Supporting Early Years via Creative Health

Last week, the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) submitted written evidence to the House of Commons’ Education Committee inquiry, Early Years: Improving Support for Children and Families. Our submission highlighted the essential role of creativity in giving every child the best start in life and preventing future health inequalities.

In this blog we outline who the Education Committee are, along with some of the key points from our submission.

Who are the Education Committee

The role of the Education Committee is to scrutinise the work of the Department for Education – ‘covering children’s social care, schools, colleges, the early years and higher education’ – as well as arms-length bodies, such as Ofsted. Their Early Years inquiry sought to improve support for children and families by examining ‘a number of policy issues related to workforce sustainability in the sector, access and affordability of services for parents, and quality of provision and outcomes for young children in terms of their development’.

Our Submission

We call for sustained investment, workforce development, and cross-sector collaboration to embed creative health across nurseries, libraries, and community hubs. By recognising creativity as a social determinant of health, early years provision can play a vital role in prevention, inclusion, and neighbourhood wellbeing.

Executive Summary:

• Creative activity is foundational in early years - Arts and culture build emotional, language, social and cognitive skills, yet access is uneven in deprived and rural areas, driving preventable inequalities.
• Creativity is a social determinant of health - Embedding creative opportunities in early years acts as primary prevention, strengthening attachment, communication and wellbeing now to reduce later health inequalities and demand on services.
• Community providers complement childcare - Libraries, museums and cultural centres offer low/no-cost, drop-in creative support that strengthens home learning and reaches families for whom full-time nursery is unaffordable or inaccessible.
• Workforce actions - We have three recommendations: to train nursery staff in creative health, recognise specialist creative practitioners via accredited routes, and fund joint CPD between nurseries and creative providers to embed shared practice and continuity.
• Stabilise delivery - Tackle short-term, grant-based precarity for creative providers to prevent stop–start partnerships and practitioner burnout.
• Inclusion & affordability - Embed subsidised, co-designed creative offers where families already go (Family Hubs, children’s centres, nurseries, community venues); place-based models like Talent25 show how to reach less-served families and bolster parental wellbeing.
• Neighbourhood opportunity, with risks - Neighbourhood working can integrate cultural assets into prevention and early years care, but cost pressures risk hollowing capacity.

To keep up-to-date with how the Early Years inquiry progresses, visit: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/9309/early-years-improving-support-for-children-and-families/. 

To hear about other inquiries that NCCH has submitted evidence for, visit our news and blogs page: https://ncch.org.uk/news.