What is the Local Offer?
All Boroughs have a Local Offer website for children and young people with additional needs, their families and the practitioners who help them. On it you will find helpful information and the details of support services in your area.
All Local Offers differ, but generally they are divided into sections:
- Parents and Carers – advice about what to do if you have concerns about your child’s development, Send Laws and Practices, Courses and Training, general help and support
- Young People – Guidance and support in relation to post 16 education, EHC plans and reviews, mental health support, travel assistance and preparation for adulthood
- Practitioners – SEND Statutory guidance and updated information on all aspects of SEND as well as SENCO and Practitioners resources.
Why is it important that we research this as parents?
It is the Practitioner’s section that can give parent’s some really useful information in relation to how children’s needs are assessed in school and what support is available.
There are three main documents that I feel it would be helpful to focus on within the Local Offer for each Borough. The first being:
1. SEND Support Arrangements/ Plans- This document provides settings with the template required to complete a pre-statutory plan and ensures that a child’s challenges and needs are recorded in one place. Sometimes parent’s know there child has a one page profile in place and/or an Individual Support Plan sometimes called an ISP which records their targets, but these are pages within the Send Support Plan and it’s useful for parents to know this because if a decision is made to request an EHCP then this document needs to be completed in full as part of the process, so understanding it and what’s involved can be really empowering for parents’/carers.
This takes us to the second document that can usually be found in the Practitioner’s section of the Local Offer:
2. The Graduated Response. There are typically two versions of this, separated into Early Years for those under statutory school age and a schools edition for those of statutory school age.
It is exactly what the name suggests, offering a graduated response to children’s needs and putting appropriate support in place and adding to it when needed.
It is divided into four areas:
- Communication and Interaction
- Cognition and Learning
- Social, Emotional and Mental Health
- Physical and Sensory Needs (including Hearing Impairment, Visual Impairment and/or Multi-Sensory Impairment
It’s written for teachers so is it going to be hard for parent’s to make sense of?
And is usually written as two parts, the first being a child’s profile of need and the second part is often referred to as the ‘Plan, Do and Review’ cycle focusing on:
- Assessment and Planning
- Intervention and Support
- Evaluating Progress and Review
This is an invaluable document for parents and teachers/SENCOs because it allows you to gain a better understanding of where your child is falling in their profile of need and be an active part of the conversation about what support can be put in place.
Can you explain what you mean by the statement Profile Of Need?
In Part 1 each of the four areas:
- Communication and Interaction
- Cognition and Learning
- Social, Emotional and Mental Health
- Physical and Sensory Needs (including Hearing Impairment, Visual Impairment and/or Multi-Sensory Impairment
are broken down into broad indicators of where a child may be falling in their development under the following categories:
- Universal – Support and access to services that enable all children and their families to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy life, and achieve their full potential.
- Setting Support – the majority of children will have their needs met through settings which adapt to meet individual need. This may mean use of visuals or simplifying tasks set etc.
- Specialist Support – Where a child continues to make less than expected progress, despite evidence- based support and interventions. Outside professionals may already be involved or referrals need to be made
- Statutory Assessment -Where, despite relevant and purposeful action has been taken to identify, assess and meet the SEND of the child, the child has not made expected progress with the involvement of multi-agency professionals, the setting or parents should consider requesting a statutory assessment
Although the Graduated Response was not designed to be used as a comprehensive assessment tool, it can be useful to highlight where you think your child is falling, based on feedback from the school and your own knowledge of them. This will then help you when looking at Part 2 of the Graduated Response which is divided in the same way, but instead of explaining how children may be presenting at school if offers guidance on the support that can be actioned for children falling into the different categories of Universal, Setting Support, Specialist Support and Statutory Assessment levels.
All of this information can and should feed into the Send Support Arrangements to give a comprehensive picture of a child needs, the support in place and next steps planned.
So that’s the Send Support Arrangements/Plan and the Graduated Response, what’s the third document?
The third document is:
3. The Inclusion and Additional Needs School Offer-this sometimes goes by a different name, but holds a wealth of information about what is available for schools to access from; training support, screening tools, free access to learning programmes and interventions through to specialist support available such as phone consultations with Educational Psychologists.
By educating ourselves that these documents exist, we are able to play an active part in the support our children receive as opposed to being a bystander.
By Tamsyn Hendry – May 2023