Healthy Early Years Awards

The Calderdale Healthy Early Years Award is a scheme that recognises and promotes a best-practice whole setting approach to health and wellbeing, building on and enhancing the statutory requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Framework.

Our bespoke framework provides a consistent standard, celebrating good practice, and supporting early years childcare providers to continually review, monitor and improve. Calderdale Healthy Early Years Award also rewards shared learning, encouraging childcare providers to learn from each other.

The award supports the Calderdale Starting Well – Maternity and Early Years Strategy 2023 - 2027 goal: Children are ready for school. It is also an area of work that contributes towards meeting Starting Well Objective 3:

“Access to safe, accessible play areas, activities, environments, and opportunities to meet and socialise with other families including access to sufficient number of high-quality early years education and childcare providers”.

The Health Early Years Award is funded by Calderdale Council’s Public Health Team. The programme and all associated support are FREE to Calderdale Early Years Childcare Providers.

Submit a Self Assessment

Dashboard

Principles

In developing the Calderdale Healthy Early Years Award, we agreed, as a multi-disciplinary team, our overarching principles for the award to be:

Designed by Calderdale Early Years childcare providers for Calderdale
Achievable for all early years and childcar providers whether a private day nursery, pre-school, voluntary setting, or childminder
Creates minimal additional work for the provider
Everyone in the setting, from managrs to early years practitioners and play workers are involved and informed
No time limit for completion- once signed up it's a flexible approach
Bronze- basic good practice for all and covers each of the four identified domains
Commitment and a mechanism to share and celebrate good practice and facilitate shared learning.

Award Domains

Promoting health and wellbeing

Focus on food

Focus on physical activity

Focus on emotional wellbeing

The framework

Our Healthy Early Years Award framework takes a tiered approach, designed to provide something for all our providers and to help them to build progressively on policy and practice over time.

Award Levels

Bronze	Awarded for doing things that all our early years childcare providers should be able to easily put in place.
Silver	Awarded to early years childcare providers meeting an agreed standard across all of the four domains of the award.
Gold	Special recognition for early years childcare providers that have gone the extra mile on a particlar domain of the award.