bitchy | Princess Kate’s Early Childhood Center is funding a new pilot program

The Princess of Wales stopped galloping in a forest long enough to “announce” a new project for the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. It honestly sounds like this new project is something minor, and something put together by other groups, and perhaps the Royal Foundation merely came in to fund this new pilot program. If that’s the case… so be it, you know? I’d much rather see the “Centre for Early Childhood” just work quietly and fund “pilot programs” and release statements. That’s actually more effective than Kate blowing through money to create creepy claymation or wasting everyone’s time trying to prove that she’s a “data-driven credible expert” on early childhood development. Unleash the pie charts!

The Princess of Wales’s Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood has today announced plans to fund a new innovative mental health pilot to better understand young children’s development in early education. Princess Kate has long championed the importance of social and emotional development as critically important for enabling babies and young children to be mentally healthy, both in the short term and for the long-lasting impact on the rest of their lives.

It was one of the projects she was quietly working on behind the scenes despite undergoing cancer treatment last year after her diagnosis. The new pilot, called Happy Little Minds, aims to better understand how mental health experts in early education settings can support babies and young children’s social and emotional development.

The announcement, shared by Kensington Palace, comes during Infant Mental Health Awareness Week which this year takes place from June 9 until June 15 with the theme being “Who is holding the baby?”.

The pilot is a collaboration between leading children’s charities Barnardo’s and Place2Be, and will see mental health practitioners providing bespoke training and ongoing consultation about social and emotional development for nearly 50 early education practitioners in two nurseries in Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

According to the Centre for Early Childhood, the practitioners will also provide guidance for parents and directly work with some children and families. The pilot, which is due to start this month and take place over the course of 12 months, will benefit around 150 babies, young children and their families.

This is the second pilot funded by The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. In 2023, it funded a trial of an observation tool for Health Visitors, known internationally as the Alarm Distress Baby Scale (ADBB), which focuses on a baby’s social behaviours such as eye contact, facial expression, vocalisation, and activity levels to help practitioners and families better understand the ways babies express their feelings. After a two-year trial, the pilot was this year expanded to eight NHS sites, aside from the original two NHS trusts, following the positive results, with the phase set to run until March 2026.

[From The Daily Express]

Isn’t there a huge crisis in funding for nursery schools and daycare for working parents in the UK? No judgment – there’s a huge crisis in nursery schools and daycare access here in America as well. My point is more… maybe the Early Childhood Centre should actually give funding to nursery schools so that they can provide early education for more children? I’m not trying to dismiss the main thrust of this pilot program, but if early-childhood educational access is really in crisis, doesn’t funding a pilot program which “studies” the effects of children’s mental health feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images, Kensington Palace.