Best Start Collaborative: Co-producing Nottingham City’s Best Start Strategy

Nottingham City Best Start Strategy 2025-2035 responds to increasing evidence that the period from pre-conception to age five is a critical period of life which lays the foundations for a child’s lifelong health, learning and wellbeing. A child’s development during these early years from age 0-5 is rapid and complex, and is strongly influenced by their environment, relationships and access to services. Every child’s and family’s journeys are different. In Nottingham City, not every child has an equal start. Too many children and families face avoidable barriers which negatively impact their health, from poverty and housing insecurity to racial inequality, poor maternal mental health, and limited access to local support. A strong partnership, the Best Start Collaborative, developed the Nottingham City Best Start Strategy as a shared plan to overcome these barriers.

This history of close partnership working through the Best Start Collaborative meant that when Nottingham was required to publish its Best Start in Life Strategic Plan 2026-2028 to meet the locally-set Good Level of Development targets, there was a strong foundational base from which to build. The insight and learning from the Best Start strategy development and the Collaborative informed the identification of six key priorities with the aim that more children will achieve a good level of development by the end of reception in 2028. 

• Engage, collaborate and co-produce a shared Best Start Strategy with partners across the Best Start system in Nottingham
• Ensure a central and unwavering focus on the child, maintaining consideration of those around them: “a child is never a child on their own”
• Accurately identify the biggest priority needs in Nottingham using a range of quantitative and qualitative data which need to be addressed to ensure that children are given the best start in life 
• Identify and achieve system commitment to actions which strengthen relationships in the Best Start System and address the biggest priority needs in Nottingham 
• To ensure that our Best Start system can collectively achieve the strategy vision, that:
• Every child has the best start in life and parents-to-be, caregivers, babies, and young children have what they need to thrive. Families, communities, and services join together to make Nottingham and Nottinghamshire a great place to be born and grow up.

Case Study focus: Best Start Strategy Partnership 

1. Nottingham City Best Start Strategy Initial Workshop
2. The Nottingham City Best Start Collaborative
3. Partnership approach with colleagues, parents, caregivers and children 
4. Close-working with Local Authority Neighbours Nottinghamshire County Council 
5. Partnership Groups and Governance boards

Nottingham City Best Start Strategy Initial Workshop

To begin the development of the strategy, people across the Best Start system were all invited to a spend the day at a Best Start Strategy workshop in October 2024. Over 80 people attended across Nottingham, including parents and caregivers. It was an interactive day from start to finish, focusing on understanding what people wanted from a Best Start Strategy, and identifying what we need to collectively focus on in Nottingham over the next 10 years. 

From this workshop, all of the information collected from attendees was transcribed, analysed and cross-referenced with the most recent population data available, and acted upon to produce the first draft of the strategy vision, priorities, principles and key populations. 

This information was put together into an Engagement Report, which was then used for further engagement with the Best Start system to refine our strategy content. 

The Nottingham City Best Start Collaborative

The workshop identified relevant strategic members to be a part of the first Nottingham City Best Start Collaborative, featuring members from: Best Start Family Hubs, Family Help, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board, Nottingham University Hospitals, Early Years, Early Years SEND, Nottingham Community Voluntary Service, Children’s Integrated Services, 0-19s Public Health Integrated Services, Maternity and Neonatal Voices Partnership. 

The Collaborative not only owned the development of the strategy but also owns the strategy itself, including the delivery plan actions and their progress. The membership of the collaborative ensures ongoing commitment and accountability for identified Best Start actions and increases efficiency and effectiveness by enabling partners to collaborate on work and reduce any duplication. A key example of this is our shared ambition to increase the number of children achieving a good level of development by the end of reception and meet the targets set for Nottingham by central government.   All of Nottingham City Best Start Collaborative partners play an integral role in helping children to develop mentally, socially and physically. Our close working means that we can ensure that this development is nurtured as early and as best as possible. For example, Maternity services supporting positive pregnancy and birthing outcomes, Health Visitors helping to ensure good early health and wellbeing, Best Start Family Hubs enabling parents and caregivers to develop positive home learning environments and Early Years ensuring that that are sufficient good quality childcare placements. 

Best Start Family Hubs have been essential in all of our Best Start work, and close collaboration between all partners has ensured that we have a shared understanding of meeting the needs of parents, caregivers, babies and infants, as early as possible.

“Being a part of the Best Start Collaborative has enabled our Best Start Family Hub and Healthy Babies work to be more widely understood by colleagues and partners building our network offer, and when professionals work together with a shared goal, this helps parents and caregivers to have a better understanding too! This means that more people engage with support sooner, helping us to identify and meet the needs of babies and infants and those around them”.  Statement shared by Nottingham City Best Start Family Hubs colleagues 

Following work with parents and caregivers at the initial workshop, we then had conversations with children, parents and caregivers across Nottingham at library events, through surveys and in 1-1 conversations in person and virtually, to ask whether they felt the principles and priorities so-far identified were accurate in their experiences. These conversations helped us to better understand the lasting impact of COVID, emphasised the importance of safety and the experiences of parents, caregivers and children in their communities, and how much they appreciate accessible events across Nottingham. One of our Nottingham parents spoke at our Best Start Strategy workshop event, and wrote our foreword for the strategy, uniting us in our shared ambitions to do our best for our children in Nottingham. Survey respondents helped us to greater emphasise the need for the Best Start system to work better together and to be more accessible for people looking for support. 

At Holidays Activities and Food (HAF) groups, which supports children and families who have low incomes, we spoke with children about what helps them to feel happy and healthy, and we analysed the engagement as part of the Child Friendly Nottingham work to understand what children feel and hope for. These insights created a strategy which focuses on the voice of the child, and statements found in the HAF sheets and in the engagement were used to contextualise each priority, and what it ‘means practically for babies, infants and children in Nottingham City’. 

The Maternity Neonatal Voices Partnership have worked with us from the first workshop, through developing the content and providing crucial check and challenge, and working with us through the delivery of the strategy with a representative being an integral part of our Best Start Collaborative. 

As part of the development of the Nottingham City Best Start Strategy, the City Best Start Collaborative and our colleagues in Nottinghamshire County recognised the need to work closely together. The County had an existing Best Start Strategy to refresh. Many colleagues in the Best Start system work across both the city and the county and there are many benefits to the system by us having a closer working relationship. We worked together to identify where our collaboration with partners and engagement with people in our “villages” who support 0-5s had identified shared priorities for each of our Best Start strategies. The result of this effective close-working relationship has enabled us to produce strategies with 4 out of 5 aligned priorities, and has supported us to work together on targeted task and finish groups across the system to progress with our action plans. This reduces confusion for both our colleagues across the city and county as well as our communities and enables us to be more efficient in pooling our resources to identify and act on opportunities. 

“It’s been fantastic working together on the development of our respective Best Start strategies, and now on bringing them to life. By collaborating closely wherever we can, we can further strengthen what we deliver for infants, children and families — recognising that the lives of the families we support naturally cross borders, and that many of our partner organisations work across localities too.” Statement shared by Nottinghamshire County Council Best Start colleagues 

Partnership Groups and Governance boards

The Nottingham City Best Start Strategy is owned and delivered by the Nottingham City Best Start Collaborative. Task and finish groups which have been created to drive actions of the Best Start Strategy delivery plan report to the Best Start Collaborative. There are also longstanding working groups in Nottingham’s Best Start system which own elements of the Best Start Strategy delivery actions and report these into the Collaborative.

Decisions made at the Best Start Collaborative involve a range of partners, and so there are different governance structures dependent on the nature of the decision. However, ultimately the collaborative reports to Nottingham’s Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Board. 

The governance structure enables us to have a shared responsibility and understanding of the working happening across the Best Start system to achieve improvements in our identified Public Health outcomes to give every child the best start in life.