From consultation to collaboration - making Family Hubs truly family-led
Beyond Consultation: Co-Creating Family Hubs with Parents is a practical resource for commissioners, family hub leaders, practitioners and parent engagement coordinators who want to move from tokenistic consultation to genuine partnership with families.
Family hubs are most effective when they're truly family-led—not just in principle, but in practice. This toolkit provides evidence-based guidance, practical tools, and real examples to help you embed meaningful parent voice throughout your family hub model, from strategic planning and commissioning decisions through to day-to-day service delivery.
Whether you're establishing new family hubs, transforming existing services, or strengthening parent engagement in established hubs, this toolkit will help you:
- Understand why co-design matters for family hub outcomes, with clear evidence of impact
- Establish effective parent carer panels that represent diverse voices and influence real decisions
- Navigate power dynamics to create genuine partnerships rather than consultation exercises
- Use practical methods for co-designing services, spaces, and pathways with parents
- Address common challenges around resources, representation, and sustainability
- Learn from others through examples from family hubs doing this well
Co-design isn't an optional extra—it's fundamental to what family hubs are meant to be. This toolkit gives you the knowledge, confidence, and practical resources to make "family-led" more than just a policy aspiration, ensuring that the families at the heart of your community are also at the heart of your family hub.
Because nothing about families should be decided without families.
