Children and Families Newcastle is a project being driven by Collaborative Newcastle partners, working with schools, voluntary and community sector organisations and children, young people and families themselves.
The aim is to make positive change and to redesign the support on offer so that it’s much more proactive, joined-up and tailored to families’ individual needs.
This work builds on the City’s current partnership approach, which includes the Community Family Hub and the work of Outreach and Family Support Teams.
During Covid, these teams have worked creatively with families to provide ongoing support and engagement, including activity packs and online story times and breast-feeding support groups.
Jane Melvin, Directorate Manager for the Great North Children’s Hospital says:
“Newcastle benefits from really high-quality services for children and families, committed and expert staff teams across the public and voluntary sector, strong working relationships across organisations, as well as good resources and community infrastructure.
“However, there are some outcomes for our city’s children that we all want to improve. Newcastle has higher rates of children who are subject to child protection plans and higher numbers of children in care than our comparator cities.
“Our children do less well in school as they get into the older year groups. Our infants go to A&E more often than national average. We also have higher rates of childhood obesity.
“We know that by working together as organisations we can tackle these challenges more effectively.”
