Workforce Development
Bradford’s early years workforce is a diverse and collaborative network of health professionals, practitioners, social care staff, academics, students, volunteers, and community organisations. Together, they support expectant parents, babies, and families with 0-3s.
Better Start Bradford played a key role in strengthening this workforce from 2015 to 2025, with a strong focus on prevention and early intervention.
Our Workforce Development Strands
Learning Together
Our flagship training and networking programme:
• Provided role-specific training for early years practitioners to work confidently and effectively with parents and service users.
• Enabled professionals to develop skills, knowledge and confidence together, and to support effective work with families with 0-3s.
• Brought early years thought leaders - including Dr Suzanne Zeedyk, Sally Hogg and George Hosking - to our locality as key speakers for our audience to learn more about research, evidence, policy and practice development from the sector.
Better Start Bradford project staff also benefited from our Knowledge Cafes: bite-sized meetings/workshops examining hot topics relevant to the sector.
Nursing and Midwifery Students
From 2019 to 2025, we delivered 6,568 hours of training to 187 students.
We provided a tailored training offer to support future health professionals, delivered in partnership with the University of Bradford and Bradford College. This included:
• Student placements working with the Better Start Bradford team, alongside meeting projects and supporting at community events. Overall we supported 877 additional practice days.
• Three-hour, face-to-face training sessions delivered in colleges to share key messages about Better Start Bradford’s work and provide a focused, hands-on learning experience around play and communication.
Future Workforce Development
Better Start Bradford invested funding and worked with Bradford Council, schools and partners to establish and embed The Centre of Excellence for Health & Social Care (CEHSC), now Centres for Technical Education (CTE) as one of their Industrial Centres of Excellence (ICE).
The centre created a tripartite partnership between employers, educators and the local government to work together to give students a better, more practical learning experience.
The CEHSC equipped young people with the knowledge, skills, and experience to succeed in work, and built on their interest in health, social care and early childhood development to help them make informed career choices. The CTE programme still supports this area of work.
Virtual Live Learning Sessions
Launched in 2022, we delivered 30 Virtual Live Learning Sessions to share knowledge, evidence and learning from Better Start Bradford projects and partners across the district.
Popular sessions included ‘Dynamics of Domestic Abuse’, ‘I Am Here Can You Hear Me? The Voice of the Child’ and ‘An Introduction to Autism and Neurodiversity’.
Adversity, Trauma & Resilience (ATR)
In 2018, Better Start Bradford, Bradford Council and Bradford District and City CCG brought partners together to consider the developing work on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) across partner organisations. A hub was established to share good practice and knowledge.
In 2021, the ATR programme was launched with a three-year strategy, outlining what would be done to prevent and mitigate ACEs; buffer the impact of these; intervene early, and develop services that are trauma-informed across the Bradford district.
Resilient Bradford is a workforce development project offering training and materials on Adversity, Trauma and Resilience (ATR), as well as restorative services, to individuals and organisations across Bradford. Led by Bradford Trident, Better Start Bradford and WAVE Trust, this project is a part of the Bradford ATR programme and has been funded by Public Health.
Volunteering
Over 300 volunteers gave their time and skills to make a real, lasting difference to families in the Better Start Bradford area during the Better Start Bradford programme:
• Community Board Members represented the community at governance level with equal voice to system leaders.
• Community Champions supported outreach, engagement and assist at community events.
• Many Better Start Bradford projects relied on volunteer peer support to deliver their services, including Bradford Doulas, HENRY, Home-Start Better Start and the Perinatal Support Service.
• Parent Panel members made decisions on parent-led applications to run activities for Parents in the Lead and the Happy Early Years (HEY!) Fund. They awarded 170 parents £260,000 between them.
Community Stars Awards
Better Start Bradford sponsored the district-wide Community Stars Awards from 2016 to 2025 to recognise and celebrate volunteer contribution to the earliest years of life.
Winners included: a doula, recognised for building rapport and going above and beyond; a mum who developed an innovative 'breastfeeding box' with practical and self-care items to help breastfeeding mums; an allotment and gardens society for developing a safe, sensory-rich educational space; and a volunteer who helped establish and run Bradford Baby Bank.
You may also like to look at...
We've poured our expertise into a range of toolkits and other resources for early years settings, anyone working or volunteering with families with young children, or anyone training the early years workforce.
Dip into our library of research and evaluation reports, articles, family and early years resources, videos, podcast episodes and more!
Dive into our Earliest Years of Life podcast - an uplifting and engaging series that looks at how formative babies’ earliest months and years are.