SEND Family Voices acts to maintain independence 4th June 2018
Dear All What’s changing, and Why? SEND Family Voices, the Richmond and Kingston based charity for families with children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), has decided not to apply for a Department for Education (DfE) grant. This is a central government grant for parent carer forums which has been our main source of funding to date. We have made this decision in order to maintain and preserve absolute independence from Local Authority (Achieving for Children) control. We want to ensure our actions are guided only by what parents tell us they wish us to focus on. We felt that Achieving for Children (AfC) had increasingly been trying to dictate how we worked with them, while in many areas being unable to engage constructively with the parent community. It is our view that to continue to take the grant money would be to maintain the illusion that parents’ views are central to the decisions about support for children and young people with SEND – and we feel that this is not the case.
What does this mean for you? We hope that this will have minimal impact on parents and carers and we fully intend to continue with the work that we have been doing. As we are all volunteers our costs are low and we are confident that we can continue to run as normal. In time, we hope to find other sources of funding to support our bigger projects
What will SEND Family Voices be focusing on? We want to focus our time and resources in informing local families how to best navigate our complex and overstretched SEND system. Our current plans include: • A series of school meetings to provide outreach to families within schools and support the hard pressed SENCO community / special school Headteachers • In response to parent demand, we have invited the acclaimed SEN barrister Steve Broach to speak to parents about post-16 provision at an event this September. Details to follow. • We will continue to run our telephone, email and web contact service for parents (and professionals) as well as our fortnightly newsletters. • We are committed to producing information and guidance to empower and inform parents (previous examples include the ‘Golden Binder’ and the ‘Guide to Reasonable Adjustments’). A key role of our forum has been to ensure that parent voices are heard; and we believe that it is important that we carry on doing this. We will continue to maintain a summarised and anonymised record of the problems that parents tell us about, which we will make available to service providers and decision makers.
We welcome opportunities to work with service providers where parent input can have a positive influence.
What can parents contribute? We aim absolutely to be a parent-led organisation, so the first and most important thing you can do is to tell other parents about us so that they know we are here to support them. You can also contact your Headteacher or SENCo to invite us to host a SEN parent meeting at your school if you feel that would be useful. As always, we want to know what issues are most important to you, so please keep communicating with us! We are also always keen to hear from parents that would like to join our Steering Group – so if anyone feels that they could contribute a few hours a week we would love to hear from you. We at SEND Family Voices feel that that with these changes we are entering an exciting new phase and are certain that our combined energies can continue to be put to good use for our SEND community. With best wishes from all at SEND Family Voices T: 07469 746 145 E: sendfamilyvoices@outlook.com W: www.sendfamilyvoices.org