I recently went to Manchester Town Hall, together with Tanya from the Parent Champions and a few service leads in Education and Social Care, to present the SEND Annual Report to the Children and Young People’s Scrutiny Committee. I was given an opportunity to speak about the forum at the start and I wanted to share it with you.

We’re a proud team of parent carer volunteers who strive to amplify the voices of all SEND families in Manchester and beyond.

We currently have 1,451 members who have officially joined through our website, but we realise this isn’t the only way to reach people as we also have a total of 6,435 followers across our other platforms. Our website averages around 6,000 visits per month whilst our Facebook views are over 30,000 in the past month.

We hold regular coffee mornings, many of which are visited by professionals from teams such as SENDIASS, CAMHS, the LA and more. These coffee mornings are a vital way for us to offer peer-to-peer support, help to reduce isolation, and for families to access information from services and each other.

We work closely with health colleagues on things such as the Neurodevelopmental Pathway changes. This partnership has led to us sharing an office with Manchester’s ND Navigators, which in turn has helped us to develop our monthly after-school club “Cool 2 Be You”. Cool 2 Be You is a safe space for children and young people to be themselves and have fun. It also gives families face to face access to PCF team members and the ND Navigators who co-facilitate it with us. We hold the sessions in a CAMHS building which helps families to overcome any fears they have about visiting the building for clinic appointments.

Another huge piece of co-production work we’ve been part of is the Neurodiversity in Education (NiE) work, including Autism in Schools and PINS (Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools). We have co-delivered these projects in every way. We’ve been part of the conversations with schools about signing up, analysed data, helped to develop the training modules, co-delivered the training modules in every PINS school and gathered the voices of parent carers, children and young people, and school staff. We’re now looking forward to using the learning from these projects to co-produce a Manchester project in line with the SEND reforms.

We have recently been delivering workshops for professionals on neurodiversity and working with parent carers who may be neurodivergent. People have attended these workshops from teams including but not limited to:

  • Early Help
  • Education teams within the Local Authority
  • Greater Manchester Police
  • Sexual Health teams
  • Social workers

MPCF also works closely with the SEND Local Offer team. We attend the monthly Local Offer Drop-ins and regularly contribute to the newsletters. We also deliver many SEND Community Offer activities for families, both in the holidays and all year round.

The SEND Community Offer supports our Cool 2 Be You sessions and our monthly relaxed cinema screenings. In the school holidays, it’s all systems go as we facilitate activities such as:

  • Festive light trails
  • Pantos and Theatre shows
  • Tenpin bowling
  • BMX cycling
  • Museum and art gallery sessions
  • Cute and cuddly animal experiences
  • Egg hunts and so much more

We use these activities, as well as our coffee mornings, school visits, surveys, social media, and WhatsApp groups to offer support to our families as well as getting to know them so we can find out what’s important to them. At the recent Manchester Inclusion Conference, we held an information gathering session on “What’s Important to Families” and delivered a workshop alongside Manchester Parent Champions and the LA, which we hope will help families to understand SEN Support without an EHCP.

We also co-chair the Manchester Working Together Network meetings, which are a brilliant way to connect with many of the other parent-led groups across the city. The groups who attend these meetings are all doing amazing work for SEND families in Manchester. They come to the meetings to showcase what they’re doing, discuss gaps and how we can support each other, and bring even more voices to the table. We’re very grateful to all of them.

A recording of the full meeting can be found on Manchester City Council’s Vimeo; our portion of the agenda starts at 3 minutes, 40 seconds and ends at 1 hour, 33 minutes.