What is a Home-Start Volunteer?

A Home-Start Volunteer offers emotional and practical support to families with young children, often during times of stress or difficulty. They work with families who may be experiencing challenges such as isolation, postnatal depression, illness, disability, or additional needs like neurodivergence.

Home-Start is a national charity, and each volunteer is carefully trained and supported to help families build resilience and confidence.

A home start volunteer explained what they do. Here is what they told us:

Home-Start Volunteers build supportive relationships with parents and caregivers, often visiting them weekly in their homes. Their role includes:

• Offering a listening ear and emotional support.
• Helping parents navigate services and complete forms (e.g., DLA, EHCPs).
• Supporting families to access local activities, appointments, and peer support.
• Sharing strategies to manage children’s emotional and sensory needs.
• Being a consistent, non-judgemental presence during difficult times.

They are often matched with families based on relevant experience or understanding.

Home-Start Volunteers don’t need formal qualifications, but they:

• Complete a 6-week preparation course.
• Receive regular training updates on topics like safeguarding, autism, and PDA.
• Often bring valuable lived experience of parenting, neurodivergence, or caring.

They work closely with Home-Start coordinators and are supervised throughout their volunteering.

Volunteers can be a huge support to families navigating a PDA profile by:

• Validating parents’ experiences and advocating for their child’s needs.
• Supporting with EHCP applications and reasonable adjustments in school.
• Helping reduce isolation and increase family confidence.
• Understanding the need for flexibility, autonomy, and reduced demands.

Because of their informal, relationship-based role, volunteers can often connect in ways professionals cannot.

Volunteers supporting PDAers may:

• Use low-demand, friendly language to build trust.
• Respect the child’s autonomy and pace, avoiding pushy or directive approaches.
• Be led by the family – what works, what doesn’t, and what’s most needed today.
• Help family members understand PDA behaviours and reduce blame.
• Adapt visits to suit the child’s sensory needs, including meeting outside the home.
• Use playfulness and humour as a way to connect when direct support is difficult.

They often support the whole family system, not just the child.

The Home-Start Volunteer we spoke to told us that they can provide calm, consistent support when families are struggling to cope or navigate systems. For PDAers and their families, they may be:

• The first person who truly listens and understands.
• A source of compassion without judgement.
• A bridge to wider help, delivered with empathy and flexibility.

PDAers and their families often tell us how confusing and unsettling it can be to meet new professionals – especially when it’s not clear what their job is or what good support looks like. That’s why we asked professionals themselves to tell us, in their own words, what they do. You’ll find their honest, personal answers in the ‘What professionals do’ section of our site.

This is a growing resource, so if you don’t see the role you’re looking for yet, you could ask the person you’re working with to fill in this short form.

Please note: these insights come from individual professionals, not official organisations, so you might find some variation in how people describe their roles. If you’re wondering whether a service you’ve been offered is the right fit, our guides to finding helpful support can help.