We are seeking an experienced early years health professional to join Thrive at Five’s working across our teams in Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland.
Location: Community based–across Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland with the ability to work from home as agreed with manager. There may also be occasional travel to other sites (Stoke-on-Trent & West Dunbartonshire) or travel to our London or Edinburgh offices.
Salary: £51,000 – 55,000 DOE
To apply for this role: Submit your CV and cover letter here.
Application deadline: Midnight on 23 September 2026
Purpose of the role
The Early Years Health Lead will work primarily with local health professionals such as health visitors, midwives, perinatal infant mental health teams and GPs to ensure that the potential for children to reach positive developmental outcomes is maximised. The Early Years Health Lead will be responsible for building relationships across services in the South Tees and will be working closely with partners to support the roll out and delivery of the Best Start in Life and Healthy Babies strategies.
This role will lead the process to co-design workstreams to enable the high-quality implementation of evidence-based interventions with our partners, as well support the evaluation of these in collaboration with the Learning & Impact team.
Graeme Nicholson, Advanced Public Health practitioner- Children and Young People: “Tackling health inequalities is crucial to giving as many children as possible the best start in life. Working in this role for Thrive at Five offers the opportunity to build relationships with local health professionals and develop lasting support in communities in both Redcar and Cleveland and Middlesbrough. If you want to make a difference to local people’s health and wellbeing, we’d love to hear from you. “
Relationship building
- Support the Programme Director in building excellent relationships with key decision makers related to the early years and maintaining these relationships to ensure we can deliver successful and impactful partnerships.
- Work with key external stakeholders to create understanding and buy in to Thrive at Five’s vision including understanding of our model and workstreams.
- Work in partnership with health professionals to build strong and trusting relationships through regular meetings with key stakeholders.
- Build, manage and sustain working groups to ensure local stakeholders are empowered to fully participate in and take co-ownership of workstreams developed in partnership with Thrive at Five.
- Ensure that working groups include representation from all parts of the health system.
- Act as an ambassador for Thrive at Five at local, regional and national events.
- Work in partnership with key stakeholders within health settings to co-design sustainable workstreams which support better outcomes for children in line.
- Ensure workstreams reflect insights from the discovery phase, using Thrive at Five’s playbook to support this process while taking into account local context and what is already being delivered.
- Work in collaboration with key stakeholders to support high quality implementation and evaluation of these workstreams, including working closely with the Learning & Impact team to ensure data and lessons learned from evaluation are used to further improve practice.
- Support the Programme Director and local stakeholders to strengthen local practice across settings, helping to bring in relevant external expertise to ensure local best practice is shared.
- Support the Programme Director to collaborate with Central teams and ensure strategy, implementation and evaluation plans are developed for all workstreams, ensuring relevant sign off processes are followed.
- Contribute to the ongoing development of the Thrive at Five Playbook, sharing lessons learned, including challenges encountered.
- Be familiar with, and comply with all organisational policies, procedures and guidelines.
- Promote and support initiatives that contribute to aa healthy and safe working environment for all employees, contractors and visitors.
- Ensure compliance with Health and Safety policies and legislative requirements.Other duties may be reasonably assigned to this position in consultation with your manager.
About Thrive at Five
Thrive at Five’s vision is a society where every child can thrive and achieve their potential. Our mission is to help children develop strong foundations for life and learning, in and alongside communities where families face the most challenges.
We work in Stoke-on-Trent, Redcar & Cleveland, Middlesbrough and West Dunbartonshire.
Our goal, everywhere we work, is to achieve long-term, sustained improvements in children’s developmental outcomes. In England, one of the ways we measure this is through the proportion of children reaching a Good Level of Development by age five.
Our work is rooted in place and built on long-term partnership. We commit to working with and for communities to build trust, embed change and support sustainable improvement. Alongside delivery, we capture learning from each place to develop a practical, experience-informed playbook that supports wider system improvement.
Benefits
- Pension contributions – We will contribute 3% and you can contribute 5% towards your pension through NEST.
- 25 annual leave days per year plus bank holidays
- £100 contribution towards your professional body membership
- Enhanced sick leave and maternity pay (following qualifying period)
AI statement
We acknowledge the value of AI in the workplace; however, we ask candidates not to use AI to write or generate application responses. Our recruitment process is designed to assess your individual skills, experience and potential, and we encourage authentic applications that reflect your own work.Please note that as this role is subject to a successful Basic Level Disclosure check through the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS). If you have any unspent convictions, but wish to apply for this role, please advise us in your application. The successful candidate will also need to provide satisfactory references and current right to work in the UK.
If you have any questions about this role, please contact people@thriveatfive.org.uk