Programme to help health visitors talk to families about early brain development

A new programme designed to support health visitors to share key information with families around brain development has been launched by the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV).

The e-learning programme – Little Sparks, Big Starts (LSBS) – was launched last month and hopes to raise awareness and understanding of early brain development and educate parents, health visiting teams, educators and children to improve outcomes for 0-5-year-olds.

The programme was developed by Kindred Squared, a charitable foundation, which commissioned the iHV to support content specifically for the health visiting workforce.

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As well an e-learning package for health visitors, the programme will also include a web-based app for parents to support conversations with practitioners.

Project lead and director of innovation and research at iHV Vicky Gilroy said: ‘Health visitors and their teams generally have a good foundational understanding of baby brain development, but they wanted support in translating that knowledge so that it lands in a clear and meaningful way with families.

‘The Little Sparks, Big Starts project has been an innovative piece of work to address that knowledge to practice gap.

‘We hope that the new programme will support health visiting teams to positively promote the importance of early brain development in laying strong foundations for longer term outcomes, supporting families to make the everyday moments count.’

Chief executive of Kindred Squared Felicity Gillespie added: ‘Every cuddle, every chat, and every moment of play helps shape a child’s brain.

‘Together, families and early years professionals build the strong foundation that children need to grow into happy, capable learners.’

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She added that she was ‘deeply concerned’ with the latest School Readiness Survey, put together by Kindred Squared, which revealed a rising number of children who haven’t reached key developmental milestones.

‘Parents and early years staff are telling us they want more information and so Little Sparks, Big Starts is concise, well-researched and sourced advice which will hopefully help raise the vital importance of just how crucial pre-school development is,’ Ms Gillespie added.

Access to the LSBS programme is free and can be found on the iHV website.

Recently, the government rejected recommendations to set a target for health visitor recruitment despite concerns about ‘unmanageable and unsafe’ workloads.

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The cross-party Health and Social Care Committee recommended that the government commit to recruit ‘at least’ 1,000 health visitors, warning that the number of health visitors had fallen by 43% since 2015, leaving a shortfall of 5,000 posts.

However, the government said that while it intends to ‘improve the capacity of health-visiting services’, it ‘cannot commit to a specific number at this stage’.