The Future in Parents’ Hands

Julie Crookes shares her experience of leading a parent volunteer programme in Charnwood children’s centres in Leicestershire. One of the aims of the programme was to increase parents’ skills enabling them to consider returning to work while valuing the postive contribution they make to the centres.

The whole notion of parent participation, engagement and involvement is central to the accessibility, effectiveness and targeting of children’s centre services. Far too often I have seen it perceived as an afterthought, extra work, or something that someone else should do. Now, it is gaining more attention within the context of financial constraints and spreading resources thinly for greatest impact. But parents are the main reason we have children’s centres in the first place. Anyone confused or concerned about whether centres should be primarily about children, or primarily about parents, needs to realise it is both. And under that assertion, we are about parenting, employment, health, education and partnership.

And before things change again and enter the next phase of all our development, there’s been some really great work done on parent involvement that should be celebrated. In Charnwood in Leicestershire, the local authority took the decision to commission a parent volunteer coordinator role across the seven children’s centre areas. We started delivering this role in 2011 and I joined to lead the programme in 2012. We have recently held an event that concludes our delivery, as a new structure and arrangements are introduced across the county from April 2015.

Supervising parent volunteers

Recently, we shared our journey with the team of parent volunteer coordinators (PVCs) in West Sussex who have an established programme of parent volunteering, yet wanted to take time for a considered review and planning session to outline their future direction. The session gave them lots of ideas for a new direction of travel they said they will introduce shortly. The session also increased team motivation. Key learning outcomes were around the devolution of day-to-day supervision of volunteers from central roles to those in day-to-day contact with volunteers in their placements. Also, the importance of starting with the individual who wants to volunteer and creating volunteering opportunities that are tailor-made for that parent.

Supporting parents to be work-ready

So, let me tell you our story: Charnwood is one of six localities of Leicestershire, with a 15-mile radius and it surrounds the university town of Loughborough. It contains seven children’s centre reach areas, and serves a 0–4 years population of around 9,000 children. In June 2011, our commission was awarded. Its purpose was to recruit, coordinate and support a target of 60 active parent volunteers, all drawn from targeted, vulnerable or groups considered to be priority across the different areas. Right from the start, we wanted to be clear about what a ‘parent’ was, and this led to us deciding parents, parents-to-be, carers, grandparents, and prospective foster and adoptive parents were all to be included — as long as the children involved were under the age of five years. It was vital we worked with other children’s centre services, especially Adult Learning, so parents could be supported to become work-ready. And we prioritised taking the time to record impact and outcomes, case studies and evaluations.

Partnership and sharing

The key principles for our leadership and coordination of this programme were partnership and sharing. We had no intention of being solely responsible for everything. It just wasn’t possible to do that with the time and resources we had available, and neither was that going to be useful for placements, professionals and the parents themselves. To support this, we attended a whole raft of meetings, held one-to-one conversations with key contacts, and produced briefings for partners, both newly appointed or created roles and those long-term team members in well-established roles.

Opening opportunities

Pivotal change was achieved through short and accessible training sessions that helped professionals to become confident and clear about what volunteering was, and how essential it is for opening up parents’ opportunities, skills, confidence, self-esteem and motivation. We’d observed that too many professionals seemed apologetic about the whole matter of volunteering, and when asking for help from parents. If an intervention starts with the word sorry, it sets the wrong tone straight away.

We wanted our materials to be positive too. We developed short leaflets and punchy posters, as well as shooting a 12 minutes DVD showcasing real volunteers, their experiences and the difference volunteering had made to them. When volunteering, parents were given identity badges and T-shirts to wear.

The recruitment process

We developed a criteria-based referral process that passed the contact details of parents who expressed an interest or responded positively. Then we could arrange to meet them at a convenient time and location, as soon as we could, and start the recruitment process.

This was structured around:

- starting the completion of a three-part personal development plan (PDP);

- safer recruitment processes including DBS and references;

- and a basic induction session covering general volunteering, safeguarding and professionalism.

This was all completed before identifying a placement and allocating the volunteer with an on-site supervisor. We did not set any minimum or maximum numbers of hours to volunteer either. And if the volunteer did not have a maths or English qualification, we would discuss a referral to adult learning at this stage. Many volunteers attended our nationally recognised and accredited training course [name of course?], achieving their first-ever certificate of achievement.

The role of placement supervisor

In the spirit of our partnership approach, the placement supervisor was the main source of support. If the volunteer called in sick, or was going to be late, they contacted their placement supervisor — because this is all part of work-ready skills. However, our coordinating role enabled us to maintain a keep-in-touch status, and the effectiveness of regular texts, calls and drop-ins can never be underestimated. Sometimes we would accompany volunteers for their first time, text to remind them of appointments, or call to see how they got on and provide encouraging feedback. These methods were also crucial in collecting evidence and case studies for our quarterly reporting, and for Ofsted inspections. They identified when PDPs needed reviewing so volunteers were stretched or supported with new goals if needed. All this information fed into our central tracking mechanism, where volunteers were colour-coded according to their stage of development.

We were able to support attendance at appointments, training, and other events with travel arrangements (including taxis) and expenses, and childcare. The availability of petty cash for immediate reimbursement and the occasional upfront payment was of critical importance.

Short-term work opportunities

Employability was always a watch-word for PDPs and this linked to another project called ‘Moving on Up!’ which offered 12-week work opportunities in children’s centres. These were designed to be as simple and straight forward as possible when it came to their potential effect on benefits, and offered direct routes to applying for internal council job vacancies — a real and valuable step on the employment ladder.

Last year, after an Ofsted inspection that highlighted the excellent and outstanding elements, the project changed to fix its attention on parents leading groups independently, where staff had withdrawn either due to budget and resource decisions, or groups were not priority actions for the local authority strategy. The targets for this included 24 active parent volunteer leaders, and the coordination of the programme’s Facebook presence as a key communication method between the programme and parents.

Towards greater autonomy

Facebook is a powerful method of communication as it is direct to parents and promotes dialogue and feedback like nothing else. Speed is of the essence and the programme needed to increase its responsiveness, speediness, and engagement with this method. For this phase, we needed more training and development in areas like safeguarding, first aid, and food hygiene. We also drove the next stage of development of the parent network (now titled the family network) that feeds into the governance and consultation mechanisms of the programme. This has moved to define officer roles and become constituted to such a degree they can now apply for funding grants — an important step towards greater autonomy. At our event this month, we heard stories of how parents had been helping other parents on their journeys from their house-bound anxiety through to aspirations for small business creation.

What happens next?

The commissioning arrangements have now all changed in the county and our contract ends March 2015. A new structure containing three centrally employed coordinators is planned for the whole county. We have learned that it takes a lot of time, effort and contact applied in a traditional ‘development work’ approach. There is a constant need for contact with parent volunteers, so they feel valued and supported. Partnership working is key from start to finish, and taking the time to track and report the difference made means everyone is able to identify the achievements made, including Ofsted when they come to make their judgements.

Julie Crookes is development officer at Hempsall’s. As well as managing this project, she leads the A2YO conference programme and other projects. She is an experienced extended schools development coordinator, and has worked in schools improvement services, and an early years and childcare service.

Watch the Charnwood DVD on www.hempsalls.com.