Creating the healthiest generation of children: turning prevention, early intervention and children’s wellbeing into reality

How can we collaborate more effectively across borders to improve children and young people’s health?

Children’s health is shaped by families, communities, environments, and systems—and both the challenges and solutions often lie beyond the health sector and beyond national borders. This session explores how we can better connect across sectors and countries to share learning, scale innovation, and focus on what truly matters to children and young people.

Hosted by The King’s Fund as part of its work to launch an International Alliance for Children’s Health, this informal breakfast discussion will:

• Explore how international collaboration can drive meaningful change.

• Consider how we use data and good practice to learn, adapt and spread innovation.

• Ask whether we’re measuring what really matters in children’s health.

• Generate ideas and actions to shape the day’s conversations and the future direction of the alliance.

Join us for breakfast and bring your insights, curiosity and experience to a conversation that puts children and young people at the heart of global health collaboration.

It’s 2035... we have the healthiest generation of children ever. In this session, we’ll reflect on what it would mean. What does it look like for you?  

This session blends an interactive workshop with panel insights and group discussion. Delegates will be led through an exercise that demonstrates the power of integrating lived experience and youth voice into the design of resources for young people. Together, we’ll examine how mental health can be better integrated with education, explore proactive approaches to prevention, and identify what leaders across sectors can take to drive meaningful change. This is a opportunity to explore cross-sector solutions that reflect the needs and voice of young people. 

Referrals to children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) for anxiety have more than doubled among primary school leavers since before the pandemic, raising concerns about young people’s future wellbeing. Developing emotional intelligence is a key part of the solution – but what does this look like in practice? What role can sectors such as education play, and how do we make these conversations part of everyday life?

Children’s wellbeing is shaped by the environments they grow up in.  

As the cost-of-living crisis deepens, more families are being pushed into poverty. This session explores how we can reduce the impact of poverty on children and young people’s health, focusing on the vital role of neighbourhoods, communities and early intervention in the first 1,001 days of life. 

Not everyone has the same opportunity to live a healthy life. Many health challenges and inequalities have foundations in childhood and are already evident at birth, leading to differing trajectories across the course of a person’s life. Health systems across the UK are facing significant challenges when it comes to meeting the needs of babies, children, young people and families, and there are wide disparities in health outcomes. 

The Children and Young People’s Health Equity Collaborative (CHEC) sees action on the social determinants of health as essential to improving health outcomes among babies, children and young people and reducing inequalities in health, and has developed a framework to underpin action for achieving greater equity in children and young people’s health and wellbeing. The voice and influence of children and young people has been integral to this work. 

This workshop launches the CHEC evaluation reports with the final Child Health Equity Framework and proposed indicators, offering rich insights, real stories and practical tools for change. Join us to explore what has worked for us, the lessons we’ve learnt and how we can drive forward a future where every child has the chance to thrive.

This session is sponsored by Barnardo’s.

Factors such as income and employment, housing and education are examples of social determinants that shape the environments in which children develop. These factors often intersect to create deep-rooted health disparities that begin in early childhood and persist into adulthood. This session will explore how these social conditions contribute to unequal health outcomes from the start of life, and how to change this. 

In an increasingly digital world, this session will consider what good care looks like for children and young people who have grown up with digital tools and technologies. The session will look at: 

• how do you do user-centred health care design that’s geared towards children and young people? 

• how do you avoid digital exclusion? 

• how do children and young people want to be engaged? 

• how do we foster conversations around digital technologies between children and young people and health care professionals, parents and carers? 

This session will explore how we can create healthier neighbourhoods for children and young people through initiatives such as the Nature Premium, improved access to play structures, and community-based planning. 

We’ll explore the role of local authorities in designing child-friendly spaces, and how the health sector can work in partnership with schools and communities to address the wider determinants of health. 

How do you measure ‘the healthiest generation of children ever’? Traditional metrics often fail to capture the full scope of children's health and wellbeing. 

This session will explore the need for new, comprehensive metrics that better reflect how services and integrated care boards are meeting the physical and mental health needs of children and young people and consider what being healthy means to children and young people themselves.