Best Start Family Hub funding and webinar
Gayle Clifford, Best Start in Life Delivery & Commissioning Manager at Gloucestershire County Council, would like to share the following update
As part of its Giving every child the best start in life strategy, the Government has set a national target that by 2028 at least 75% of children should be ready to start year 1 at school ready to learn, as measured by the Early Years Foundation Stage assessment (EYFS).
The EYFS assessment is carried out by reception teachers towards the end of the reception year and looks at whether the child is attaining a “good level of development” (GLD) across 12 Early Learning goals.
Gloucestershire has been set a GLD target of 77.2% and 60% for Free School Meals (FSM) children by the end of reception 2028.
Each local authority has been awarded three years of funding to support us to increase the percentage of children attaining a Good Level of Development (GLD), by 2028.
We are currently in the planning stage with the funding and below are our three main targets -
By January 2026 we need to have identified a Best Start Family Hub site. This could be an existing children centre or a new building and needs to be situated in an area of deprivation.
By the end of March 2026, we need to have determined which parenting and home learning environment programmes will be delivered in Gloucestershire to support 3 and 4-year-olds and to have trained a range of practitioners to deliver them.
From April 2026 we need to start the delivery of the parenting and home learning programmes.
Best Start Family Hub webinar: Wednesday 21 January 10am to 12pm
To help us to plan for the delivery of programmes from April 2026, we would like to invite you to attend the webinar below where we will provide information about the Best Start Family Hub funding and the programmes we have selected to deliver across Gloucestershire and where delivery needs to be targeted.
We hope that you can attend and support us with discussions on the delivery of the training programmes and how we can work together to increase Gloucestershire’s GLD from our current 68.6% to 77.2% and FSM from 48.3% to 60%.
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