This is a three-year strategy for professionals that will help Wrexham’s children, young people and families to be happy, healthy and safe and to develop the resilience, confidence and independence needed to take control of their own lives.
If difficulties do arise, making sure the right kind of support is offered as soon as possible, has been shown to be the best way to get things back on track.
The strategy has been developed by a wide range of partner organisations who work with children, young people and families in Wrexham, including a number of Wrexham Council departments, different disciplines in Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, Third Sector Organisations, the Police, Coleg Cambria and Wrexham University, and the Department for Work and Pensions.
A Prevention and Early Help Framework was established first, which established our joint priorities for all services and the strategy was then developed. The draft strategy went out to consultation in December 2022 and lots of young people, parents and carers and professionals told us what they thought. We made some changes as a result.
You might wonder – why do we need a strategy?
We know that our strategy cannot influence everything which affects families, for example our partners have little control over
- Rising costs, including the cost of energy in particular
- Employment and wages
- Climate change, wars, migration
- Amount of money available to help each of the partners to run our services
But this strategy will help us focus on what we can do, like
- Continue to focus on Prevention and Early Help as well as the high intensity specialist provision.
- Make sure our children and families are in the best place to take advantages of the opportunities they are offered
- Make sure that the best kind of help is offered as early as possible if difficulties arise
- Mitigate some of the effects of trauma and poverty
The strategy is a public statement of what we intend to improve together in the coming years. It will also help us put systems in place to see if things are improving or getting worse.
If you want to be more involved or if you want to tells us anything about this strategy, please feel free to contact us on familiesfirst@wrexham.gov.uk.
Next Steps
The work is not finished of course. Some of our next steps are set out in the strategy itself and others include
- Involving children, young people and families more actively in the future
- Create an easy read version of the strategy
- Making data more available to all the partners
- Improve our information sharing arrangements between partner organisations
- Improve the way we use our resources to get the most from our financial allocations