Support
Helping parents and carers find trusted information, guidance, services and expertise - and navigate systems when they don't know where to turn.
About NPA
A national organisation for parents and carers
Parent-led. Family-centred. Independent.
The National Parents Alliance is an ambitious new civic movement and membership organisation for parents and carers of children and young people up to the age of 25.
We are building a permanent, independent national organisation through which parents and carers can find support, connect with others, contribute their knowledge and experience, and have greater collective influence on the policies, services and decisions that affect their children and families.
Parent-led. Family-centred. Independent.
Our starting point isn't government, politics or institutions. It's children, parents, carers and families.
What We're Here To Do
SUPPORT. CONNECT. EMPOWER.
Connect
Connecting parents with one another, with organisations, communities, campaigns, specialists and expertise - creating a stronger national parent community.
Empower
Giving parents greater opportunities to participate, contribute their knowledge and experience, organise around shared concerns, and influence the decisions that affect children and families.
Support when you need it. A community to belong to. Influence where it matters.
One Alliance. Different Ways To Participate.
NPA is being built around individual parents and carers, but we don't want to recreate work that is already being done by excellent parent organisations, specialist groups and grassroots campaigns across the country.
Instead, we want to connect people, organisations, experience and expertise through shared national infrastructure - while allowing each to retain its own identity and independence.
Individual Parents & Carers
NPA Members
At the heart of NPA - participating as individuals, accessing support and services, contributing their experiences and helping shape NPA's work.
Organisations
Organisational Affiliates
Independent organisations connected through NPA's wider network, sharing knowledge, expertise and opportunities for collaboration while retaining their own identity and independence.
Grassroots Parent Campaigns
Parent Campaign Network
A way for parent-led campaigns and emerging groups to connect, share experience and access wider networks and infrastructure without having to become part of NPA or give up their independence.
Specialist Interests
Special Interest Groups
Parents and others with relevant lived or professional experience coming together around particular issues - initially including areas such as SEND, AI and Education, Social Media and Devices, Sport in Schools, Curriculum, and Enrichment and Wider Opportunities.
Different routes. One shared purpose.
To make it easier for parents and carers to be informed, supported, connected, involved and influential in the issues that affect their children and families.
An ecosystem, not a hierarchy.
How NPA Will Work
NPA is designed to combine practical support for individual families with the collective strength of a national parent community.
1. What NPA enables for parents
- Inform
- Connect
- Represent
- Enable
- Better Informed
- Better Connected
- More Involved
- More Influential
2. How individual experience can create wider change
- One Family's Experience
- Shared Experiences
- Patterns & Evidence
- Representation & Advocacy
- Change
When one family encounters a problem, we can help them navigate it. When many families encounter the same problem, we can help change it.
Individual support and national influence are not separate ideas. Helping one family matters in itself. But when many families encounter the same difficulty, their experiences can reveal a wider pattern.
NPA can bring those experiences together, investigate them, turn them into evidence and use that evidence to strengthen representation and advocacy.
Parent Experience Is Evidence
Parents and carers see parts of children's lives that no single institution does. They experience education, health, family life and public services across different stages, organisations and systems.
That knowledge matters.
NPA will bring together parent and family experience alongside research, professional expertise and other forms of evidence to build a better understanding of what is working, what isn't, and where change may be needed.
We won't start by telling parents what to think. We'll start by asking.
Through surveys, research, conversations, working groups and our growing national community, we want to understand where parents agree, where experiences differ and what families themselves believe needs attention.
Agreement is evidence. Disagreement is evidence too.
Starting With Education
We're starting where families spend so much of their lives: education.
Education will be NPA's first major area of focus.
Our Education Founding Group will coordinate our early work, supported by developing Special Interest Groups exploring areas such as SEND, AI and Education, Social Media and Devices, Sport in Schools, Curriculum, and Enrichment and Wider Opportunities.
But children don't live their lives in institutional silos.
As NPA grows, there may be good reasons to explore other issues that directly affect children, parents and family life.
Start with education. Prove the model. Expand deliberately.
Independent By Design
NPA is non-party-political and independent.
We want to work constructively with governments and opposition parties, schools and universities, professionals and researchers, charities and community organisations, businesses and other organisations whose work affects children and families.
But NPA does not belong to any of them.
Our responsibility is to our members, our purpose and the evidence.
Collaboration without capture.
Funding can support NPA's work. It cannot buy NPA's voice.
Built With Parents
NPA is at the beginning.
We don't want to build an organisation behind closed doors, decide what parents need and then present the finished product to them.
We want to build it with them.
Our Founding Team is putting the initial foundations in place. Our Founding Community will help shape what comes next - from the questions we investigate and the evidence we gather to the services, support and membership benefits we develop.
The organisation should become stronger, broader and more representative as more parents and carers become involved.
Be There At The Beginning
Register your interestBy parents. For families.
Be there at the beginning
Help shape what NPA becomes.
Join our free Founding Community. Follow our progress, share your experience or contribute your skills. You decide how involved you want to be.
By parents. For families.