An eventful last meeting of 2014 with new faces and some new resolutions for taking the partnership forward:
Choosing a school for a child with special needs is not easy. Small rural schools inevitably have little experience of working with children with disabilities and or special educational needs. The chances of finding a school that has recent experience of working with a child with a similar disability as your own is remote. It is also unlikely that you will meet a parent of a child who has been to any of your local schools to give you an honest opinion about their experiences. For legal reasons the Council are not allowed to advise parents which schools are good at providing for children with special needs. It was agreed however that the Educational Psychologists would be willing to visit a school with parents to help them ask the right questions and make sense of the answers. This could prove to be a great help to parents looking to find the right school for their child
Care Opinion is a web site that allows service users to rate local services. It is carefully moderated and can prove to be very useful in helping parents make informed choices and for local services to gain honest feedback about how they can best improve. Following discussions at the November partnership meeting the Council has agreed to look at working with Care Opinion to extend this service to include parents opinions about local schools.
Events for 2015: It was agreed that the partnership would look to host two events in 2015. Both events will be designed designed around the idea that parents often come together around activities targeted at their children. The idea being that if the children are entertained the parents are likely to attend and be freed up to talk with each other. Final agreements for the events are to be agreed but the ideas included:
1. Sporting activities and social opportunities. This aim of this event will be to provide opportunities for children to try new sports and identify new opportunities that could be supported locally. For parents this will be an opportunity to meet socially and have some fun!
2. Health Education & Social Care. One of the big challenges for the council is finding capacity to complete all of the new EHSC PLANS as part of the new local offer. It has been agreed to try and do this in a new and innovative way that will give parents much greater control of what is included in the plan for their child. The idea is to hold a market place event where professionals can present to parents the range of services they have available and the type of needs they can best meet. Parents, who already understand their children’s needs, will be able to priorities which services they would want included in their child’s plan. By doing this collectively parents will also be able to chat with other parents about the types of services they do and do not think are most effective.
In the spirit of the partnership, both events will be an opportunity to demonstrate what can be achieved if parents and professionals work together as equal partners.
Finally, we hope everyone had a great Christmas and we wish everyone well for the New Year!
Next Meeting Wednesday 21st January at The Royal Hotel, Ross on Wye, from 7:30pm. All welcome