Did you offer provision for children with Special Educational Needs & Disabilities? If yes then can you share examples?
Throughout 2023 – 2024, we have commissioned training from Active Impact, a local disability service and support organisation encouraging inclusive opportunities for disabled and non-disabled young people based in Gloucestershire, to ensure that all providers on the HAF programme were aware of the adjustments they could make to ensure their activities were more inclusive and accessible to children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. We provided sensory tents to 60 providers to help them to create quiet spaces that children could access during the provision.
Children with SEND accounted for 14% of those attending the HAF programme. This included 6% with a recognised disability, and 8% with a special education need.
As part of our HAF Framework we allocated a specific Lot with a focus on the delivery of sessions for CYP with Special Educational Needs and Disability. This ensured an inclusive and accessible offer across the county for all children and young people but particularly those with SEND. Providers had a cross cutting range of experiences which included special schools to mobile providers. Some included Mentoring, the SAND Academies, Goals Beyond Grass and The Spring Centre.
We worked closely with members of the Gloucestershire Parent Carers Forum to review our provision and received feedback from their members to ensure that the activities we commissioned were inclusive and met the needs of children and young people and their families. This also included reviewing delivery to build on the provision but horizon scanning for emerging needs, so that the HAF programme stayed fit for purpose.
In Winter HAF 2022, we began piloting a new project All About Me and All about Us, as we recognised that families needed more information about what was available, and providers needed more information about children and young people to ensure that they had the best experience.
‘All About Me’ enabled families to provide more information about their children and young people and ‘All About Us’ enabled providers to share more detailed information including photographs of the provision. This helped families decide whether the provision would be suitable for their child.
Throughout 2023, we developed the project by looking at different ways and templates that will support streamlining the process as well as introducing it to more providers to implement in their delivery with the aim to get all providers doing this by Summer HAF 2024.
Feedback received from families suggested that these forms were useful in terms of gauging the needs of the whole group and ensured activities were detailed sufficiently. They were also useful in identifying strategies to encourage them to join in with the activities.
The impact of the All About Me and All About Us process was mostly positive. In 2022 - 2023 the percentage of participants with SEND was 11% in Spring, 21% in Summer and 17% in Winter.
In 2023 – 2024, the percentage of participants with SEND increased to 18% in Spring, decreased in summer to 16% and remained static at 17% in Winter.
Reports from HAF community connectors suggested that some SEND families feel this is ‘just another form to fill in’ which could suggest the why attendance rates could be improved. We are working with our Specialist SEND HAF Community Connector to improve and simplify this process further in 2024 using their knowledge of barriers that SEND families face and suggestions on how to simplify processes.
Following feedback from parents, carers, and partners, in Winter HAF 2023 we piloted a ‘soft launch’ of the booking system a week before it goes public. This enabled parents who required more time to review activities to decide whether it was appropriate for their child to attend. Traditionally, the majority of HAF activities are booked out within the first 24 hours. Families who required extra support when booking were able to make use of our HAF Community Connectors in each district, commissioned by the GCC HAF team to deliver additional and direct support for vulnerable families to access activities and signpost to local support services within the family’s communities where necessary, to review activities and book those they find eligible for their child without the worry of it selling out before they could decide. This pilot launch was very successful, and we have continued this approach in 2024-2025 extending the soft launch period to two weeks prior to the live date in the lead up to the summer and winter holidays 2024. This supported the complex and busy lives of some of our most vulnerable families and is drawn from feedback from parents and professionals we work with who support families.
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