Thrive at Five

Who we are

It takes a community to raise a child and Thrive at Five embeds itself in the communities we work with to strengthen the systems that support parents, carers, and children. Our local teams are recruited from the local community, and they start by discovering the opportunities and challenges to help every child achieve their potential. Together with parents, carers and organisations working in the early years they design the best approaches. We also recruit and train voluntary and paid Parent Champions to help design and implement projects.

Our national team supports our local pathfinder colleagues with guidance, additional expertise and by securing funding or technical support from partners.

Focusing on a long-term investment in connecting and strengthening the systems and support networks around parents and carers, at a community level, was identified as the most effective way to make sustained improvement in early child development. Collaborating with parents and local organisations would be critical to harnessing the existing power and energy to build capacity in a community.

We are developing, testing and continuing to refine the Thrive at Five approach with our local and national team, supporters and collaborators working together to deliver our first pathfinder in Stoke-on-Trent.

The approach will shortly be rolled out to more pathfinder communities and as we deepen our evidence base, we are building a model that could be applied to achieve long-term systemic changes to child development, in any part of the UK.