Introducing ... the Parent Panel Pilot✨
Introducing ... the Parent Panel Pilot✨
A blog series about shifting power to local parents at Impact on Urban Health.
Hey, we’re Emily and Tayo. We’re currently working on the Parent Panel Pilot- a collaboration with Impact on Urban Health exploring how to include local parents in their decision-making processes.
In this blog series, we’ll share highlights of what we’re learning around power and collective decision-making in that work.
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Blog #1: Setting up the Parent Panel Pilot
Background
In 2022, Hello Brave partnered with Impact on Urban Health to co-design a Parent Panel which would help their Children’s Mental Health team explore if they could make decisions with parents in their local area, rather than for them. You can read more about that co–design process in this short blog series here.
Now joined by Emily Danby, Hello Brave are supporting Impact on Urban Health to pilot a version of that co-design Parent Panel to answer the question ‘can their Children's Mental Health Team make decisions with parents in this way’.
We’re testing this question with a nine-month pilot of the Parent Panel, involving ten parents from Lambeth and Southwark.
In this blog, we’ll share a little about the set-up phase of the Parent Panel and what we’ve learned so far.
What’s happened so far
Set-up phase
After a bit of a slow start, we kicked off the project in October, spending the first few months getting set up with the Children’s Mental Health team. This involved:
Initial meeting with the CMH team to define the scope of this work
Establishing our ways of working as a new team of facilitators
Recruiting 10 parents from the local area to join us in this work
Over January and February, we’ve been welcoming the parents to the project with a series of 5 initial sessions. These included:
An in-person kick-off session to meet one another and digest the plan for the project
An information session, focused on Impact on Urban Health, and their Children’s Mental Health programme
A session on navigating power
A session for parents to share their knowledge related to the project in short talks.
A final reflection session to capture what we already know about the things that might enable or hinder the panel in making collective decisions with the CMH team.
We’ll share some of the parents’ reflections on these sessions in our next blog.
Recruiting the parents
As part of the recruitment phase, we decided to work with two parents, Abigail and Leon, who were involved in the co-design phase of this work. This wasn’t in the original plan but was something Emily brought to the work to increase our commitment to power-sharing. Abigail and Leon formed a recruitment group who were responsible for helping to promote the opportunity and select parents to join the panel.
Their role was to help review our outreach strategy and comms materials, then support the recruitment process through shortlisting, interviews and a final selection session.
In the end we had 134 applications- many more than expected!
Because of the high number of applications to review, we (Emily & Tayo) joined in with the first round of shortlisting.
We each reviewed a quarter of the applications and put forward six people.
We all reviewed this list of 24 applicants and settled on a final selection to be interviewed.
We then held 15-minute calls with each of the shortlisted candidates.
We used notes from these calls in a final session, where Abigail and Leon took the lead in deciding who would be invited to join the panel.
This recruitment process started to feel like a core part of the set-up phase, after investing time to approach it in a way to reflect the project's commitment to diverse representation and practising joint decision-making.
Here, Abigail and Leon share 5 reflections on their experience.
Bringing different perspectives 💭
It felt valuable to have parents of different genders involved in the recruitment process. In particular, having a dad on the panel really contributed to us reaching fathers, men and male co-parents. This was especially boosted through the panel’s suggestions and contacts, and their clarity about this as a priority.
On the panel’s suggestion, we made a separate comms pack for reaching people who identified as fathers, men or male co-parents which we shared with local organisations supporting men. In total, we received 41 applications from this group (that’s over 30% of applicants), compared to 5 (that was just 8%) during recruitment for the co-design phase.
Time pressures⏳
Overall the team felt that the time for the full recruitment process (6 weeks) was tight. With an unexpected volume of applications to review and 21 people to interview, the pace was fast.
There were moments when this was stressful (e.g. suddenly receiving a lot of diary invites for interview calls). It relied on being able to read and digest a lot of information very quickly, which didn’t suit everyone’s ways of processing.
This meant that the panel felt they weren’t able to give each applicant as much attention as they would’ve liked. They made decisions based on what they could process in the time available.
Recruitment criteria 📃
We had a core set of objective criteria for recruiting parents (e.g. must live in Lambeth & Southwark & be a parent or carer to a child under 16). Beyond that, we left it to personal judgement..
In practice, this meant the recruitment panel were drawn more to parents they could relate to. In effect, we each decided our own criteria. We wonder if it would have been possible to identify a few more characteristics we were looking for, such as an ability to self-reflect, and include these in the role description.
Despite this scope for bias, having four of us involved in the early stages of the process helped to get a range of perspectives. We found that each of us shortlisted a different and broad range of people. When we checked during our final recruitment session, the selection put forward included people from a range of backgrounds.
Including parents of 12-15 year olds🧒🏾
With 10 spaces on the panel, the group found it difficult to include all of the applicants they would have liked to. In particular, they would have liked to also include two parents with teenagers.
The group felt this would have added a useful perspective. As this would have taken us above 10 parents, they asked about whether we could increase the group to 12. This would have meant securing a variation of funds for the project from Impact on Urban Health, at short notice.
We asked IOUH about this. They were supportive of the idea, but not able to grant the request at short notice. We agreed to keep it at 10 people on the panel, with no parents of teenagers represented. We have noted it as a recommendation for this work that increasing the number of parents to 12 would make it easier to have broader representation.
A meaningful process 🫱🏽🫲🏽
On balance, the recruitment group said that the process felt positive. It gave them a clear sense of purpose, particularly to be involved in something that will support children with their mental health. There was space for everyone to express what felt important to them, and for that to lead to the decisions we decided together. Something that we hope to bake into any proposed future Parent Panel process.
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Coming up
As we enter March we’ve now begun a lighter rhythm of Panel Meetings. These include crit or feedback sessions (where the panel will give feedback on elements of the CMH team’s strategy and priorities) and relationship-building moments, ahead of our first decision-making day in May.
We’ll also be working with the parents on future editions of this blog! In our next instalment, we’ll share reflections on how parents are finding the process so far.
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Get in Touch
If you’re working on similar projects within your organisation and would like to chat or swap notes, we’d love to hear from you!
You can reach out to Emily at emily@emdanby.uk and Tayo at tayo@hellobrave.org.