puts the people of North Birkenhead at the heart of education, services and local decision-making. It aims to significantly improve literacy standards among children, give families easy access to the support they need, improve the quality of life for all and create new opportunities for local children and young people. It works to improve communication between the community and the organisations that serve them.
Every child in North Birkenhead thrives, from cradle to career.
To support North Birkenhead to develop as a strong, thriving community where every child and young person has all the help and opportunity they will need to succeed.
A small, locally based project team will provide a “backbone” of support to bring about this change by:
Working with all local schools, from early years to secondary, to boost literacy and communication skills, attendance and behaviour.
Connecting with families that need support, building one-on-one relationships, offering practical assistance, and giving them access to the services they need. Through these new relationships, local people will gain a voice in local decision-making.
Giving local people the power to change North Birkenhead for the better by building on the many strengths of the community. Residents will be supported to extend, create and deliver projects that create opportunities for local children and young people.
Transforming the way public services are delivered. All key staff will be based under one roof in North Birkenhead and a community fund will be developed, issuing grants to back local organisations.
Decisions about activities are made by working groups of local residents and professionals, guided by research and evidence, with input from the people the decisions will affect, especially children and young people. The programme is guided by a local Steering Group, which oversees the budget and makes sure the project aligns with the vision and mission.
Cradle to Career intends that the children of North Birkenhead leave school with the skills and qualifications they need to succeed in later life. This change will not happen overnight; in fact it may take 10 to 15 years. The Heseltine Institute at The University of Liverpool is developing a full measurement framework for the programme.
In Education… we’ve brought together 6 primaries and 2 secondaries to look at how we improve literacy and language development – all committing to share information in order to understand the challenges pupils face and work together on the solutions, sharing learning and good practice along the way. Our baseline data has shown that a quarter of pupils in the project are significantly below their expected reading ages, with poor speech and language in Early Years contributing to this problem. We’ve agreed on teacher development training in Early Years and whole school literacy planning, are exploring Speech and Language Therapy support, and are looking at how we can address the Ks2-3 transition gap in literacy through sharing resources and information.
In the Community… supported by key local community organisations in our Community Working Group, we’re conducting an area-wide survey with adults and children to understand how residents feel about their local area. So far we’ve had our initial Discovery findings confirmed: many community members love North Birkenhead and are ready to drive forward change. They want to celebrate the area and increase local pride, whilst making their streets safer and cleaner. Our community campaign “Our North End” is seeking to do just that, with street murals that celebrate the community in design and the launch of a Community Fund to encourage residents to find creative ways of bringing people together.
In Local Services… Wirral Council have committed a 17-person “Cradle to Career” multidisciplinary team to the area, made up of social workers, school readiness workers, a health visitor, family support workers, youth and play workers amongst other roles. This team has already seen huge impact with their new way of working: relationships with local schools are improving and a universal “10 Part Childhood Offer” for families is in development. Two Family Connectors have been commissioned by the project to provide community-based, non-threshold support alongside the Council-led team to strengthen their offer. Since October, the team have been able to step down 15 families from Child Protection Plans as a result of the holistic and timely support in place.
And behind it all, our programme team have been working hard to build relationships with stakeholders, keep everyone informed, up to date and able to share their learning with others, support the development of a shared measurement framework, and bring people together from across the system to initiate exciting new opportunities collectively.
