Launching AllChild in Wigan – Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham, January 2025

Last month, I attended the launch of AllChild Wigan at the Leigh Sports Village.

As you leave the sports centre, and head down the nearby East Lancs road, the changing skyline of Manchester starts to become visible.

My mission as Mayor is to ensure that for young people across our region, those skyscrapers are not just visible – they’re tangible. That they’re places that young people across our region can get to, in every sense of the word. They’re places they can and should see themselves working one day, in good jobs that reflect the wealth of talent our young people have.

Take transport. By ensuring that young people in the Greater Manchester region have access to affordable and reliable transport, we ensure that they can get to school, get jobs, and get to those jobs.

By using our devolved powers in health to ensure early intervention and a whole-person approach, Greater Manchester Combined Authority is able to take steps to ensure that people across our region live well. Our LiveWell scheme does just that, taking into account the wider factors that impact people’s lives and wellbeing.

The 2015 devolution deal on health allowed us to break down barriers between services. Early studies on the impact of this are indicating promising results on healthy life expectancy and self-reported life satisfaction.

AllChild’s way of working is interesting because it’s an example of this thinking on a more focussed scale – bringing in support from the local community and voluntary sectors, crowding in private sector investment, commissioning and delivering services within schools and communities, and basing it all around a single trusted relationship. Most importantly it bears fruit. Proactively identifying children and young people who are most at risk of poor outcomes, supporting them to attend and thrive at school, intervening early to help them stay out of trouble or worsen to crisis is what they do – and they do it well.

They listen to what local people need, not operating with models imposed from elsewhere. It shows what can be done when – like GMCA has done – you put children and teenagers at the centre of your work, making yourself accountable to local people.

I welcome their new project in the Wigan area – their first outside their original West London home. They have taken the time to listen to the needs of local people and local representatives. Their impact down south shows the benefits of active and early intervention to help those who are struggling: 95% of school leaders say AllChild has changed the trajectory of children at risk.

Some 75% of school leaders say that AllChild has contributed to avoiding the need for external intervention and escalation down the line including via social care, CAMHS or Alternative Provision. 74% are no longer at risk in their peer relationships and 86% have improved in their emotional wellbeing. Nearly half of persistently absent children were no longer persistently absent after two years. These are difficult, often intractable, problems –

ask any Mayor across the country, and you’ll hear very real concerns about attendance and youth mental health in our areas – but by linking up services, they’re seeing real impact.

AllChild’s work breaks down the silos that far too often define our support systems. When things go wrong in a young person’s life, it’s rarely just the one thing. Poor attendance can be due to issues at home and fading trust in state services. The pressures of everyday life at the moment are no doubt driving stress and anxiety in young people and their families. But too often, what we see is siloed services not speaking to each other until a crisis point is hit, and then local services – starved for cash for a decade by decisions made in Westminster and Whitehall – having to step in. It is Labour’s prevention agenda made real.

It’s also the growth agenda made real, because these are lives that will go on to flourish, to contribute to society, to become the productive citizens of tomorrow.

It is clear that Labour at a national level are learning these lessons too. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy was also at the AllChild event before launching the new National Youth Strategy. As part of this strategy, young people from across the country will be given a voice, with a new approach from Government that focuses on delivering the support services, facilities and opportunities that young people say they need. It takes a whole-child approach, because as the Secretary of State put it, ‘a child’s life doesn’t stop at the school gates, and neither should we’.

This, then, looks like the future of successful public policy under Labour. Whether it’s a charity like AllChild working locally, a combined authority working across a region, or a national government breaking down boundaries between departments, when you bring services together and put power in the hands of local people, you change lives.