In 2019, our Founder and Chairman Steve Morgan initiated the hugely impactful Cradle to Career programme, which brought together the local authority and third-sector organisations to deliver systematic and long-term change to improve outcomes for children and young people in North Birkenhead, one of the most deprived areas in the Liverpool City Region.
Now, as Cradle to Career completes its fourth year since the programme launched, we celebrate its impact and subsequent expansion across Liverpool.
North Birkenhead Cradle to Career’s three areas of focus
Working in collaboration with our funding partners SHINE & UBS, our lead delivery partner Right to Succeed and Wirral Council, we embarked on an ambitious 12-month discovery period to establish the priorities, needs, challenges and aspirations for residents, professionals and partners.
Through this process the local community identified three priority focus areas:
- Significantly improve literacy standards among children
- Give families easy access to the support they need
- Create new opportunities for local children and young people.
Implementing change
Affecting change in the three focus areas has been the combined effort of a number of dedicated organisations – a total of 43 partners are now engaged locally. While improving child literacy involved programme development between local schools, and the youth offer depended largely on the third sector, it was the Wirral Council who held sway over the second priority – giving families in need access to the support they needed.
Through the creation of a multidisciplinary team (MDT) of community-based specialists, referrals and support now happen much quicker with the right person at the right time getting to these families to make these changes.
Caseloads have dropped significantly and social workers can spend more time working on the most urgent cases or focusing on preventative work that was squeezed out before.
The MDT also has a worker linked with each of the area’s eight schools. As a result of this collaboration and light intervention, attendance has climbed an average of 16%, bucking the national trend of falling attendance.
The charity partners attend weekly meetings alongside the MDT and this collaborative working, the guiding principle behind the Cradle to Career programme, has brought together third-sector organisations who would otherwise be in stiff competition for limited funding and sometimes duplicating efforts.
The impact of Cradle to Career
We are delighted to see the impact that Cradle to Career and our placed-based change approach is having on the community in North Birkenhead:
- Gone from being the highest-need community in Wirral since records started to the fourth-highest
- Almost twice the rate of child protection step-downs compared to Wirral as a whole
- Reported a 20% reduction in re-referrals to social care and is no longer the highest referring ward
- In literacy, a 15-month reading gap was closed in the first three years across four year groups
- After four years, all children aged 8-16 are now on average at national reading age expectation
- For pupils with SEND who have been on the programme since year 1, there has, on average, been an increase in reading ability that aligns with over half a GCSE grade
Following its impact in North Birkenhead, the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is now investing £5.25 million to extend the programme into five more of the region’s most deprived wards. Mayor Steve Rotherham called the programme a “radical, bespoke approach that works with the communities to identify local issues and empowers them to come up with solutions.”
Steve Morgan, CBE said:
“I firmly believe that collaborative working is the most effective strategy for delivering change, which was the driver behind setting up the Cradle to Career programme. The impact the initiative has had clearly demonstrates what can be achieved when services join together and focus on real local priorities informed by the people they were established to serve.
“The Steve Morgan Foundation has committed £4.9million of funding to date to the Cradle to Career programme and we remain a primary catalyst, investor and champion.”
Read more about the Cradle to Career programme here