The challenge
Halton Borough Council wants to make sure parents help shape the design and delivery of their Family Hubs work, including its mental health support offer for parents during pregnancy and the first year of their child’s life.
In 2024 they commissioned us to help them develop their Family Hubs work, support strategic and wider workforce, gather insight, learn together and find new ways to collaborate across the system.
What we did
Through community research and co-production, we’re delivering a range of support to help the Family Hubs team to understand what mental health support parents want and use, the barriers they face, and specific insights from families who are seldom heard.
Exploring people’s stories
We ran an appreciative inquiry session to co-create research questions with families and professionals. We then recruited, trained and worked with community researchers who gathered more than 50 stories from local families. We then ran a session with the community researchers and local partner ‘Parents in Mind’ to make sense of the findings and agree findings.
Deciding spending priorities
We’ve supported Halton to establish a sustainable participatory budgeting approach to support families and informal groups to access funds to help them take forward good ideas. Community research and workshop sessions have helped people to understand what matters to families. Our ‘Ideas Canvas’ supports people to develop new ideas and activities. In-person and online support helps people to develop their ideas, which the Families Fund panel meet regularly to review, allocate funding and connect people to local mentors who can support them whilst they deliver their ideas. There have been two rounds of funding already with ‘mirco’ and small grants available.
Professional development
We have run a number of professional development and staff learning days for people in a wide range of roles across the Family Hubs service – from nursery nurses, children’s centres, speech and language specialists, to physios and safeguarding staff.
These sessions used appreciative inquiry to support teams to celebrate good work, explore new ways of working, engage with the perspectives of children, babies and families and build cohesion and confidence across the team.
Learning from each other
Working with multiple people and partners, we’ll co-design a community of practice structure to support ongoing reflection and learning across the teams involved in the family hubs network.
Our impact
The community researchers have enabled families whose voices often get missed to share their experiences and be involved in shaping the new services.
Through our work with professionals , we connected this research and the parents who undertook it, with the wider Family Hubs workforce, ensuring greater understanding and collaboration across the system.
Adam Hindhaugh, Early Help Transformation Lead – Family Hubs Programme, Halton Borough Council said of the community research:
“I am loving this particular piece of work and I know that the findings will really help to shape and develop our next steps in the Family Hub Programme…
“Having the privilege to hear real life family stories was extremely powerful and should be front and centre whenever we are wanting to capture feedback…
“I really enjoy the informality of the sessions but at the same time, hearing and working on the serious and key issues that it brings. I think it allows people the freedom to be creative and think differently.”