IT IS the champion of breastfeeding and home births, and its antenatal classes are popular among professionals.

But now the National Childbirth Trust wants to transform its image out of concern that it is too white and too middleclass.

As a first step it is to drop its “evangelical” position on breastfeeding, moving from a stance of “promoting” it to one of “protecting” the rights of women who decide to do it.

The shift, which follows a two-year review of the charity’s work, forms part of its new “20/20 strategy”, a programme to reach all 20 million parents in Britain by 2020, regardless of their background.

“We need to get the message out that the NCT is for everyone, not just for ‘posh’ parents as some people assume,” said Anne Fox, its head of corporate communications.

“We want to have a more diverse reach. We have always worked on word of mouth, but now we want the person who says, ‘you should go to NCT’ to be a pregnant 15 year-old living in central Manchester.

“Our practitioners and volunteers are trained to support all parents – those from ethnic minority groups, families that are newly arrived and those who parent on their own.”

The NCT, formed in 1956, has 100,000 members, making it the biggest parenting charity in the UK. It provided antenatal classes for about 90,000 couples last year, 16 per cent of them free through the NHS.

An analysis of parents signing up to paid-for sessions, which cost about £200, revealed that 86 per cent had a degree and 95 per cent were white.

The NCT wants to run more NHS and children centre classes, which would open up its membership to a more diverse range of parents.

The shift in stance follows warnings that strident campaigning — labelled by critics as “Breastapo” tactics — can alienate women who decide to bottle-feed.

Rates of breastfeeding among new mothers range from 90 per cent for more affluent women, to just over 70 per cent for those in the poorest social classes and only 63 per cent for teenage mothers. The Government recommends that babies are breastfed exclusively for six months.

“We are very happy to put our hands up and say that over the years we have perhaps

We want to reach out to the pregnant 15 year-old living in Manchester

been evangelical about breastfeeding because at that time, it was needed,” said Mrs Fox. “Now we don’t believe that is the right approach.

“Most women want to breastfeed and most stop before they want to because of external pressures such as a lack of support. We want to work with parents and make sure the barriers that might be there are taken away.”

The policy is a significant departure for a charity that reported OK magazine to the Advertising Standards Authority in 2007 for featuring a photograph of the model Katie Price bottle-feeding her baby. As the milk company’s logo was visible, the NCT argued that it broke the ban in Britain on advertising formula milk for babies.

Mrs Fox said the “breast is best” public health message was now well established: “We don’t feel that we need to say to people ‘you should breastfeed, you should breastfeed.’ There are organisations that do that.”

With 10,000 volunteers and a branch in every postcode, the charity is well placed to be at the heart of the Government’s “Big Society” programme, which aims to transfer more public services to the voluntary sector. It runs free NHS antenatal classes in Birmingham, Chester, Eastbourne and Salisbury and is bidding for more contracts.

The NCT’S change of approach on infant feeding is likely to prove controversial, however, coming at a time when the Government has cut funds to promote breastfeeding. Last year, ministers pulled the funding for Breastfeeding Awareness Week and cash for the national breastfeeding helpline is now under threat.

Emma Pickett, a councillor with the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers, said: “The NCT is right in that the real crisis is the number of women who initially breastfeed but don’t go on to meet their own breastfeeding goals.

“But you also can’t assume that everybody has the same access to information about the various benefits of breast feeding. I’ve spoken to lots of women, even educated women, who really don’t know why exclusive breastfeeding is recommended.”