How can we support you?

Get help to buy food and milk
(the Healthy Start scheme)

What is Healthy Start?
If you’re more than 10 weeks pregnant or have a child under 4, you may be entitled to get help to buy healthy food and milk.

If you’re eligible, you’ll be sent a Healthy Start card with money on it that you can use in some UK shops. We’ll add your benefit onto this card every 4 weeks.

You can use your card to buy:

• plain liquid cow’s milk
• fresh, frozen, and tinned fruit and vegetables
• fresh, dried, and tinned pulses
• infant formula milk based on cow’s milk

You can also use your card to collect:

• Healthy Start vitamins – these support you during pregnancy and breastfeeding
• vitamin drops for babies and young children – these are suitable from birth to 4 years old

More information can be found here

We’ve teamed up with Full Time Meals to share lots of recipes to help ease the stress in the kitchen, get the kids involved, whilst not breaking the bank.

Take a look at our recipe cards, here.

The Active Essex Team have put together some low-cost, easy recipes as well as some special, seasonal treats!

Take a look at our different recipes here.

After this difficult year, knowing how to look after your own mental health and wellbeing has never been so important, particularly for children and young people. That is why the Department for Education are delighted to have worked with their Youth Mental Health Ambassador, Dr Alex George, on a series of wellbeing videos. The videos involve a whole host of special guests, alongside follow up activities and discussion ideas for children and young people about the video content. The videos are based around Dr Alex’s five core ‘ways to wellbeing,’ which build on content already in the relationships, sex, and health education curriculum.

These videos are available on the First News website here.