Announcements, MPs, Home School & a Super Moon 3rd December 2017 Dear All It feels rather like the world of SEND could be followed just by Twitter this week… NB: If this is the first time you have received this; please note that you can unsubscribe by following the link at the end of this newsletter.
National Conference for Parent/Carer Forums Two of us spent a day and a half in sunny [not] Manchester with parent/carer representatives from most of the parent/carer forums nationally.
#1 What is a Parent/Carer Forum? A Parent/Carer Forum is a group of (usually) volunteers that seeks to represent parents and carers of children & young people with SEND within their borough/s – to the service providers such as the Local Authority or the Health providers. https://contact.org.uk/get-involved/parent-carer-participation/what-is-a-parent-carerforum/ Locally, SEND Family Voices take this role and it is where most of our funding comes from. As a steering group, we are all volunteers and all parents – although we receive additional funding from other sources. As a group of volunteers, we believe that we must take responsibility for our actions and be thoroughly ethical in our approach; we work to the Nolan Principles of public life (see our Policies on our website). We recently worked out our combined steering group reach exceeds 4000. And… importantly… in the same way that all children and young people are different, and SEND covers a massive arena… We acknowledge that no disability specific group, nor collective forum can absolutely represent all parents. We just do the best we can. Please contact us if you would like to know more, or to contribute to our work.
#2 So what did the Conference cover? Lots! Once we have the slides, we will put these onto our website. In the meantime, here are some highlights… • The sponsor was the SeaShell Trust, we heard from their CEO and you can read more about them here: http://www.seashelltrust.org.uk/ • We had a video address from Minister of State for Children & Families, Robert Goodwill MP. (it was said more than once in the room, that due to the Government’s majority being small, MPs were not allowed to go too far from Westminster mid-week should there be some urgent vote). In the past, the Minister has attended. •
This was followed by a very sensible presentation from Ann Gross, Director of Life Skills, Disadvantage and SEND, from the Department of Education. Slides to follow. On new policies: “I think it is unthinkable that we [government] would take
forward major policy change without involving families”