All children can reach their full potential when nurtured by empowered and connected families, who are supported by strong communities.
Last week, the First Minister set out a route map in his Programme for Government for delivering Scotland’s ambitions for children, which targets resources at reducing child poverty during pregnancy and the early years.
This is a very welcome advance, which indicates that a more coherent policy direction has been adopted within the Scottish Government, and strategic planning and resource allocation is increasingly evidence-led and rights-based.
In addition to the various Whole Family Wellbeing Fund initiatives currently underway, the Programme committed an extra £1.57million to expand its Fairer Futures Partnerships, which provides poverty-aware, integrated, wrap-around support to help families.
The emphasis on integrated, local support for families is a step in the right direction. But the pilots must be developed in addition to meaningful and sustained investment in statutory local early years services for families across the country. This must include health, social work, justice, early learning and childcare and the voluntary sector.
The First Minister again underlined the need for public sector reform to meet growing need with ever diminishing resources.
Creation of a reimagined "social safety net" will require strategic leadership from the Government to deliver coherent policies and services. This needs to be supported by targets that measure what matters most, such as the ability of our citizens, services and systems to foster and maintain the consistent and loving relationships that make life worthwhile.
Any reconfiguration of public services must have The Promise delivery at its heart and pay particularly close attention to the needs of prospective and new parents with experience of the care system in Scotland. Inequality starts before birth – it’s too late to wait until children start school or even nursery before taking action. Babies born into the poorest families have a greater probability of childhood adversities.
It is well recognised that combined poverty, stress and disadvantage can lead to poor life chances for children. Poverty makes every aspect of life harder and puts a strain on relationships. The link between poverty and child mortality is well known.
There is growing interest in revisiting the Sure Start approach. The Scottish Government has a unique opportunity to build on key learning from Sure Start, while also incorporating key advances in the early years including the expansion of early learning and childcare and growing specialism in infant mental health.
We are also seeing more creativity in how we use data relating to babies, children and families, with a strong emphasis on lived experience of both parents and professionals, which can help build a picture of local need and in turn inform service design.
A robust universal offer, integrated community support, and a better use of data are essential building blocks of an evidence-led early years ecosystem. But we need to do more to help families with more diverse or complex needs – 15 per cent of children in Scotland are at risk of disordered attachment, often stemming from sustained stress and adversity in the early years.
Evidence is clear that skilled and specialist parent-infant relationship support can dramatically change children’s life paths when provided early enough.
In Scotland, we are seeing real innovation in the development of infant mental health services, which support high-quality attachment relationships between the infant and a safe carer and can drive the long-desired shift towards prevention.
The good news is there has never been a better time to commit to the transformational change required to improve the national response to infants at risk.
Infant mental health teams are forming at pace across the country, training for professionals and students is improving, and a Scottish Centre of Excellence for Infant Mental Health is under development.
The Scottish Government must harness this growing knowledge and experience to ensure that policy and practice changes are in tune with the needs and rights of the most vulnerable citizens.
If we are serious about upholding the rights of the babies, children and families who need us most, then we must think creatively about how we include mental health expertise into trusted community support services, for those families who need it.
This will require local parent-infant relationship support that is co-created with parents and the voluntary sector and is trauma-informed to reduce parents’ fears about reaching out for support.
We also call on the Scottish Government to make sure the needs and rights of infants are at the heart of Children’s Hearing System reform. We need a care system which has an advanced understanding of infant mental health and the impact of trauma on their social and emotional wellbeing.
All decisions within a reformed system need to support a secure attachment between an infant and primary caregiver, which is critical to the infant’s mental health and wellbeing in the immediate, short, and long term.
The Scottish Government has invested in the fundamental building blocks of support for families that prevents harm. By enhancing and better connecting early years provision, and prioritising families in the greatest need, we can build communities with the social, economic and emotional resources that provide nurturing and supportive environments for children and families.
Joanne Smith is head of policy and public affairs for NSPCC Scotland
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