Reporting on the policies, actions and impact of Oxfordshire County Council’s ‘Marmot Place’ initiative to give every child the best start in life.
“We’ve got an opportunity to actually lift this whole place to a level where everyone has got great health outcomes“
Martin Reeves, CEO of Oxfordshire County Council, at the launch of the Oxfordshire Marmot Place, November 25th 2024
Oxfordshire County Council is pledging to take action to ensure every child in the county gets the best possible start in life.
The pledge is part of the county’s so-called ‘Marmot programme,’ which aims to make Oxfordshire a place where everyone has a fair chance of living long enough and well enough to enjoy an active and healthy retirement.
Speaking at the launch of the programme in November 2024, Martin Reeves, chief executive of Oxfordshire County Council, said, “We’ve got an opportunity to actually lift this whole place to a level where everyone has got great health outcomes.”
Making the most of that opportunity would make a massive difference to the futures of children living in more deprived areas of the county. If nothing changes, these children are likely to lose their health and vitality more than a decade earlier and die more than a decade younger than children growing up in better off areas of the county, as we reported back in 2019.
Oxford Investigates is now setting up an Oxford Marmot Tracker to follow the progress of that programme, as a local public interest news reporting project.
What action is Oxfordshire County Council promising to take?
In signing up to become a ‘Marmot place’ Oxfordshire County Council is pledging to work with support from the Institute of Health Equity (which is led by the leading health equity researcher and advocate Michael Marmot) to ensure everyone has what they need to look after the health of themselves and their families.
This includes decent housing, a healthy environment, good education, and a healthy living standard.
Oxfordshire County Council has specifically committed to work together with local authorities, communities, public services, businesses and voluntary sector organisations to:
- give every child the best start in life
- create fair employment and good work for all
- ensure a healthy standard of living for all
Ensuring children get what they need, when they need it, is seen as a particularly powerful way to boost their chances in later life.
This means, for instance, helping families ensure they can provide their children with the time and attention they need, and with a warm home, enough good food, places to play safely outside, good schools and the support children need to get the most from their education.
The Oxford Investigates Oxford Marmot Tracker will focus primarily on Oxfordshire County Council’s ‘Marmot’ pledge to seek to give every child the best start in life.
Further details of the OCC Marmot programme can be found on their website.
How will the Oxford Marmot Tracker work?
The Oxford Marmot Tracker will be reporting on what the County Council is doing, with the Institute of Health Equity and with local partners, to improve the start in life that families in more deprived areas of the county are able to give their children, and on the impact of those actions.
We will also seek to hear from local professionals, volunteers and parents about the changes they feel would make the biggest differences to ensuring all children get what they need in their early years to give them a fair chance of enjoying a long and healthy life.
We will report on our findings in real time on this site and we will be setting up Oxford Marmot Tracker social media channels to spread the word.
We will be seeking to collaborate with community organisations to provide a public platform where interested people can contribute to tracking the progress of the Oxfordshire Marmot programme’s efforts to provide the best start for every child.
Beyond Oxfordshire: a local news Marmot reporting collaboration?
At a time when almost one in three children in the UK is growing up in poverty, and life expectancy has been falling, asking questions about what local authorities are doing to help give everyone a fair chance to live a long and healthy life is a matter of great public interest.
In line with the original vision of Oxford Investigates, we see this Oxford Marmot Tracker reporting project as part of a wider national effort to find a sustainable way to do investigative, public interest stories that journalists working in the traditional local press no longer have the time to cover. In parallel with our own local reporting efforts, we will be seeking to collaborate with journalists in other parts of the country who may have an interest in tracking the progress of similar programmes in their own areas. We hope that the experience we gain in reporting on the Oxfordshire programme can offer a model, or at least some pointers, that can help other local journalists do something similar.
Our funding
Oxford Investigates has no core funding. We are currently looking for project funding to support our work on the Oxford Marmot Tracker. We will declare our funding as we go along.