Find out what we’ve been doing to reach and support even more new parents across the country, and our plans for the future
A lot’s been going on at NCT and while we’re not ones to shout about our achievements (of course), we thought we’d share a few highlights – just in case you weren’t aware of all the things we did as well as antenatal classes.
Over 2016 and 2017, we focused on developing our common purpose and strategy to help us decide what direction the charity should take over the next few years.
A key part of this is #ourNCTservices to help determine the future of our courses and activities. We want to ensure they really do help parents have the best possible experience of pregnancy, birth and early parenthood.
We know how important our volunteers are – the people who are always out there, meeting and helping parents in their local area.
So we’re working harder to support them better and we’ve set up a volunteer co-production crew so they themselves can help shape the decisions that affect them.
And we’ve seen measures introduced by the Health Secretary, so that one in five women will have access to the same midwife throughout their pregnancy by March 2019. This is something we’ve been championing for over 25 years.
Improving maternal mental health is so important to us and there are lots of ways we’re working hard to make a difference for new parents.
We launched our #HiddenHalf campaign to improve support for mums with mental health concerns during pregnancy and after the birth of their child. Over 6,000 people have signed up as #HiddenHalf supporters, with 2,360 campaigners writing to their local MP.
We piloted the delivery of Parents in Mind in three areas, which gives trained peer support to women experiencing emotional health difficulties in pregnancy and in the first year after birth.
We found that women who received support from other women and mums for at least eight weeks showed a significant reduction in anxiety and depression.
We’ve secured funding from global health charity Nesta to take our Birth and Beyond Community Supporters (BBCS) programme to five new areas across the country. The programme trains local women to become volunteer Birth and Beyond Community peer supporters to help support new and expectant mums’ emotional wellbeing. In the future, we’re planning on introducing the scheme in even more areas.
Over the next few years, we have some big ambitions. We want our services to to be accessible to all new and expectant parents so we’ll be looking at what we should continue, stop or adapt.
We’ll be transforming our technology services and website to provide a better experience for parents who access our courses and information.
We will continue to improve our recruitment of students to be NCT teachers across the country.
Over the last 12 months we:
• Supported 95,662 parents through courses and classes
• Helped 5,791 volunteers across 332 branches
• Received more than 6.5 million visits to our website
Crucially, we know that we will only achieve a lot of our ambitions through a network of parents supporting parents and that means building our branches.
None of this is going to be easy, but it is the challenge we’ve set ourselves to achieve our vision of a world in which no parent is isolated and all parents are supported to build a strong society.
We are a movement of passionate people across our staff, volunteers and teachers so, standing on our collective strength, we are determined to do more and go further for you – and every new parent.
Read about the work we do here.
Find out about NCT in your area.
Get involved with your local branch.
