ABSTRACT
This book has emphasised throughout the role of parents and families in the work of Sure Start children’s centres. What this chapter seeks to do is first to look at the essential elements of involving parents in the development of centres and the design of services. Second, it looks at different ways to engage parents and families in this process. Parents are our greatest resource within a children’s centre; they need to set the agenda for services, and they need to be pivotal in everything that we do. From the outset, Sure Start programmes were expected to engage with families to help create a sense of uniqueness for each programme in response to local needs. A key element of these early programmes was the idea that the empowerment of parents would help to enrich the local community and help it to become more sustainable. The significance of parental empowerment lay also and most crucially in its impact upon adult-child relationships. Helping parents to feel that they had a greater say over their own futures would support their confidence in parenting. The very kernel of Sure Start programmes has and will also be that dynamic between adult and child. However, this approach required an entirely new way of modelling services a radical approach which would seek to move away from a more hierarchical way of working to one that was more user-led in nature. With the move away from the Sure Start model in areas of specific deprivation to the more universal and more poorly funded model of the children’s centre, sometimes it can seem that that parent voice has been lost.
