#351 Being an Early Years Communication Hub – Chestnut Nursery & Little Squirrels

We’ve created an accessible platform for all caring professionals including childminders. Many practitioners had access to free training with Elklan and Wellcomm which has had a positive impact on the early communication in the settings where staff gained their qualification. We have brought lots of different services together, which gives each service an opportunity to explore the needs of children within our area more deeply, and to be able to plan targeted services in collaboration. Due to COVID we have not been able to see the impact on children from other settings. However, the CPD that has been introduced as part of our network meetings, we are confident has upskilled the practitioners in attendance, which in turn will benefit the children in their settings.

We worked together with other professionals to get ideas on what they all felt was needed for the project to work. Everyone had opportunities to speak and work together in breakout rooms at our meetings online. We had guest speakers who inspired practitioners to make changes in their settings and practice.

It was reassuring to know that we all shared the same concerns and had an open platform to talk these through and work together supporting each other. Having professionals from all sectors of children’s services was beneficial to all as we had information first- hand and were able to share this with our families. We feel due to the pandemic we were unable to have good quality face to face meetings where we feel there would have been more interaction. We also wanted to introduce more physical projects e.g., a human resource library.

We did require finance to support the project and thanks to the NOA funding, this enabled us to deliver a targeted approach to early communication with our families. We also developed communication friendly spaces with money from the funding pot. We also were able to source inspirational guest speakers.