About Flintshire Early Years and Childcare
"The early years (conception to seven) are vital years in our children’s lives. Our vision is for ALL children to have the best start in life, growing up happy, healthy and safe, with the opportunity to reach their potential, with no one left behind. A child’s experiences during this time has a major impact on their future life chances. Good parenting, good advice and support and opportunities for high quality early learning, together, provide the foundation all children need to nurture their readiness to learn and make the most of their abilities as they grow. This is particularly important for disadvantaged children where support in the early years can have the greatest impact."
Welcome to the Flintshire Early Years and Childcare service.
In early 2022, we started our ‘Parents Voice Flintshire’ consultation. We spoke to parents and expectant parents across the county, and they told us that they would like one place where they could find information about what is available in Flintshire, to support them in their parenting journey.
The Flintshire Early Years and Childcare team provide information, advice and support for expectant parents and families with young children aged 0-7 years living in Flintshire.
If you are an expectant parent, or a parent (including grandparents and carers) of a child up to age 7 living in Flintshire we hope that you will find this information helpful.
If you are providing services to young children and their families, we hope that you will find this a useful source of information, advice and support to help you in your role, and to share with families.
The Early Years and Childcare service consists of four main areas:
- Early Years Gateway
- Early Years Child and Parent Team
- Childcare Team
- Early Years Strategy, Planning and Evaluation, making sure we do the right things, and do them well.
The Early Years Gateway, which includes the Family Information Service, is the main contact point for any professional, parent, or family member who needs information, advice, and support. Our Family Information and Gateway Officers are on hand to listen to your situation, and help you access the services that will best support you.
They can offer support on a wide range of areas including:
- Childcare
- Activities and community provision 0-25 years
- Child behaviour
- Parental support
- Support services
- Information and signposting to other services
If you need advice and support, contact the Early Years Hub.
Visit the Family Information Service webpage.
EarlyYearsTeam@flintshire.gov.uk
Working alongside other agencies, the Early Years Child and Parent Team provide community and tailored, enhanced and specialist support to families to improve their outcomes and reach their goals and aspirations. It does this through positive engagements, finding out more about your strengths, exploring your needs and helping you to identify the things that matter to you.
Advice and support is available for the following key areas:
- Pregnancy and preparing for parenthood
- Family life
- Child development
- Speech, language and communication
- Understanding behaviours
If you need support in any of these areas, contact the Early Years Team at EarlyYearsTeam@flintshire.gov.uk.
The Childcare Team work to ensure that there are high quality early years childcare places and play opportunities for children and their families in Flintshire.
The team has a statutory responsibility to assess childcare sufficiency and works with local providers and services to help meet demand, minimise gaps and continually improve quality.
The team administer Welsh Government funded childcare including 2-year-old childcare, the 3-4 Childcare Offer and Early Entitlement.
They can provide advice and support for children with emerging needs, working in partnership with education, health and third sector colleagues.
Visit our childcare pages for further information or contact the Early Years Hub.
For more information, please contact CCODigitalSystem@flintshire.gov.uk or 01352 703930.
We are committed to addressing diversity and inclusion in a meaningful, constructive, and holistic way.
Parents Voice
We listened to what parents said would be helpful, and working with parents and services we created this area of the Flintshire County Council website.
Parents told us they want:
- Children to be at the heart
- The language to be simple and easy to understand
- Information on health, safety and security that is easy to understand
- Information that is simple, available, and accessible to help parents, help their child
- To be involved
- Help to find solutions
- Help to understand what is available
- Help to identify needs and what can be done
- Stories – to know they are not in the parenting role alone and that every contact should be easy and make a difference
- Services that matter and are flexible, consistent, open, listening, relational, understanding, accountable, seamless, caring, wanting to make a difference, not judging but seeing the best and the way forward, honest and trustworthy.
We hope that you will find information that is useful to you and would welcome your feedback – is there something you found really useful? is there something you think is missing or needs changing? if so, tell us, so we can continue to develop the information to help all parents.
You can contact us at EarlyYearsTeam@flintshire.gov.uk.
To learn more about what shapes the work that we do, please visit: