HENRY is the UK’s leading healthy start provider. We offer a range of flexible family support and practitioner training services that support all aspects of child development. This holistic approach and our commitment to quality has led to commissions from more than 70 local authorities and Health Boards across every UK nation. Our Healthy Families programme covers birth to age 12 and has the strongest evidence base of any such UK programme.

The HENRY approach

The proven HENRY approach is a unique and holistic approach of working with families underpinned by the evidence on risk and protective factors for whole-family nutrition, healthy weight and child development.

HENRY integrates proven behaviour change models into a supportive and effective approach that increases parental confidence and their ability to provide a healthy start and healthy childhood for their child. The ‘HENRY approach’ brings together support for parenting efficacy, family emotional wellbeing and behaviour change with information about nutrition, physical activity, oral health and more. Parents and children supported by HENRY become a healthier weight and make statistically significant lifestyle changes which independent clinical trials show are sustained at follow-up.

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Support for all aspects of child development

The breadth and holistic nature of the HENRY approach supports not only improved nutrition and healthy weight, but all aspects of wider early child development including social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive – therefore contributing to school readiness and ability to learn. This is why many commissioners use HENRY as a key parenting pathway.

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Practitioner training - improving effectiveness

Evidence consistently shows that improving the skills, knowledge and confidence of all practitioners working directly with families is vital to ensuring effective support for a healthy start in life. HENRY has trained over 16,000 health and family practitioners and offers a range of flexible, well-established, effective and evidence-based training courses, as well as bespoke training tailored to local need.

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Family support services

HENRY provides a wide range of family and antenatal programmes to support a healthy start in life up to the age of 12 – covering nutrition, infant feeding, speech & language, oral health, parenting, emotional wellbeing and healthy weight. Services include our evidence-based Healthy Families programme, a cooking skills programme, a range of subject-specific workshops, drop-in sessions and 1-to-1 support.

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Resources for parents and practitioners

HENRY family support and practitioner training services are always developed hand-in-hand with high quality, visual resources that are accessible to families across a range of community and language groups. We consult widely with parents and practitioners and we get excellent feedback on the quality and impact of our resources. Examples include top tips, recipes, activity ideas, videos, charts, and books.

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Flexible delivery models

Our family support services can be commissioned for direct delivery by HENRY, or through training your own local practitioners to deliver HENRY programmes and services through our partnership model. We also offer a ‘blended’ model with HENRY practitioners and local staff working together to deliver HENRY services. We can start with direct delivery and then train local practitioners to take on full local delivery as we step back. We can even train up local practitioners to deliver HENRY practitioner training.

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Animated explainer video

Find out more about the HENRY approach to supporting a great start in life, how we work, what we do and why.