Research on training programmes and direct support for early years staff and parents around infant socioemotional health.
The challenge: Babies who feel safe and experience the world as a consistent, loving place, are more likely to develop into individuals who also build good relationships. Promoting this can help both early years staff and families foster an understanding of good socioemotional health in infants, but it can be difficult for staff and families to know where to begin.
What we’re doing about it
Little Minds Matter promotes positive parent-infant relationships in the Better Start Bradford area. They do this by delivering training and consultation to staff in the early years workforce, and direct therapeutic support to families with concerning relationships.
Little Minds Matter delivers training courses on parent-infant attachment and mind-mindedness. Mind-mindedness is a parent’s (or other caregiver’s) ability to treat their young children as individuals with minds of their own.
Findings
In a little under 3 years (April 2018-January 2021) Little Minds Matter has delivered 28 training courses to 434 staff in the early years workforce. This includes health visitors, nurses, midwives and staff in other Better Start Bradford projects. High satisfaction with the training was reported by 99% of attendees.
In the same period, Little Minds Matter provided 251 sessions of consultation, support and guidance to staff in the early years workforce, and 62 families with concerning parent-infant relationships attended at least one session of direct support from Little Minds Matter.
All Better Start Bradford projects are monitored to check, for example, that they see as many families as they are expected to in a year. These expectations are called targets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Little Minds Matter had to change and deliver its services online or via the telephone. Despite this disruption, they stayed open throughout, and met or nearly met all their targets. This is an amazing achievement. Well done Little Minds Matter!
Staff in the early years workforce highly value the service and want information and support to promote positive parent-infant relationships. This is seen in the number of staff attending training and receiving support, and the satisfaction they report with the training.
Future plans
Little Minds Matter works by being well connected to early years services and their staff. We are doing some research to find out more about the relationships between Little Minds Matter and other services. We want to understand if it is reaching all the staff and families that may need support and the impact it has had on these other services since.
Project summary written by Sarah Masefield
the Better Start Bradford Innovation Hub 
You must be logged in to post a comment.