The Parent and Carer Alliance is an independent Community Interest Company established in order to provide emotional and practical support to parent carers (including adoptive and fostering parents).

The PCA was started by Parent Carers who want to make a difference to other families like theirs, to use their own lived experiences to help support less experienced, less able, and more vulnerable families.

We hope that this group can enable parent carers to connect, to create a deeper culture change in society to ensure our families are safe and happy.

Our overall aim is to support families whose children have additional needs so they can live better lives. We work to ensure families are given a real opportunity to have a voice in the decision-making processes which affect their lives and to feel more confident in championing getting the needs of their families met. We do this by:

• Running events and hosting webinars to enable increased understanding of legislation and rights.
• Providing an advice service that gives practical advice and on how to ensure rights to support are met.
• Contributing valuable lived experience when working on local and national projects to improve services.
• Providing safe spaces for families to meet virtually, and face to face, to share their experiences with others experiencing the same challenges, who truly understand, to alleviate loneliness and have fun. Click here for our Safeguarding Policy

The group is constantly growing in strength please click here to join us.

We also have many members playing an active role supporting one another via the Facebook forum- sharing advice and support. Click here to go to our Facebook Forum.

Some members are also actively involved in the steering committee and  help us develop our plans to improve the lives of parents and carers, working only in their best interests, and placing families first.

When asked what the work of the PCA means to them, families comment that:

“I would say that the Alliance is all about bringing people together and building strong relationships in and across communities, helping more people to reach their potential, by supporting them at the earliest possible stage, through information sharing, demystifying jargon, and supporting parents and children, some of whom are the most vulnerable and complex in society”

“The Alliance is the one place we can come to for help and advice especially when we are hitting brick walls. We have the help and back up via this group to find professionals who can help and tell us where to go and who to see. They are the light at the end of a tunnel when it is beginning to feel hopeless and the offer of help and support at a dark time is something we cannot afford to lose for parents and children alike.”, and

“For me it has been the networking aspects that have helped to get the right people to hear about the difficulties with the system. Thinking when I posted some issues here and realised it wasn’t just me, others were having the same problem. By being able to network and share, not only do we find out that we are not alone, it isn’t just us, we can also share who it is we need to talk to in order make sure things get better.”