Research and Background: Why Parent Co-Design Matters in Family Hubs

Family hubs represent a distinctive approach to family support, moving beyond the traditional children's centre model to offer a broader age range (from conception to 19, or 25 for young people with SEND), integrated services under one 'brand' if not always one roof and a Healthy Babies offer focused on the critical 1,001 days from conception to age two. 

The model gained significant policy momentum following Andrea Leadsom's review "The best start for life: a vision for the 1,001 critical days" (2021) and the subsequent Family Hubs and Start for Life Programme, which allocated £302 million to support local authorities in transforming their family services. The Department for Education's family hub guidance explicitly emphasises that family voice must be "embedded in the design, delivery and evaluation of services." Family hubs are predicated on relationship-based practice and community connection with guidance stating that hubs should be "led by families" and responsive to local need.  

The family hub model faces unique challenges that make co-design particularly critical. Unlike single-purpose services, hubs must integrate multiple functions: infant feeding support, parenting programmes, mental health services, employment advice, youth services and more. Understanding how families navigate these interconnected needs requires their direct input. 

Research on service integration consistently shows that professionals often assume they understand how families experience multiple services, but parental accounts reveal gaps, duplications, and contradictions that aren't visible from within the system. For instance, parents may be asked to repeat their story multiple times to different practitioners within the same hub network or receive conflicting advice from different services. Only by involving parents in mapping and designing integrated pathways can hubs genuinely deliver on their promise of "no wrong door." 

The Healthy Babies offer within family hubs presents particular co-design opportunities. Services supporting infant feeding, perinatal mental health, and early parent-infant relationships are most effective when they're culturally appropriate, non-judgemental and accessible at the right moments. Mothers from different ethnic communities have diverse infant feeding practices and beliefs; parents with previous trauma may experience perinatal services differently; and fathers often report feeling excluded from early years support. Without parent co-design, family hubs risk replicating the patterns of previous services rather than genuinely transforming them. 

Research consistently demonstrates that services co-designed with users achieve better outcomes across multiple dimensions. A systematic review of co-production in health and social care found that involving service users in design processes led to services that were more accessible, acceptable and effective. Crucially, co-designed services showed improved engagement rates, particularly among families traditionally described as "hard to reach"—a term increasingly recognised as problematic, with "seldom heard" being more accurate. 

Studies specific to children's services reveal particular benefits. Research found that when parents participated meaningfully in service design, there were measurable improvements in service uptake, reduced dropout rates and enhanced family satisfaction. Parents reported feeling more valued and respected, which in turn increased their willingness to engage with support when needed. 

The What Works Centre for Children's Social Care has examined participatory approaches in family support services, finding that co-design leads to more appropriate interventions, better matching of services to family circumstances and stronger working relationships between families and practitioners. Their research emphasises that co-design isn't simply about service improvement—it builds family confidence and capability, creating benefits beyond the immediate service interaction. 

In the context of early help and prevention, which sits at the heart of the family hub model, co-design has particular value. The Early Intervention Foundation's research highlights that preventative services must be trusted and accessible if families are to engage before reaching crisis point. Services designed with parents are more likely to feel welcoming rather than stigmatising and to identify the subtle barriers that prevent early engagement. 

Effective parent carer panels within family hubs transcend tokenistic consultation. They represent genuine partnership where parents have influence over strategic decisions, not merely feedback opportunities on predetermined options. Several family hub networks have developed strong models that offer valuable learning. 

Diversity and Representation: Family hub parent panels must reflect the communities they serve across dimensions of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, disability, family structure, and geographic location. Single parent families, fathers, kinship carers, and parents of children with SEND are often underrepresented in consultation processes yet possess critical perspectives. Some family hubs have established specific sub-groups—such as fathers' forums or panels for parents of children with SEND—to ensure these voices are properly heard. 

Achieving diversity requires proactive recruitment beyond existing service users. Families who have never engaged with family hub services may have the most important insights about barriers to access. Partnership with community organisations, schools, health visitors, and informal networks helps reach beyond the "usual suspects."

The family hub model lends itself to co-design across multiple domains. Leading examples demonstrate the breadth of possibility: 

Physical Space Design: Several family hubs have involved parents in designing or redesigning their venues. Parents have influenced layout decisions such as creating welcoming reception areas that feel more like cafés than offices, ensuring private spaces for sensitive conversations whilst maintaining open areas for drop-in, designing outdoor spaces that accommodate different ages and ensuring breastfeeding-friendly environments. 

Service Timing and Access: Parent co-design has led family hubs to adjust opening hours, with some offering early morning or early evening sessions for working parents, Saturday provision or school holiday programming informed by family need rather than professional working patterns. 

Communication and Branding: Parents have shaped how family hubs communicate, influencing everything from names to social media approaches, leaflet design and the language used to describe services. Parent input typically shifts communication away from professional jargon towards accessible, warm language that emphasises welcome rather than assessment. 

Pathway Design: Co-design has helped family hubs develop smoother access routes. Examples include creating single referral processes rather than separate forms for each service, developing digital access points alongside face-to-face, establishing clear drop-in sessions for initial conversations, and designing "warm handovers" between services that parents helped specify should feel supportive rather than bureaucratic. 

Service Content: Parents have co-designed specific programmes and groups within family hubs. This includes shaping parenting programme content to better reflect local cultural contexts, establishing peer support groups on topics parents identify as priorities, developing father-inclusive approaches to traditionally mother-focused services and creating youth voice mechanisms that give older children and young people influence over services for their age group. 

Workforce Development: Some family hubs involve parents in staff recruitment, sitting on interview panels or shaping job descriptions to emphasise the qualities parents value. Parents have also contributed to staff training, sharing their experiences of what felt helpful or unhelpful in practitioner approaches. 

The Healthy Babies (Previously Start for Life) component of family hubs—focused on conception to age two—particularly benefits from co-design. This period involves intensive contact with multiple services (midwifery, health visiting, infant feeding support, perinatal mental health) and represents a crucial opportunity for building relationships that support families through subsequent challenges. 

Parent co-design has improved healthy baby services in numerous ways. Feeding support services have been redesigned to feel less judgemental and more inclusive of different feeding methods after parent feedback highlighted that some mothers felt shamed for their choices. Perinatal mental health pathways have been adjusted to reduce waiting times and improve continuity of care based on parents' experiences of falling between services. Antenatal and postnatal group content has been shaped by parent preferences about topics, format and involvement of partners. 

Co-design has also highlighted gaps in provision. Parents have identified needs for support with infant sleep, returning to work while maintaining infant feeding relationships, support for fathers' mental health in the perinatal period and culturally specific support for families from minoritised communities. Without parent voice, these gaps might remain invisible. 

Authentic co-design requires acknowledging and addressing inherent power imbalances between professionals and parents. This is particularly pertinent in family hub contexts where some services involve assessment or safeguarding functions alongside supportive offers. 

Parents may fear that criticising services or being honest about difficulties will lead to judgement or referral to children's social care. Family hubs must work consciously to separate early help relationships from assessment functions, ensuring parents feel safe to engage honestly without fear of consequences. 

Creating conditions for genuine partnership means professionals must be willing to share power, accept challenge to established practices and recognise that their expertise, whilst valuable, is incomplete without parental perspectives. This requires organisational cultures that value learning and adaptability over defensiveness. 

Several family hubs have addressed power dynamics by establishing independent parent forums that can advocate collectively rather than as individuals, ensuring senior leaders attend parent panels rather than delegating downwards (demonstrating that parental voice is valued), creating parent champion or ambassador roles that shift some power to parents themselves and being transparent about budgets and constraints so discussions are realistic. 

Research on participatory approaches highlights the importance of reflexivity—professionals critically examining their own assumptions, biases, and the structural factors that shape interactions with families. Some family hubs build reflective practice into supervision and team meetings, explicitly discussing how power operates in their setting. 

The investment in effective parent carer panels and co-design processes yields multiple returns specific to family hub objectives. Services become more responsive to actual rather than assumed needs, increasing their relevance and uptake—critical when family hubs are measured partly on reach into their communities. 

Co-designed family hubs demonstrate improved outcomes across domains including breastfeeding rates, parent-infant attachment, parental mental health, and family functioning. This reflects both better service design and the empowerment effects of meaningful participation itself. When parents feel heard and valued, their confidence and capability increase, creating positive ripple effects beyond the immediate service interaction. 

The integration agenda—central to family hubs—particularly benefits from co-design. Parents experience integration differently than professionals conceptualise it. Co-design helps identify where integration genuinely serves families versus where it primarily serves organisational efficiency. 

From a prevention perspective, co-designed family hubs are better positioned to engage families early. Services that feel welcoming, relevant, and non-judgemental—qualities enhanced by parent input—are more likely to be accessed before difficulties escalate. This aligns with family hubs' core purpose of strengthening families and preventing crisis. 

From a resource perspective, co-design can prevent costly mistakes where services are developed that families won't use, or that require subsequent modification. Early investment in understanding user needs through co-design is more efficient than retrofitting services after launch. Given the significant investment in family hubs, ensuring services meet family needs from the outset represents good financial stewardship. 

Implementing effective parent engagement in family hubs faces particular challenges. The breadth of the model means engaging parents across the full age range and service spectrum is complex. A parent of a baby accessing Healthy Babies services has different perspectives than a parent of a teenager accessing youth provision, yet both matter to family hub design. 

Partnership structures within family hubs can be complicated, often involving local authority commissioning, health service delivery, voluntary sector provision and multiple funding streams. Ensuring parent voice influences all these partners requires sustained effort and clear agreements about how co-design decisions translate across organisational boundaries. 

Time pressures and resource constraints can undermine good intentions. Family hubs often operate within challenging financial contexts, and meaningful engagement requires dedicated resource—staff time, venue costs, payment for participants and potentially independent facilitation. 

There's risk of consultation fatigue when parents are asked repeatedly for input without seeing change or of creating a dynamic where the same voices are heard repeatedly. Family hubs must balance maintaining relationships with experienced parent panel members whilst continuously refreshing membership to capture evolving community needs. 

Managing expectations requires honesty about what can and cannot be influenced by parental input. Some decisions are constrained by statutory requirements, existing contracts, or budget limitations. Transparency about these constraints maintains trust even when parents' preferences cannot be fully implemented. 

Sustainability requires embedding parent engagement within family hub structures rather than treating it as a project or initiative. This means dedicated resources within family hub budgets, clear accountability with named leads for parent engagement at senior level, staff training on co-production principles across all roles and leadership commitment that models inclusive practice. 

Several family hubs have created paid parent liaison or parent engagement coordinator roles, sometimes filled by parents who previously used services themselves. These positions bridge between services and communities, support parent panels and ensure family voice is consistently represented in planning processes. 

Developing parent champions or ambassadors who can bridge between services and communities creates sustainable engagement pathways. Some family hubs have supported parents through qualifications in peer support or community development, creating progression routes that recognise expertise whilst building capacity. 

Partnership with voluntary sector organisations can strengthen engagement, drawing on their expertise in community development and their existing relationships with families who may distrust statutory services. Many family hubs commission voluntary organisations specifically for community engagement and parent participation functions. 

Integration with broader community development approaches ensures family hubs are genuinely community assets rather than imposed services. Some areas have linked family hub development with asset-based community development, participatory budgeting or community organising approaches that fundamentally shift power dynamics. 

Early learning from family hub implementation highlights both successes and areas requiring attention. The National Centre for Family Hubs, established to support the programme, has documented examples of effective practice whilst identifying common challenges. 

Successful family hubs typically demonstrate several characteristics: leadership that genuinely values and acts on parent voice; investment in relationship-building with communities before expecting engagement; flexibility to adapt based on feedback even when this challenges established practice; and integration of parent engagement into performance frameworks so it's monitored alongside other outcomes. 

Areas that have struggled typically show: treating parent engagement as a communications exercise rather than genuine co-design; expecting parents to fit around professional structures rather than adapting services around family lives; failing to ensure diversity in parent panels or seeking input only on minor operational matters whilst major strategic decisions remain professional domains. 

The Department for Education's family hub guidance emphasises continuous improvement cycles informed by family feedback. This positions co-design not as a one-time event but as an ongoing commitment woven through family hub culture. 

The evidence for effective parent carer panels and co-design in family hubs is compelling and growing. When done well, parent engagement transforms family hubs from institutional provisions into community resources, from professionally defined solutions into family-centred support. 

This is particularly critical for the family hub model, which represents a significant shift in family services towards integration, early intervention and relationship-based practice. These ambitions cannot be realised through professional expertise alone—they require the active participation of families in shaping what family hubs are and how they operate. 

The question facing commissioners and providers isn't whether to invest in parent engagement, but how to do so effectively and sustainably. The family hub guidance is explicit that family voice should be embedded throughout, and emerging evidence suggests this isn't merely policy aspiration but practical necessity. 

For family hubs to fulfil their potential—reaching families early, providing integrated support, building on family strengths, and strengthening communities—they must be genuinely co-created with the families they exist to serve. The stakes are too high, both for individual families and for community wellbeing, to design services in isolation from those they exist to support. Evidence and ethics alike point toward the same conclusion: family hubs cannot succeed without families at their heart, not just as recipients but as partners, co-designers and co-creators of the services that bear their name.