Reflecting on Year One of Big Hopes Big Future

One year ago, Home-Start London proudly launched Big Hopes Big Future – a four-year initiative aimed at ensuring more children across Camden, Islington, Southwark, and Lewisham start school ready to learn, grow, and thrive.

We were delighted to recently come together with colleagues from Home-Start Southwark and Home-Start Camden and Islington to reflect on an inspiring first year of collaboration. It was a valuable opportunity to celebrate our progress, share learning, and renew our collective commitment to early years support. This programme is generously funded by The Charity of Sir Richard Whittington, for which the Mercers’ Company is Corporate Trustee.

Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our staff and trained volunteers, we have laid strong foundations for the success of this programme. Key achievements in year one includes:

  • Developing robust, child-focused monitoring and evaluation systems to track impact and inform learning.
  • Strengthening and building partnerships with local early years services and community organisations.
  • Delivering comprehensive staff and volunteer training to ensure quality practice.
  • Delivering group and home-visiting support to help families create rich home learning environments that build children’s literacy, language and social-emotional skills.

So far 64 children and 63 parents have accessed support and we are delighted that the early feedback and evaluation data shows promising results. Parents report increased confidence using play to support their child’s learning and development, while staff and volunteers say they feel better equipped to embed school readiness into their work with families.

Parents shared that they now feel better equipped to help their child with literacy and numeracy at home, drawing on activities from the programme, “It opened up my eyes to other things that I can do at home to make sure he’s ready for the bigger jump [to primary school], and I’m trying to do more educational activities, like writing with him at home.”

As we move into year two, we’re excited to continue building on this momentum – deepening our impact, strengthening our partnerships and ensuring even more children get the best possible start in life.

We look forward to sharing further updates as Big Hopes Big Future grows – and we remain deeply grateful t our funders, partners, volunteers, and the families we support for making this first year such a success.