NIPA: Nursery Inclusion Project for All

1. A Rationale

The Marmot Review (2020) clearly evidenced that good quality services focussed on Education and Care, in the early years, have enduring effects on health and life chances outcomes for both children and their families. NIPA looks to challenge a worrying, emerging narrative. This narrative focuses on the “disadvantagement” and learning deficit of our most vulnerable children and families compared to others. This narrative does not acknowledge the many wonderful abilities, skills and contributions our vulnerable families bring into our vibrant community. Nor does it focus on the fact that this learning deficit is a result of inaccessible services that a family should, by rights, be entitled to. The narrative focuses on the child, the family’s poverty and lack of English as significant factors for learning deficit, not a school’s or communities focus on better meeting their needs.

Rather than focus on this damaging narrative, (admittedly in this introduction we have done just that, but only to provide the background rationale to why we must focus on this work) we will focus our work on the narrative of capacity building. We will dedicate ourselves to the following challenge, “How do we bring together our community, families and professionals, to build an Early Years provision dedicated to both continuously improving education and health care?”

1. The “Work”

We have three focus areas:

• Improve our Curriculum Design and Education provision
• Become a, “Supportive Partner” to The North East London NHS Hub and The Redbridge CAMHS Partnership Group, providing for our community access to essential Health and Care services.
• Build the financial capacity to ensure our work is sustainable

We have seven aims:

• To increase children and young people’s access to NHS-funded community mental health services
• The co-production of community-based health and care which promotes equality for all;
• To build evidence of sustainable, scalable solutions to mitigate and prevent inequalities impacting on the health and wellbeing of communities
• To sufficiently reach the target groups of children and parents.
• To identify gaps in current provision and design projects to address these gaps
• To work with communities that face health inequalities
• All children experience the highest quality of services focussed on Education and Care, which have enduring effects on the health and life chances outcomes for both the children and their families.

1. Examples of our work

• Providing training and employment opportunities for adults to develop skills and knowledge needed to deliver The Nuffield Early Language Intervention Programme
• Providing access to Speech and Language Therapy
• Providing access to Play Therapy
• Better supporting identified children who display behaviour that stops them engaging after moments when they transition from their main career into the nursery setting.
• Better supporting identified children develop better self – agency, emotional and stress system regulation through regular Play therapy sessions.
• The creation a Summertime Kindergarten for local 2-year-old children and their families
• Advocating the voices of our parents through London’s Being Human Festival

1. Summary

To date this work has allowed us to improve our capacity to better support our community. We have, and will continue to build, sustainable solutions to mitigate and prevent inequalities impacting on the health and wellbeing of communities, identifying gaps in our current provision and designing projects to address these. We will continue to dedicate ourselves to the challenge of bringing together our community, families and professionals, to build an Early Years provision dedicated to both continuously improving education and health care.