What is Flying Start?

Flying Start is a Welsh Government funded programme which provides intensive support services to families with children aged between 0-3, who lives in disadvantaged areas across Wales.

The Blaenau Gwent Flying Start team is child-focused and offers encouragement, information, and guidance to support parents/carers at each stage of their child’s development, providing free opportunities, activities, and programmes to allow all children to develop their language and social skills and their emotional and physical development in order to be ready to begin school.

What Flying Start means in practice:

There are 4 core elements of the Flying Start programme which have been drawn from a range of options that have been shown to influence positive outcomes for children and their families.

 

1. An enhanced Health Visiting service

Flying Start Health Visitors provides an intensive Health Visiting service to all eligible families, and with the assistance of Health Family Support Workers have the capacity to visit families more frequently and provide one to one support in the home.

Recently Flying Start has introduced new antenatal programmes and services, with the aim of contacting every pregnant mother that attends our Antenatal Booking Clinic. Such early contact promotes health and wellbeing for the mother and child during pregnancy and beyond. Each Flying Start family is supported to develop and bond with their baby, supporting both parents with their emotional and mental health. Flying Start provides locally accessible baby clinics promoting the uptake of immunisations, giving general baby health advice, on breast feeding, weaning, creating routines and sleep patterns.

Baby Massage courses are available, informing parents about baby bonding and creating attachment, which can help alleviate and soothe a baby during illness, or teething and general growth. The Health Visiting Service continues up to the age of 4 years old, when the child’s health care is handed over to the school nurse on entry to school.

 

2. Access to Parenting Programmes

Parents living in Flying Start areas are supported further by having the opportunity to attend a range of parenting programmes, which aim to give them the skills to parent effectively. Some courses are especially for new parents with new-born babies to encourage baby bonding and attachment.

As children grow further programmes are available which build parents’ confidence to understand children’s behaviour, promote positive parenting, creating positive approaches to building healthy relationships with their children. Some of the programmes available include:

- Family Links “Welcome to the World” Antenatal Programme – supporting new parents with some of the difficulties they may experience and support to get to know your new baby.

- Grobrain Infant programme – for new parents with new-born babies and children up to 12 months old

- Grobrain Toddler programme – for parents to learn how to scaffold their children’s emotional development, and encourage language, social and physical development.

- Family Links Nurturing Programme – supports families to build positive relationships, communication, and positive behaviour management within the family.

- Little Explorers offers a range of bespoke programmes are available at local Flying Start hubs or through home delivery, offering support that is tailored to meet the needs of each family.

 

- Circle of Security programme supports parents and caregivers to help them to:

Understand their child’s emotional world by learning to read emotional needs.

Support their child’s ability to successfully manage emotions.

Enhance the development of their child's self-esteem.

Honor the innate wisdom and desire for their child to be secure.

 

Different workshops, parenting programmes and sessions are also available for Flying Start parents that can be very beneficial, these include:

Baby massage

Elklan – Let’s Talk with your baby.

Play and Development

Parents and toddler group

Small Steps

Confidence building

Stress Busting

Interparental relationships

Healthy eating, cooking, and weaning on a budget.

ACES toolkit – exploring adverse childhood experiences.

 

3. Speech, Language and Communication Support

Parents are a baby and young child’s first teacher.

Flying Start supports parents to foster a communication and language-rich environment to improve children’s early speech, language and communication development and learning to talk. The years from birth to 3 are crucial in developing a young child’s growing need to communicate.

Evidence shows that speech, language, and communication ability is an important predictor of later progress in literacy and has an impact on social skills as well as behaviour of children and their readiness for school.

Within Blaenau Gwent we offer a range a programmes and services to identify needs, provide support and promote speech, language, and positive communication within families via our team of Early Language Workers. These include:

Antenatal Language and Play – to provide parents-to-be with an understanding of how to communicate with their baby before birth, as well as a range of skills to support their child’s early educational development from the day they are born.

Elklan ‘Let’s talk with your baby’ – for parents with babies 3-12 months old, providing a communication-rich environment through interactive, fun activities.

Talking Tots – aims to introduce language development strategies and interaction styles to parents supporting children with delayed speech, language, and communication.

Elklan ‘Let’s talk with under 5’s” – aims to provide parents and carers with opportunities to discuss ideas to help their children learn to listen, understand, and talk, as well as to provide information around typical speech and language development and communication difficulties children can experience.

Flying Start Speech and Language Therapists – are available to support families and their children on a one-to-one basis in their homes or as part of group session where children have been identified as having developmental or language delays. Very often children can become frustrated if they have speech and language problems but making a few changes can help them make a lot of progress.

 

4. Free quality, part-time childcare for 2–3-year-olds

Children living in eligible properties (postcode dependent) within Flying Start areas are entitled to free part-time childcare for 2.5 hours per day (12.5 hours per week), Monday to Friday, for 42 weeks of the year.

The Flying Start Early Years Advisory Teacher works with each Flying Start childcare setting within the County Borough to develop suitable curriculum plans and activities which stimulate two-year-olds’ development. The emphasis is on setting standards which produce quality childcare provision across all 11 childcare settings.

For those families who require support and do not live in a Flying Start area, a Flying Start outreach option is available to ensure equality of service provision across the borough.