We need your voice to help us provide the best for you and your family and to help us shape the services offered through our Family Hubs and Start for Life offer.

About the Parent/Carer Panel

We’re bringing together a group for parents and carers to help families with young children, from when they’re just a tiny seed until they’re two years old. This group is a big part of our Family Hubs and Start for Life programme. We want people from all over Torbay to join, so we have lots of different ideas and experiences to help shape our services.

This group will help us make sure the information and services we give to new parents are just right. If you want to help families and and our young children, or know someone who does, please think about joining our group by completing a few details for more information or to join.

Who can come along?

• Mums, step mums
• Dads and father figures
• Co-parents
• Carers
• Grandparents
• Kinship carers

If you’re expecting a baby in the family or have responsibility for a child under two.

Our meetings

These informal meetings will take place once a month and are run by our parent carer panel worker. We simply ask attendees for their feedback on the sessions we provide, the support we offer and how we can improve our offer to local families. We will occasionally host informal focus groups and surveys as part of this. Hearing your voices is at the heart of everything we do in our family hubs.

Each of our three hubs host these panels each quarter across Torbay. These meetings will take place in person, however, we’re looking at hosting one of these sessions online.

With each meeting having a different theme, these are safe spaces to discuss your experiences and what support you feel will help families near you.

What support will I get to be involved?

We want to enable accessibility as much as possible so we will discuss with you what you need to participate. A few examples of what we can offer includes creche/childcare for meetings where necessary, travel expenses to meetings, refreshments in meetings, rewards and recognitions. We will support with any other accessibility requirement to enable you to fully participate in meetings/training.

Come and join our friendly group

Are you interested in being part of our Family Hubs Parent and Carer Panel? We need the help of local residents who use our services currently or may do in the future to make sure that Family Hubs are designed to meet the needs of our local community.

The purpose of the parent/carer panels is to:

• Ensure local parents/carers play a key role in designing and continuously improving family services
• Enable the voice of local parents/carers including those whose voices are seldom heard
• Ensure Family Hubs are designed for inclusion and meet the needs of the diverse communities that live in Torbay
• Ensure that the panel is representative of Torbay residents who have a wide range of lived experience
• For more information on how you can get involved click on the join our parent carer button below