Guidance

Establishing your parent and carer panel

Published 13 February 2023

Applies to England

Introduction

Background to this implementation guidance

This implementation guidance on parent and carer panels has been produced to support all local authorities to include the voices of families as you design, deliver and improve support and services in the Start for Life period – from conception to the age of 2 – and during the transition to services for children older than 2. This guidance focuses on how to establish your panel. It is intended to be used by those who will be engaging with parents and carers in their local authority.

We have based this guidance on research as well as learning from our facilitation of a national parent and carer panel and feedback from our panellists. We anticipate that this guidance will build on existing ways in which you seek feedback from parents and carers. Depending on your current approach to including parents and carers, you may find some sections more relevant than others.

Context: the Early Years Healthy Development Review

The Early Years Healthy Development Review – the best start for life: a vision for the 1,001 critical days sets out a vision to transform how we support families to ensure babies get the best possible start in life.

One clear theme that emerged from parents and carers was that they wanted the opportunity to work collaboratively with those designing services for babies and their families – in other words, the opportunity to co-design those services, where appropriate. Therefore, the review recommended that local areas establish a parent and carer panel for the Start for Life period to include the voice of families in service design and delivery.

What co-design is

We know that there are a variety of sources on co-design, including the National Centre of Family Hub’s co-production toolkit, and academics^{[footnote 1][footnote 2]} have acknowledged that the terms surrounding co-design are hard to define and often overlap with one another. One helpful definition that attempts to support leaders to co-design comes from a mental health charity that regularly practices co-design with their service users: Mind.

Therefore, for the purpose of parent and carer panels you may find Mind’s definition of co-design useful:

Local authorities, their delivery partners and parents and carers with an equal level of power coming together to create a tangible ‘product’, including a new service, organisational policies, and service specifications.

We recognise there may also be some aspects of co-production that develop as you start to consider parent and carer’s experience in developing and changing the way your Start for Life services are delivered. Co-production is commonly defined as the attempt to implement the outcome or goal that was created in the co-design phase. For ease, we will use the term co-design throughout this guidance.

Why co-design is important for parents and carers from conception to their baby’s second birthday

During the Early Years Healthy Development Review, we heard that current services were often not designed and delivered in collaboration with families to ensure babies’ needs were met.

We know that the 1,001 critical days is a time of rapid development. Babies’ experiences during this time lay the foundations for lifelong emotional and physical health. This is why it is important to engage with parents and carers at the start of their journey to provide the best possible outcomes for their babies.

The family hub model framework also refers to the importance of parent and carer panels for informing the design of services – particularly those for babies from conception until their second birthday, and during the transition to services for children older than 2.

For example, in a basic family hub model this would include parent and carer engagement activities, and families being able to submit feedback on their experience, through to a developed model where families and young people co-design family hub services by being on relevant governance and partnership boards.

As part of a wider co-production strategy for families with children of all ages, parent and carer panels can be used to help shape early years services in family hub models in each locality.

The importance of co-design as part of your Start for Life offer

People with lived experience can bring valuable insights and perspectives to the design of services. Our vision for parent and carer panels is for the Start for Life offer to be co-designed and for panellists to share feedback based on their experiences to support the continuous improvement of these services.

We envisage your parent and carer panel will be a helpful addition to your existing parent and carer engagement. This could include parent carer forums, Maternity Voices Partnerships, the NHS Friends and Family Test or collaborating with Healthwatch.

Co-design with families, including parent and carer panels for the Start for Life period, can help shape the local offer in family hub models, continually improving the services families want and need. The family hub model framework sets out the importance of wider community ownership and co-production. For example, in a basic family hub model this would include parent and carer engagement activities and families submitting feedback on their experience. A developed model would include families co-designing family hub services through membership of relevant governance and partnership boards for their local network.

We would encourage local areas to use parent and carer panels to help shape Start for Life services in their local family hub model. This could form one part of an area’s wider co-production strategy for families with children of all ages (that is, beyond the Start for Life period).

The Family Hubs and Start for Life programme

At the 2021 budget, the government announced a package of around £300 million to transform services for parents, carers, babies and children in 75 local authorities in England. This will provide thousands of families access to support when they need it, ensuring that babies have the best start in life.

Family hubs:

• help join people up locally to improve access to services
• improve the connections between families, professionals, services and providers
• prioritise strengthening the relationships that carry us all through life

Family hubs bring together services for children of all ages (up to the age of 19, or up to age 25 for those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)), with a great Start for Life offer at their core. Local authorities who are part of the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme can find more details about the expectations regarding parent and carer panels for the Start for Life period in our programme guide.

Case study: Better Start Bradford

Better Start Bradford submitted a bid to the National Lottery Community Fund to improve outcomes for children aged up to 3 in the most deprived wards. They were clear that they wanted to develop a governance model where community members were held in high esteem as full and equal partners. Consequently, half of the Better Start Bradford Partnership Board was made up of senior representatives of local services, and the other half made up of parents and individuals with links to the local community (community board members).

Community board members receive a financial incentive to compensate them for their time but, perhaps more importantly, receive opportunities to gain training, qualifications, experience and transferable skills, including decision-making, staff appointments, awarding contracts and public speaking. They have access to shared learning events and training provided by Better Start Bradford’s project partners.

The benefits of this model can be evidenced across the Better Start Bradford programme. One particular success story is an individual who started as a community board member and progressed to become a community champion, a Parents in the Lead panel member (approving funding for parent-led initiatives) and ultimately a paid neighbourhood project worker within the Better Start Bradford programme. The particular skills that were fundamental to their progression were project management skills, networking and building confidence to challenge, all of which started from their involvement as a community board member.

Guide to chapters

Below is a summary of the chapters in this guidance:

Chapter 1: how to recruit a diverse and inclusive parent and carer panel

We often hear from the same voices, so it is important to hear from parents and carers who have different lived experiences and represent your locality.

This chapter provides guidance on how to ensure your parent and carer panel represents the diversity within your local population.

Chapter 2: how to use co-design to successfully run your parent and carer panel

When engaging with your diverse parents and carers, it is important to think of their needs and involve them early in the process to be able to effectively work together.

This chapter provides guidance on how to engage with parents and carers and wider systems to set up and use a parent and carer panel to co-design services.

Chapter 3: how to use the feedback from your parent and carer panel

Once you have successfully run your first panel, it is important to consider how you will use their feedback.

This chapter provides suggestions on how to measure impact.

Chapter 1: how to recruit a diverse and inclusive parent and carer panel

Why we need a diverse parent and carer panel

As set out in The best start for life: a vision for the 1,001 critical days, we anticipate the membership of parent and carer panels will reflect that families can and do take many forms.

To ensure that as many voices as possible are heard, you will need to consider how to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for all families. You may need to give particular attention to those from diverse and underrepresented communities because these voices are often unheard. We also encourage you to ensure that around half of your panel members are fathers or co-parents.

In addition, a paper by the King’s Fund on Understanding integration: how to listen to and learn from people and communities highlighted the importance of having diverse representation for co-design. For instance, bringing the voices of all people and communities to the design of a programme such as a parent and carer panel – not only those who the system has traditionally found easiest to engage with.

Case study: Lambeth Early Action Partnership

The London borough of Lambeth is an ethnically diverse borough. Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP) is proud of the diversity of the parent champion volunteers who are representative of the community in which they live. In 2019, the ethnic breakdown of 24 parent champion volunteers was as follows:

• black African: 5
• Somali: 3
• black British: 2
• white British: 2
• mixed Caribbean: 1
• black Caribbean: 3
• Latin American: 4
• Polish: 2
• Arabic: 1
• Pakistani: 1

They achieved this through their Community Engagement team who developed tailored marketing that prioritised important groups and recognised them as the experts within their communities. In addition to marketing, parents have been encouraged to talk with LEAP through a range of different mediums including online workshops, email, WhatsApp, telephone and face to face at community sessions.

Case study: Swindon SEND Families Voice

Parent carer forums are an example of Department for Education grant-funded representative groups of parents and carers of children and young people from conception to the age of 25 with SEND.

The initial issues Swindon SEND Families Voice faced were building relationships with the local authority and then-clinical commissioning group (CCG), and trying to engage with parents who did not know who they were or what their purpose was.

They engaged parents by building a positive relationship with the local authority, CCG and other local agencies. They showed families that their feedback was being not only listened to but also acted upon. They did this by regularly sharing ‘You said, we did’ statements in newsletters and through their Facebook page.

To build participation from parents, they encouraged the local authority and CCG to be more visible, and they set up a Branches monthly support group where professionals could talk and listen to parents and carers. This helped to:

• build relationships
• improve understanding of both families and agencies
• provide more opportunities for participation, engagement and consultation

More than 20 parents and carers now attend each Swindon SEND Families Voice session and contribute to a quarterly newsletter that not only gets shared with their members, but also goes on the local offer and is shared with schools, too. The local authority also includes news about the forum in their weekly SEND News Splash newsletter, which is sent out to over 900 people.

Case study: Coram Parent Champions in Brent and Redbridge

Coram Family and Childcare works to make the UK a better place for families, focusing on childcare and the early years to make a difference to families’ lives now and in the long term. Their flagship programme Parent Champions began in 2007 to support families to access vital services and for those services to meet families’ needs. The programme engages 40 local authorities, 300 volunteers and 20,000 families each year.

The Parent Champions model allows them to reach communities where language and cultural barriers make for a lower engagement in local services than might be expected. The scheme is embedded at all levels with support from the Children’s Centre Strategic Lead and Head of Early Years. The investment of senior stakeholders has allowed the team to put their full energy into developing a successful scheme.

Parent Champions Redbridge fully embrace and understand the value they have within their community. The team has a range of valuable skills that enable them to speak with local parents. Most notably, each parent champion speaks at least one additional language and many have an early years or teaching background.

Parent Champions have been able to educate parents who do not speak English about emergencies and non-emergencies, how to register with a dentist, where the dental surgeries are located, the importance of registering when a baby’s first tooth appears, and provide information about grants, dental health, childcare and the NHS 111 service.

How to make your parent and carer panel more inclusive

Making your parent and carer panel more inclusive will increase the diversity of the views and experiences you hear from them. The National Centre for Family Hubs has created a co-production toolkit that includes tips on how to be inclusive – for instance, working together to become aware of personal bias and assumptions, and to be supportive of those sharing their lived experience as they may be talking about difficult topics.

Here are some further examples of how to make your sessions more inclusive.

Timing of your panel sessions

Parents and carers with babies and young children will typically only be available at certain times, so it is important to collaboratively establish a suitable time.

Duration

Your panel should ensure everyone’s views are heard by being flexible in length according to the number of panellists you have.

If there is a small group (between 10 to 12 people), we would suggest a minimum of 75 minutes.

If there is a larger group, there is the potential to have break-out rooms to reduce the time parents will need to spend providing feedback, or you could choose to have a longer session.

Accessibility of location

You may wish to use a family hub as the venue for your parent and carer panel. This would provide a good opportunity for parents and carers to access services in one place. In addition, the size of your locality will impact where your panel is held.

One option could be to change the location for each meeting, or to alternate between hosting a face-to-face and online meetings.

Consider reasonable adjustments

You could:

• where you have recruited panellists who speak English as an additional language, hire an interpreter for the panel
• write accessible notes for people with specific learning difficulties
• consider covering travel costs as this could be a barrier to hearing from those on lower incomes
• offer a creche service and/or consider allowing babies to attend the session, as parents and carers may not be able to afford childcare

Tackling stigma

We recognise that panellists may feel stigmatised by being recruited in part because of their protected characteristic. This may reduce their willingness to offer to participate.

We would encourage you to invest in outreach to identify potential participants and support them to attend your panel. For example, if you have been allocated dedicated funding as part of the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, you could use this to employ a parent champion to recruit panellists by reaching out to parent networks.

Providing pastoral support

Panellists may be sharing potentially triggering personal histories when they provide their insights.

If you have been allocated dedicated funding as part of the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, you could use this to provide pastoral support or, alternatively, you could signpost parents and carers to support available in your area.

Chapter 2: how to use co-design to successfully run your parent and carer panel

We have collated research on co-design from a range of sources. Below are some guiding principles that should aid you in co-designing with members of your parent and carer panel.

Understanding the system of support for families

When co-designing with parents and carers, it is important to understand their experiences of the systems of support for families in the 1,001 critical days – for example, the join-up and transitions between services from pregnancy to their child’s second birthday (and beyond).

Parents and carers should be asked how services have worked well together in order to influence how Start for Life services could be run in your area. For instance, how have families found the experience of accessing support from their health visitor and what would have made the experience better?

There will also be other sources of information or services that support a parent or carer and their baby – for example, local Healthwatch teams, peer networks, voluntary sector organisations and professionally led groups, as well as information online – which will be important to consider when asking for their experiences. Therefore, you would benefit from exploring multiple areas of support and may find it helpful to work with other delivery partners such as the NHS or third-sector organisations to establish your parent and carer panel.

You may also wish to work with local professionals to ensure their insights are being fed into your parent and carer panel and vice versa.

Welcoming parents and carers to your panel

It is important when establishing your parent and carer panel to consider what actions will help panellists to know what to expect when participating.

Informed consent

When recruiting your participants, you will be collecting their personal data (such as their name and contact details) so it is important to remember to collect this data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The Information Commissioner’s Office has published helpful guidance on complying with your obligations under data protection legislation. In particular, you will need to ensure that participants have given clear consent for their personal data to be processed for a specific purpose.

You will also need to consider whether the data you already hold could mean that contributions could be linked to a particular person. For example, if there is only one single parent invited to a parent and carer panel and the contribution identifies the participant as a single parent, then you may indirectly identify that person.

Terms of reference

As you will be engaging with a diverse group of panellists, we would recommend agreeing and co-producing a terms of reference. This agreement will help panellists to feel more comfortable when expressing their views in a group setting.

For the Start for Life national parent and carer panel, we used the following principles:

• avoid assumptions
• respect each other
• everyone’s contribution counts
• keep others’ confidences (any contribution shared in the panel is not discussed with others outside the panel)
• speak as myself, not for others
• pass – no pressure to provide feedback
• everyone’s experience matters

We also recommend asking parents and carers to join your panel for a specific period of time to ensure that they’re able to share their recent experiences of expecting a baby or accessing services for a baby under 2 years old. You’ll want to be flexible around this, depending on when parents and carers join your panel, so that they’re able to take part and contribute for long enough to benefit from the experience.

This means that it is not necessary to ask parents and carers to leave your panel as soon as their youngest child turns 2 years old, but perhaps within 6 to 12 months of that date. Parents and carers are welcome to leave your panel earlier if they choose to.

Manage expectations

Your parent and carer panel will be a great opportunity to work with parents, and for them to see the positive impacts they have on Start for Life services.

However, it will be helpful to manage expectations about the length of time it will take to implement change. Some of the changes to Start for Life services will not be seen while they are members of the panel.

Building confidence in your panellists

Many parents will enjoy the experience of joining and participating in a parent and carer panel, as demonstrated by panellists in the Start for Life national parent and carer panel. One panellist said:

It’s been nice to hear from other parents of children of a similar age, similar experience… It’s been nice to hear [from others]. It makes the experience a little less isolating.

However, some parents and carers may struggle to have the confidence needed to speak up and contribute to panel meetings. Therefore, you may wish to consider ways that you could help participants to fully engage with meetings.

Supporting parents and carers through training

You could offer open sessions to potential panellists to give them an idea of what participating in a panel would involve.

You could also offer training to boost the confidence in your participants. You could develop this training yourselves, or explore training options from organisations such as the National Children’s Bureau or Coram Family and Childcare.

Alternatively, you could allow participants the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback after meetings.

We also encourage you to think about what experience, qualifications or transferable skills parents and carers might be able to gain as a result of being involved in your panel and associated activities.

If you have received dedicated funding as part of the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, you may wish to invest in additional courses or training for those who take part. This can:

• enrich your panel
• act as an incentive for others to join
• benefit the communities you work with

Supporting parents to help each other

It is important that parents and carers build peer support networks to give them a sense of ownership, and some may wish to go further and start their own initiatives to support other parents in similar situations.

This could include mentorships between parents with more experience and those new to the panel and/or a buddy system between parents.

In addition, a parent and carer panel could have a parent champion who takes on similar work, and supports the other parents and carers.

Case study: Coram parent champions Wolverhampton

The City of Wolverhampton Council has established a scheme to ‘recruit’ parents who have received support from children’s services to act as parent champions for access to these services.

Parent champion volunteers help to build trust and confidence with local parents, inviting them to share their experiences of accessing services and informing them about services that may be available to them, including childcare opportunities such as free childcare for eligible 2-year-olds.

Champions can also offer one-to-one support for families that need a little more help and encourage parents to register with local family hubs. As part of the scheme, volunteers are given regular support and training including a 6-week induction. The package of support can also help to build confidence and skills for the volunteers themselves, and has helped recruits go on to find employment when ready to return to work.

Facilitating your panel meetings inclusively

Effective group facilitation should ensure that all voices are heard. National Voices in Manchester (as seen in the National Centre for Family Hubs co-production toolkit) found that great facilitation enables creative thinking and increased confidence in those involved in co-design.

You may wish to consider recruiting an independent facilitator. This could help panellists to speak more openly and honestly. Alternatively, you may wish to consider training someone in your team to organise and facilitate your parent and carer panel.

Regardless of whether you recruit an independent facilitator, we hope that the tips below will support inclusive and thoughtful discussions:

• give parents and carers information and questions prior to the panel
• keep any content on slides to a minimum – so the focus is on the discussion rather than trying to digest a lot of content
• keep your agenda concise rather than attempting to cover multiple items in one meeting. For example, you may like to pick one of the following topics per meeting:
  • experiences of maternity services
  • breastfeeding
  • perinatal mental health and parent infant relationships
  • parenting support
  • accessing support through the family hub
• prioritise a small number of questions for each topic – too many questions may limit the depth of feedback that panellists can share
• ensure questions are open ended
• your panel may suggest several different or competing ideas. To help you prioritise these, you may wish to use interactive tools, such as a poll

Chapter 3: how to use the feedback from your parent and carer panel

This section of the guidance will give you tips on how to use the feedback from panellists to shape Start for Life services.

Sharing feedback with local leaders

You will want to think about which local leaders will be best placed to reflect and act on the feedback and insights shared by your parent and carer panel.

If your local area is participating in the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme, you will have appointed a single accountable leader, but there may also be others who will be involved in designing local services and able to integrate the ideas with wider strategic improvements to be made in your local area.

In particular, it may be helpful for local leaders to consider how the feedback may support your local early help strategy and related work such as Supporting Families: Early Help System guide improvement planning. The insights provided can be used to influence local leadership and strategic decision-making, and improve a wide range of services’ work with families across your local area. You will want to take a partnership approach, working closely with local health services.

Here are some tips on how to use the feedback from parents and carers. You could:

• outline the specific actions that have been completed based on the feedback from parents and carers. This could be supported by writing frequent ‘You suggested, we did’ posters that could be displayed around your locality, including in your family hub
• work with panellists to present their feedback to relevant board meetings or have panellists be represented in leadership teams in family hubs. It may be more impactful for the board to hear from service users directly
• respond to feedback you receive from the panel by demonstrating how services meet the needs of parents and carers. Producing these reports will help to demonstrate the impact of including parents and carers on service design and delivery in the Start for Life period

Case study: London Borough of Camden, Integrated Early Years’ Service

Camden’s Integrated Early Years’ Service established a Father Inclusion Lead role to promote father-inclusive practice. This focus on fathers was in response to feedback that fathers needed more access to support and services.

The role entails raising awareness about the importance and positive impact of fathers and male carers in children’s lives. The Father Inclusion Lead also promotes the importance of teams taking active steps to support fathers’ access to and engagement in services. An annual father-inclusive practice audit by all Early Years’ Service teams drives improvement and supports continued learning.

The Integrated Early Years’ Service also recruit Dads Champions through an open offer to Camden Council employees to get involved and deliver the father-inclusive practice training. The training helps participants to reflect on the role of fathers and their own practice, and identify what could be improved in their own teams or services.

The Father Inclusion Lead and Dads Champions are:

• delivering father-inclusive practice training to all early years staff and colleagues
• contacting fathers directly through an online survey to hear their views and understand their needs, preferred support and preferred resources
• launching the National Father Inclusive Forum

They also encourage father and male carer involvement in the early years publicity group, which is attended by a range of staff and parents, and edit local promotional materials to include images and language that is ‘father friendly’.

Through the early years service co-production approach, engaging fathers in the design of services ensures all early years services are offered and tailored to fathers, and their diverse needs and perspectives.

Additional resources to measure success

The National Children’s Bureau has created an audit toolkit for local authorities that engage with children and young people to ensure their engagement is successful. This may be helpful as part of implementing the family hub model framework, and can be applied to parents and carers.

It has also provided some guidance on monitoring and evaluation to assist you in tracking the progress of your community engagement. It advises that you should consider the individual, organisational and strategic impact of your parent and carer panel.

You may also wish to follow the example of the NHS Friends and Family Test (FFT), which asks service users whether people would recommend the service they used to their friends and family. This invites feedback on the overall experience of using the service and the FFT provides a mechanism to highlight both good and poor patient experience. There are several case studies on how the FFT has improved the quality of services across the country.

1. Vargas C and others. ‘Co-creation, co-design, co-production for public health – a perspective on definition and distinctions.’ Public Health Research & Practice 2022: volume 32, issue 2. ↩

2. Masterson D and others. ‘Mapping definitions of co‐production and co‐design in health and social care: A systematic scoping review providing lessons for the future’. Health Expectations 2022: volume 25, issue 3. ↩