Health and Wellbeing Strategy
Priority 3: “Ensure the best start in life for all children and young people”.
Work to date has focused around ‘gamechangers’ – Best Start and Early Help/Family Help. Best Start in Life provides the practical framework for achieving the Health and Wellbeing Strategy aims of reducing inequalities by intervening earlier, particularly in the 0-5 age range.
Wirral Council Plan (2021 to 2026)
Priority 2: Provide Early Help for Children and Families
Best Start in Life strengthens early intervention by identifying needs earlier, supporting families sooner, and reducing escalation to specialist service. This aligns with the Council’s commitment to reduce inequalities and improve long-term outcomes.
Priority 6: Safe, Resilient and Engaged Communities
By improving early childhood outcomes, Best Start in Life contributes to communities where residents feel safe, supported, and able to live healthy, active lives. Accessible, well co-ordinated family support via Family Hubs underpins this priority.
Child and Family Poverty
There are close connections between the Best Start in Life and the Child and Family Poverty Framework (and national strategy), with substantial overlap in purpose, policy levers and target populations. They both present as part of wider effort to improve early childhood outcomes and reduce inequalities.
A Place to Call Home: Housing and Health (Annual Public Health Report 2026)
Good health is about more than not being ill. It’s about feeling safe, having stability and being able to live well every day. Our homes play a huge part in that. A healthy home for our families and youngest residents should be warm, dry and safe, we will ensure that we work with housing to enable this.
SEND Reforms White Paper: Every Child Achieving and Thriving and Wirral’s SEND Strategy
The Best Start in Life Plan aligns closely with the SEND reforms outlined in Every Child Achieving and Thriving, which sets out a national ambition to strengthen early intervention, improve mainstream inclusion, and ensure every child receives the support they need to thrive.
Priority 4 of Wirral’s SEND Strategy says: We will ensure that SEND needs are identified and assessed early, and that access to services and support are based on needs and not diagnosis. Wirral has a strong foundation to build upon, with a dedicated Early Years Early Intervention Team supporting families in the home, and Area SEND Officers supporting settings to be as inclusive as they possibly can be. An early notification pathway exists between health services and Wirral’s SENIF (Special Educational Needs Inclusion Funding) panel to ensure that children are supported well at the earliest point.
Domestic Abuse Strategy
Wirral’s Domestic Abuse Strategy aligns closely with the national Best Start in Life guidance by prioritising early help for children and families through its explicit connection to the Council Plan’s early intervention themes, emphasising safety, stability and trauma-informed support to ensure children have the emotional and developmental foundations needed to thrive.