January 7, 2025
In October 2024, our Supporting Early Mind Research Network hosted Patrick Myers, Partnership and Programme Lead at Thrive at Five. He discussed Thrive at Five’s Collective Impact model encouraging collaboration between funders, service partners and the public to improve outcomes in the Early Years.
Thrive at Five recognises that one of the best ways to ensure that children get the best start in the Early Years is to work purposefully with the parents to ensure that they can help their children to be the best that they can be by being the best parent that they are able to be. Thrive at Five aims to coordinate services across the public, private and voluntary sector.
Patrick shared the organisation’s Five Conditions for Collective Impact:
They have set up pathfinder areas in Stoke-on-Trent, Redcar, and Cleveland and looking to work some more in the North East and eventually move into Scotland as well. The aim is to have five or six pathfinder areas though the country.
Patrick referenced Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. At Thrive at Five, their concentration is about thinking around the immediate family, the household and the child but recognising that they need to be influencing kinship and informal networks, friends, cultural groups and neighbours and equally need to be actually working in the local environment. However, they also have a greater ambition to be influencing broader economic policy and social and wider environments around the Early Years so partnership collaborations help to both supply the evidence base and boost the message.
At the core of Thrive at Five’s ethos is the desire to get involved earlier in the lives of children who are likely to have difficulties later in childhood, to improve their outcomes and prevent escalation. For example, they work with Stoke-on-Trent which has the highest number of children in the care of the Local Authority per head of the population.
Strategies have included an initiative called Ready Steady Stoke which encourages schools to engage with parents and children across the summer holiday with four weeks of stay and plays in schools to support transitions. This had some very positive feedback and enhanced strongly the parent and child familiarisation with the school with improved relationships. Another project was the Mouse Club where children were given a mouse that they had to get ready for school, such as creating uniforms, maps and coming up with a daily routine for the mouse. This has been a successful tool for aiding transition and is now in its second year.
Another project in Stoke is Stoke Speaks Out which is targeting speak and language since this is an identified area of need. Additionally, Thrive at Five are collaborating with Staffordshire University so that undergraduates on the Early Childhood degree courses receive training on delivering the Nuffield Early Language Intervention. They have also set up parent toddler groups in response to parents saying that they have nowhere to take their children. This has also help speech and language acquisition as parents are encouraged to engage and offered simple resources such as loaned story sacks and booster bags that families can take home.
The key message of the webinar was that waiting for mandated checks at the end of Foundation stage is too late to improve the long-term outcomes of a child in need. Action is needed before this point, which means working with communities to identify areas requiring action and building links with hard to reach groups at the earliest possible point.
You can watch the webinar in full on the Supporting Early Minds website.
Or, to find out more about infant mental health and book a place on an upcoming Supporting Early Minds webinar visit: Webinars – Supporting Early Minds (mhid.org.uk)