How we support forums in England

We are the delivery partner of the Department for Education in supporting parent carer participation in England. 

Contact’s core offer for 2025-26 to parent carer forums  

Contact offers the support below to parent carer forums, funded by the Department for Education.

• Supporting the work of the National Network of Parent Carer Forums (NNPCF) and working in partnership with the NNPCF on national projects. Read more about the NNPCF National Network of Parent Carer Forums.
• A named parent carer participation adviser for each forum able to offer virtual, telephone, and email advice and support. Read more about Contact Advisers.
• Support and advice to forums in relation to the Department for Education grant process and completion of forms. Management of the grant process including grant application approval and grant monitoring approval. Read more about grants and monitoring.
• Management of the priority grant process (subject to current year underspend being available). More information is available on the grants and monitoring page.
• An annual conference with the NNPCF which is open to all parent carer forums. 
• Eight online learning sessions on the topics that forums need most and including the annual grants session – keep feeding in suggestions to your adviser. See our recorded online learning session on our YouTube channel for parent carer forums.  For details of up and coming learning opportunities go to learning and events for forums.  
• CiC Assistance Programme for all forums to access telephone and face to face counselling, financial and legal helplines, family care advice and signposting, wellbeing portal and app, support for managers (for forums with staff), guidance on HR issues, policies, and procedures, ‘everyday matters’ information sourcing, whistle-blowing support. Read more about CIC Assistance.
• Subscription for all forums to Community Matters Yorkshire’s knowledgebank. Community Matters provide advice, information, and support with governance and legal issues. Read more about Community Matters. 
• Website and online resources. We will keep our webpages up to date and offer resources for parent carer forums, including our dedicated PCF YouTube channel. 
• Support and attendance at regional network or cluster meetings, either face to face or virtual.
• Regular news and updates on the issues that matter to forums including good practice examples, consultations, follow-up information, changes to legislation, training, events etc. 
• Information and resources to support forums’ engagement with health partners locally, and routes to provide feedback on experiences to NHS England and other national health bodies via our Strategic Health Lead. 
• Forum training two online training opportunities. Training options include, Leading your Forum, being a Parent Representative and/or DARE Resilience. Please note not all these programmes will run every year.  Forums can buy in these options, for more information see Contact’s Training Offer.
• Access to the new Parent carer forum handbook, a resource for all forums which will be regularly updated through forum feedback.
• Support to develop Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies, use the Diversity and Inclusion toolkit, and to plan for an inclusive forum culture. 2 Equality and Diversity peer support session for parent carer forums.
• Annual report on strengthening the parent carer participation movement. 

Contact’s enhanced offer of support to forums experiencing challenges: 

We offer some supplementary, paid-for support which is outlined below, that Forums are able to use grant funding for. In addition, we hold a limited budget that we can use to pay for targeted support from either a Contact Associate or Community Matters, in the case of urgent, crisis situations. As you can appreciate, this additional budget can be spent quite quickly, and as of September 2025 is low, meaning we’re having to be extremely rigorous in our prioritising.

If you are struggling, please do reach out to your Adviser, and we’ll do what we can to support you.

• Intensive support through our Associates and mediators when significant issues arise. Associates can support with a wide range of issues, you can read more about this in in the parent carer forum handbook.
• Intensive or bespoke support from Community Matters on complex governance or policy issues on an Associate basis.  Support from Community Matters on policy review, organisational development, finance, GDPR and data, complaints, governance issues, and training on key topics.
• Support to forums’ strategic partners including the local authority and health agencies and raising the profile of participation and co-production amongst these partners. 

Additional paid options, for more information visit Contact’s Training Offer:

The Contact and NNPCF parent carer participation newsletter (England) 

Contact and the National Network of Parent Carer Forums (NNPCF) produce a joint parent carer participation newsletter.  

This newsletter contains key information about the development of parent carer participation. Sign up for the parent carer participation joint newsletter.

Our impact

Parent Carer Participation Annual Review 2023-2024 which brings together activities, experiences and insights from parent carer forums throughout 2023-2024.

Read our latest annual review (2022-2023) to find out how Contact supported parent carer forums that year, and about the impact that forums have on services in their areas. 

Read our last annual review (2021-2022) to find out how Contact supported parent carer forums last year, and about the impact that forums have on services in their areas. 

In addition to the Department for Education funded support offer, Contact is committed to:

• Equality Diversity and Inclusion with 3 additional EDI peer learning sessions.
• Working collaboratively with the NNPCF and parent carer forums to develop how we might support and help amplify parent carer voices in the future.
• Exploring improved support options for new and re-establishing parent carer forums.