Worcestershire Parent Carer Forum plays 2 roles. We listen to parents and gain their feedback on SEND services in Worcestershire. Our approach to this is to run well-being events, to up-skill parents with advice and training from professional speakers and to run peer support events. This year alone we have run more than 120 parent carer events across the 6 districts of Worcestershire. Whilst parents are with us, they share their experiences and we listen, learn and gather themes about Worcestershire’s SEND families’ experiences. Parent carers’ feedback tells us they really value our events and it’s running these that keeps us motivated.
Leaning into that feedback, we then attend meetings with education, health and social care staff from Worcestershire County Council, ICB and NHS trust to share the Worcestershire parent carer voice. Our parent carer reps attend more than 200 meetings a year and say it as we see it. We are straight-talking, plain-speaking and brutally honest. Ask anyone that also attends – we are not shy in speaking up.
As a parent carer forum, we are funded by the Dept for Education (a whopping £17.5k a year) and receiving this income prevents us from campaigning. We sail very close to the line, but our constitution was specifically written to enable us to support and raise awareness of campaign groups that align with our aims and objectives.
A parent carer forum is different to a campaign organisation – we give honest feedback and share the parent carer perspective, and then we try to help. We try to coproduce – to work as equal partners to create better services and outcomes for our children and young people. Let’s be honest – it rarely happens. More often than not, we’re consulted with and sometimes we’re informed. Some of the projects that we’re invited to be involved in move at a snail’s pace and others expect us to provide feedback over a weekend. And let’s remember, all of our parent carer reps are parents carers themselves – juggling their own young people’s needs and having their own struggles with the system.
Some small projects have been true co-production and do bring about little pockets of transparency in an otherwise bewildering system. Some projects aren’t finished yet but are looking promising. Some of the SEND practitioners we work with ‘get it’, want to coproduce and are realistic when we’re not co-producing. Because not everything can be coproduced – we’d need as many parent carer reps as they have staff!
Some projects we’re involved with are released into the wild and the best we can say is – “you should have seen what it was like before we got involved.”
This week the Local Area Partnership released a draft of their Self-Evaluation Framework for public comment.
Previous to that, WPCF reps had met with the Director of All-Age Disability to review some of the statistics and graphs to ensure they made sense to parent carers. We provided some extensive feedback on these limited areas. It was an honest and constructive exchange of views.
Later on, a full draft of the SEF was shared with WPCF and we provided some quick but honest commentary. Our feedback included:
- We requested that the phrase coproduced with WPCF be removed – we hadn’t. We were informed and consulted with, but we didn’t co-produce the SEF.
- We suggested that the reading age of the document would make it inaccessible to many parent carers and that more plain English was required.
- We made recommendations to improve the colour contrasts to enable partially-sighted parent carers to be able to access the document.
- We objected to the description of a 3-year recovery plan “eradicating” long waits for Autism and ADHD assessments. Waiting lists are up, not eradicated.
- We requested that
- the commissioning gap for OT assessments for EHCNAs be acknowledged – we have fought long and hard for this gap to be accepted and addressed.
- the long waits for community paediatrics be acknowledged – 1640 families are in the queue and 374 of them have been waiting more than 104 weeks.
- the lack of specialist school places and the absence of a plan to address them be acknowledged – we are still waiting for figures for how many C&YP are not on roll and are waiting for a specialist school placement.
- the very poor EOTAS experience be acknowledged – families who need or are forced down the EOTAS route find themselves even more lost and unsupported than the majority.
- the EBSA children who fall between the cracks be acknowledged – children with an EHCP who aren’t attending school sometimes spend months or even years with no provision.
- the huge dissatisfaction with Short Breaks be fully acknowledged – our Short Breaks report breaks down the full extent of parent carers’ dissatisfaction.
- the poor communication (micro and macro) be acknowledged.
The short summary is that some of our feedback was implemented and some wasn’t. WPCF know that the current SEF draft feels totally out of sync with parent carers’ experiences. We know, because we talk to hundreds of parent carers every month. Much of the ‘activity’ documented in the report, hasn’t yet had any impact on the outcomes for our children. Until that activity results in better experiences and outcomes, it will just be ‘activity’.
Like all parent carers, WPCF also has the opportunity to feedback on the draft SEF which we will be doing by the feedback deadline of Sunday 7th December.
Worcestershire Parent Carer Forum remain committed to being a partner in the Local Area Partnership and will continue to strive towards genuine co-production. We will also continue to be proactive in our help supporting change for better outcomes for our Worcestershire SEND children and young people. However, the inclusion of the WPCF logo on Local Area Partnership documents does not equate to our endorsement of that document.
