Our collaborative, targeted review of the Department of Health and Social Care’s and Department for Education’s Start for Life programme improved programme management, assurance and delivery processes, aiming to enhance outcomes for families and communities.

Background

Start for Life is a national programme delivering trusted NHS advice and guidance on topics such as pregnancy, infant feeding and early child development. The Start for Life Unit at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) were approaching a critical point in their programme and requested short-term support to review aspects of the programme as below, make quick-win improvements and provide recommendations for further developments, focusing on:

• Programme management
• Programme reporting
• Programme assurance 
• Parent/carer panels and Start for Life offers
• Overall lessons learnt.

Our support focused on clarifying the gaps, opportunities and strengths of the current processes and strengthening assurance, risk management and the approach to implementing best practice.

Action

Our Improvement Unit established workstreams for programme improvement, focusing on each key area, codeveloping approaches with DHSC and Department for Education (DfE) colleagues such as workshops and process mapping. Our actions included:

• Desktop review of assurance, programme management, reporting and Family Hub, Parent and Carer Panels and Start for Life provision by local authorities
• Comprehensive lessons learnt exercise
• Roadmap for reporting future benefits realisation
• New assurance report using existing intelligence
• Quick-win improvements of the programme management approach including risk management
• Comprehensive mapping of each local authority’s offers, highlighting examples of best practice and areas that may benefit from further support
• Final report with recommendations and suggested SMART action plans to enable sustainable long-term improvements.

Impact

In the short term to date, our programme improvement support has:

• Further strengthened joint working across DHSC and DfE teams, for example in the development of a joint work plan
• Moved the programme towards more streamlined and effective processes, tools and guidance for programme delivery such as reporting and assurance
• Increased clarity on gaps, challenges and opportunities faced with realistic, co-designed suggestions for further actions to deliver sustainable improvements
• Increased clarity on areas of best practice and common challenges faced by local authorities delivering the programme, with opportunities to continue to spread best practice across all local authorities.

In the long term, our support intends to:

• Proactively establish effective planning for any future similar programme to reduce the level of rapid design required
• Promote effective collaboration on complex programmes across departments
• Ultimately, improve outcomes for children, parents/carers, families and communities through effective, streamlined and collaborative programme delivery.

For more information

For more information and to learn how we can help you, please contact us.