Berry Street Web Docs Berry Street Early Years Plan

Berry Street Early Years Plan 2011 - 2014 Our Vision Berry Street believes all children should have a good childhood, growing up feeling safe, nurtured and with hope for the future. This vision requires that all children are supported during the critical early years to make healthy, adaptive progress in each of the key developmental areas, including language, learning, social, emotional, physical and moral development. Our Focus Berry Street has always worked with children and young people at the most complex end of the continuum of risk and vulnerability – with the children and young who have experienced the most harmful forms of abuse, violence or neglect. As part of a commitment to prevent the harm that disrupts healthy child development we want to intervene earlier in the lifecycle i.e. during the early years. We need to do more and do better in protecting and strengthening healthy, adaptive child development, and responding to emergent developmental vulnerabilities of the children we work with. The Berry Street Early Years Plan focuses specifically on the first and prime developmental phase of the “early years” — the period between the antenatal phase and eight years. This is the critical period when brain growth is at its peak, establishing either a sturdy or fragile foundation for children to acquire essential capabilities that will shape the rest of their lives. Our Commitments In our early years work we are committed to: • Children’s rights, including the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities (2009) • Recognising and respecting that healthy child development occurs within a diversity of family and kinship systems, child rearing practices and cultural traditions • Acknowledging that parents, carers and the home environment have the greatest influence on children’s development - building the capacity of families, staff and carers to strengthen and enrich the developmental environment for children • Strengthening and developing new early intervention approaches and strategies - both targeted and universal - to support young children to get the best start in life • Developing our staff and carer practice through improved understandings of the lifelong implications of child development, childhood trauma and attachment relationships • Ensuring that our services for children in the early years are of high quality • Advocating for strengthened government and community investment in early years programs, prioritising those communities with pronounced disparity in children’s developmental outcomes • Partnering with other early years services to develop and promote more effective and inclusive early years programs for all families. • Building community capacity, because a strong community is a key source of support for families parenting children in the early years.