January 14, 2025
In October 2024, our Supporting Early Mind Research Network hosted Georgie Marks (Action for Children), Siobhan Mitchell and Kath Wilkinson (University of Exeter).
They discussed their recent work and research concerning knowledge mobilisation in communities to share evidence-based information about the First 1001 Days. Specifically, they shared their findings about the use of community champions as trusted messengers in this area. By this, they refer to the training of non-professionals who interact with parents in communities and have existing relationships to share knowledge and build confidence.
Their Building Babies Brains approach has been informed by research done by Siobhan and Kath with Siobhan’s piece part of the design and development phase and Kath’s part coming as the approach reached maturity. The approach itself is over seven sessions which total 15 hours, enabling community champions to do more with what they already know. The idea is to empower trusted messengers who see parents and carers in everyday places to gently share accessible, engaging, and freely available resources about the first 1001 days.
The approach is evidence-informed and all content for the Champions to share is evidence-based so they draw on excellent resources created with parents in mind. The Community Champions come from wide and varied backgrounds. For example, there are toddler group leads, church group leads, carers, and librarians. It is inclusive and the emphasis is on who those trusted messengers are within a particular community.
The idea is to be a preventative early intervention, with sign posting to services. Generally, it is offered in locations that might be considered to be at a higher level of need, with the aim at connecting with those who might be considered hard to reach. The initial concept came about in response to the Devon children’s centres moving away from universal provision, with a concern that this reduction in service created a potential missed opportunity for some parents to have access to information.
Service users were involved in development from the beginning. They held a workshop with 14 parents attending, exploring the gaps left by this service change, the information they felt parents wanted and how it might be best provided. Hearing their experience of the previous service and how they might want things to be different within a new service helped them to shape the programme and also identified who parents might consider as trusted messengers. This included breastfeeding peer supporters, Home Start volunteers, and supported thinking about who parents might turn to.
With the approach piloting in two places in Devon, they were commissioned by Action for Children to do some research to understand the experiences of the Community Champions involved. They carried out some short semi-structured interviews over the phone with fifteen Community Champions from a variety of backgrounds and roles within their community, exploring their motivations for volunteering and getting involved, their experiences of the training and their experiences of passing on messages in their community and also their recommendations for training and support.
In terms of their motivations for engaging in the training, several mentioned a desire to upskill in their current role either as a parent or to enhance the help they were offering within the community. Many had backgrounds within child development or Early Years work. Their experience of the training was largely positive, reporting that they felt it prepared them well for the role of Community Champion. They felt that the facilitators’ delivery created a positive group dynamic and a safe space to learn.
Some feedback was varied depending on their previous background or experience, with some reporting struggles with the brain development content. They described having less experience of that kind of ‘pass it on’ Champion role and wanted more of a focus on that within the training.
The Champions reported both successes and challenges in terms of passing on messages within their community. The challenges really focused on where they were based and who they could pass messages on to and what messages they were passing on. This often stemmed from a lack of access to appropriate settings, so for example they used to go along to a toddler group but now the child is older so the Champions need to be regularly active in their community setting in order to have the consistent interaction needed to build those relationships.
Some Champions reported the main challenge was around approaching someone who is struggling. So examples of challenging interactions including where family members offered conflicting advice or approaching someone with a fixed mindset. Some content was harder to pass on than others, so Champions might feel confident passing on tasks modelling different behaviours but less confident passing on specific science-based knowledge.
Successful experiences tended to come from Champions being in a receptive context, which tends to involve building relationships with parents through a series of phases
Building relationships with parents
Following on from this, they decided to investigate the context of champion-parent interaction in the community impacts information sharing. Specifically, how knowledge mobilisation differs depending on who the Champion is, so in terms of their traits and characteristics but also in terms of how they come into contact with parents in the community. Does their role impact their relationships with parents and how the approach works in practice?
To get at some of these questions, they undertook an online survey and some online interviews. The sample included Champions from all of the sixteen training cohorts which had taken place over the four years of delivery of the training and covered eleven areas of Devon. They separated these broadly into three categories for the purpose of analysis; those in paid roles (working in schools, childcare settings, charities, NHS, libraries), those running community groups (e.g. toddler group leads, church group leads), then peers (other parents in the community, e.g. breastfeeding peer supporters) who may not have a specific role. Naturally though, many of those who were in paid roles or group leads were also parents themselves which is worth bearing in mind.
They had the following findings about information sharing opportunities:
The peer and group lead Champions were found to be most likely to have this regular interaction with parents and importantly the same parents within a community which really enabled the information sharing. This made it easier for the drip-feeding of information to parents over time in quite a naturalistic non-directive way. It also enabled Champions to tailor their messaging to parents.
Champions being friendly and approachable helped them share information but also the non-professionals particularly the peer and group leads often reported that they build relationships with parents through sharing personal information about themselves and their lives and parenting journeys so they could become trusted acquaintances. This was an interesting contrast to the professional Champion, where the parent had a greater expectation that they would share information so they thus found it easier to bring up. On the other hand, a key challenge for the non-professional Champion was if they lacked confidence in the information or having the interaction with the parents.
This led to some specific implications for practice moving forward in how champions are selected and trained
In order to continue the programme at a large scale, ongoing training and other resources or support needed to help Champions with their confidence will be necessary. Some adaptations have already been made, such as lengthening the training from five sessions to seven. In the future, they may consider tailoring the training differently for professional and non-professional Champions.
Building Babies Brains is being rolled out as part of the Family Hub approach in the South-West (Devon, Torbay, and Plymouth). Family hub staff have trained 250 Champions. Future plans include how to scale up and sustain the programme.
Please also find below two research papers referred to in the webinar concerning the research behind Building Babies Brains. Both papers are open access and free to download:
You can watch the webinar in full on the Supporting Early Minds website.
Or, to find out more about infant mental health and book a place on an upcoming Supporting Early Minds webinar visit: Webinars – Supporting Early Minds (mhid.org.uk)