Comment: Creating a toolkit to support parents and carers networks
Workplace policy for parental leave, flexible working and support should include parents and carers in discussions. The inclusion of staff networks representing parents and carers is crucial to campaign for change and to drive improvements in policy and organisational culture.
Parents and carers at work
Parents and carers face the daily challenge of balancing work with caregiving duties. They often feel unsupported by their employers and organisations, leading to feelings of isolation. This is an important part of the policy debate about parental leave, flexible working, and the provision of support for parents and carers within the workplace. Clearly, parents and carers should be involved in this debate, but how can this be achieved? Increasing and improving staff networks aimed at representing the voices of parents and carers could be a positive way of making this happen.
What is the nature of parent and carer networks? How can these staff networks best organise? I have been looking at this with Dr Mark Gatto, Lecturer in Critical Organisation Studies at Northumbria University. We have been investigating how parent and carer staff networks are developing in UK higher education institutions and how they are coming together in a broad, national level.
Investigating parent and carer networks
Our project incorporates multi-methods and has included ‘mapping’ the field to identify where parents and carers are organising in UK higher education. In this, we were supported by Dr Nosheen Khan, Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Newcastle University Business School. We also conducted a survey and qualitative interviews.
We found that there is great deal of diversity amongst these networks: some are very well established, some are brand new, or are in the very early stages of being set up. Some are formal networks that sit within the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and HR structures of larger institutions, others are informal and independent. There is also diversity in terms of visions and aims, challenges, relations with management and trade unions. All networks provide valuable peer support and a safe space for parents and carers to discuss their experiences and needs; many also influence university policy by voicing the needs of parents and carers and campaigning for changes and improvements in policy, practice and organisational culture.
From our work, it became clear that staff networks can function to voice parent and carer needs and advocate within their institutions, enabling parents and carers to influence organisational policies. However, we have also come to recognise that there is a risk of being ‘co-opted’ by management, particularly when networks are fully integrated into formal structures of the organisation, paying lip service to the goals of equality, diversity and inclusion.
A toolkit for networks and future developments
A key output of our work is a toolkit for networks. This toolkit will be housed on a new website we are developing with support from the School Impact Fund. It will be owned by an emerging national structure that this project has supported and nurtured. The toolkit is being coproduced with the project participants and will be a live document to which network chairs and members can add to and contribute. This is in line with the community engagement ethos of our project. The aim is to help networks establish themselves and grow in size and level of influence so that we make academia a better place for all.
We have plans to broaden the project in the future to include other sectors, as we believe there is scope to impact policy not just within the higher education sector but more broadly. After all, parents and carers are a majority group in the labour force.
Dr Ana Lopes, Senior Lecturer in Work and Employment at Newcastle University Business School