This article has been brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Early Years Parent Champion Coordinator & Business Support Officer, Shamila Khan for the attention of all Early Years and Childcare Practitioners.
Slough is very excited to be relaunching the Parent Champions Programme, this is where we need you!
Parent Champions reach the families in our community who miss out on vital information about how to access childcare, early years services and family services. Being parents themselves, they are able to share their own positive experiences of our services in a relatable, trusted and informal way.
Most schemes run with six to eight volunteers, who typically spend around five hours a week meeting parents.
We are really wanting to work in partnership with you to gain information on your experiences working with the community and whether you have something similar as this programme.
Do you have any parents that would be interested in becoming a Parent Champion?, can they spare 5 hours a week?, can they talk about services? i:e SEND, Early Help, Early Years, Early Hubs and many more.
Each Parent Champion will gain skills from each area of their choice. Parent Champions will gain knowledge of their services, they will be shadowing services, support nurseries by targeting their specialist role.
After some training, they will be able to direct parents to the organisations that could best help them, like a local children’s centre or a Family Information Service. By connecting parents with the local services that can help, they will be making a vital contribution to the lives of families you come across and to our wider community.
We are keen to support our Parent Champions in the real world of work, with a focus of their next step in life, building their skills and potential opportunities.
We want to offer them a breadth of opportunities, with your support we can work together to gain the best outcome for our Parent Champions. As "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."
If you have any parent/s interested they can come along and meet me in person for a coffee morning at the Special Voices event on Friday 24th November 09:30 -13:00 and register their interest.
They can also contact on fis@slough.gov.uk
I look forward hearing from you and hope we can work together to support our community by providing the best service through spreading information on services that we have to offer.