Yesterday, Parent Champions from across England came together in London to celebrate everything they have achieved in the last year, and to learn from each other for the year ahead. The Parent Champions conference and awards is always a highlight for us at Family and Childcare Trust.

We were delighted to welcome Caroline Dinenage MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Women, Equalities and Early Years and Maria Sciara from the Department for Education this year. It’s great to have the opportunity to meet the volunteers from schemes across the country, and to showcase their achievements to politicians and policy makers.

What happens to us in the early years is crucial to the rest of our lives. Good quality childcare improves children’s outcomes and gives parents the choice about whether to take paid work. But just having childcare places available is not enough – parents need to know that it’s there. Parent Champions are the link between services and local mums and dads. All of them are local parents themselves, so they can provide trusted information about what’s available and how it can help families in the area. They work particularly in areas of deprivation, because children from disadvantaged backgrounds have the most to gain from childcare.

We aimed to reach 4000 parents between April 2016 and March 2017. At the end of December 2016, we’d already reached 4928. Hundreds of parents have reported that these conversations directly led to a child taking up a childcare place – in reality, there are likely to be far more as our hard-working Parent Champions Coordinators are not able to follow up with every parent reached. Each child going into childcare is getting a better chance to do well at school and beyond.

Our parent volunteers tell us that becoming a Parent Champion has real benefits. They enjoy helping their communities and gain confidence from seeing the impact they can have. This often leads to them finding paid jobs, often after a few years out of the workplace. We’ve been able to recruit a lot of new Parent Champions this year, partly because of people leaving for new opportunities and partly because we’ve been setting up new schemes. Over the last quarter, we welcomed an average of 28 new Champions a month –nearly one new Parent Champion a day. And 71 per cent of Parent Champions schemes are planning to recruit even more volunteers this quarter.

This year marks several new initiatives for us – thanks to the John Ellerman Foundation we’re expanding into Wales and Scotland for the first time, and thanks to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation we’re testing a variant of the scheme which is specifically for refugee and migrant families. Funding from the Department for Education will support us to continue our existing schemes and set up 15 more: some of these will focus on rural areas, some on BAME families, and some on home learning. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned from these in the year to come.