Confident and supported parents are better prepared to raise strong families and contribute positively to their local communities and society in general. We understand parents are key to the development of happy and well-adjusted children, so our focus is always on new and expectant parents, and their early parenting experience. Becoming a parent is a major life change, and the transition to parenthood has huge emotional and physical impact. At the same time, there are many other changes taking place in relationships, careers, finances and general life balance. Parents often care for their babies and young children under difficult circumstances, while facing more than one challenge at a time. With social and economic pressures and an array of conflicting advice from official and unofficial sources, everyday issues can start to become real problems. We want to help them distinguish between high-quality, factual information and personal opinion and to look for solutions that help them to meet all their needs.

NCT's CEO Belinda Phipps talks about NCT's strategy to reach 20 million parents by 2020.

Our vision

Our vision is a world in which parents are valued and supported to build a strong society, believing that a child’s early years significantly impact upon the future they help to shape.

What we do and how we do it

NCT is the UK’s largest charity for parents. Since 1956 we have been a trusted voice and provided essential support for millions of parents. We offer services across the UK, from our antenatal and parent preparation courses through to day to day peer support based in our local branches. We guide people through the transition to parenthood, from pregnancy up to their children’s second birthday. We believe our role is to help parents through what will be one of the most challenging changes in their lives. We do this both through our own activities and by working externally with health professionals and maternity and family service providers as well as policymakers, opinion formers and employers. Today, our online support reaches over 1.2 million parents and parents-to-be each year, and more than 450,000 are supported through our events and helplines. We currently have 10,000 volunteers on hand to help with local branch support, and our courses prepare over 70,000 parents annually. Alongside our traditional classes we also provide antenatal and breastfeeding support through the NHS, and Children’s Centres in England, and we continue to provide our parent focused training for health professionals.

Why a new strategy? Why now?

Since 2005, the launch of NCT’s first strategy, we have doubled in size, increased the number of parents we support and created more services for them, as well as succeeding in many of our campaign goals. To help deliver our objectives we have created an infrastructure to help support every expectant couple in the UK and are merging with two charities to support even more new parents. Baby Café, a network of breastfeeding drop-in centres, which provides faceto- face breastfeeding support, and MIDIRS (Midwives Information and Resource Services) with whom we can be more involved in supporting the professionals who care for parents, whilst strengthening our position as a trusted source of evidence-based information.
This growth and expanding role makes it an ideal time for NCT to re-examine its charitable remit. So we have updated our vision, set new priorities for the future and developed a strategy for the coming decade – taking us to 2020.

The new strategy

Our aim is to reach 20 million parents by 2020.

To do this we will focus on more growth, increased thought leadership and developing new partnerships
Growth – we will continue to increase our reach, both geographic and social, to all parents and expand our postnatal and early years services.
Thought leadership – we will use our position of influence to change the perception of parenthood and create breakthrough solutions to address the dilemmas parents face.
Partnership – to deliver on ambitious targets we will work more formally with other organisations to increase the support available to new parents and expand their availability to reach even more of the population.

Key themes

Five key themes will underpin all of our work to achieve our goals for 2020:
1 Confident parents
2 Supportive services
3 Positive image of parenthood
4 High-quality information
5 An efficient organisation

We will call on everyone in our community of members, volunteers, staff, practitioners, health and family services professionals, partner organisations and sponsors to help us achieve what we need to in these key areas.

If you have comments or questions about this strategy or would like to speak to a member of NCT's team about ways of working together to achieve our vision, email 2020@nct.org.uk