August Activity Blog

Parenting Experts now in post
(Don't let their title scare you it doesn't mean that they are some sort of super parent who never make mistake - could anyone ever be that!!!)

It's great to be announcing that we have two new people starting with us to help with the Parenting Strategy and its roll out across the districts. The two parenting experts are

Jill Gregory and Richard Harper

Jill is working in the North of the county covering;

Moorlands
Newcastle
Stafford
South Staffordshire

Richard is working in the South of the county covering;

Cannock
Lichfield
Tamworth
East Staffordshire

Their role, in brief, is to help drive forward the strategy and help turn the actions into a reality. They will do this by working with key people in each of the districts and helping them access more training, deliver more services for parents and get better co-ordination of services. Like I said they are not the supper nanny parent who never makes a blunder - but they are very skilled and knowledgeable professionals, they understand what parents want and need, they know the parent services we have across the county and they know what standards services need to work to when they engage and support parents.

275 parents tell us about working together

275 parents answered questions in the Citizens Panel this term proving insight into how parents prefer to receive information, where they get information from, how they would like to be engaged, what services are most useful to them and their families and what they think about integrated services. The findings showed that:

The most popular engagement activity was receiving confidential questionnaires
The top 3 services that parents felt would be the most useful in Staffordshire are more cost effective child care, drop in advice centres for parents and professional who would visit homes to provide parenting advice
When asked which one they would like to see more of in Staffordshire there top choice was more cost effective child care during the summer holidays
With regards to services working together just over half of the parents responding said that bringing services together under one roof would be useful with the top 3 services being identified as youth workers, connexions PA and community police officers.

We will create a link to the findings on my webpage and consultation page as soon as we can.

Getting parents more involved in local activity

Charlotte is working hard to get more parents involved in a variety of ways, including - board meetings, taking part in task and finish groups, parent forums or working groups to support the development or planning of services, being involved in interviews and much more.

Since November 2008 we have been establishing a data bank of parents who wish to be kept on record to be contacted about engagement activity. There are nearly 400 parents who have now self-identified and they are contacted when opportunities arise. If you are interested in being contacted send us your details.
/Contacts/

Parent views heard by the Commissioner

I have been contacted by 98 since starting in post. Each issue that you raise with me is logged anonymously. When it becomes obviously that lots of parents are telling me the same issue, I approach the agencies/service that you name, raise the issue that you raise and talk with them about what they are going to do about it.

Getting everyone's voice and improving communication

There are lot of organisations that work with parents and sometimes it can be confusing for families and they end up with lots of professionals giving them different sets of advice and help. To try and co-ordinate parent support a little better we are trying to make sure that in each district across Staffordshire the professional services are talking more to one another. To help us do this we have developed something called 'Parenting Service Forums'. They are a forum where by all the services in the area can come together to plan what they are doing and that there are no duplications or gaps in services. The forums have been set up to:

provide a method to get information to and from all the parenting services
To get regular feedback from parenting services about their users views (parental voice)
To promote opportunities available to parents to be involved (parental engagement)
To ask parents (via services) their ideas, views and options (parental consultation)

Some of these forums have been around for a while, so we have built on those that were already there and where they do not exist we are helping to set them up.

Last Modified: 03/11/2009 10:49:50
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