Parent Panels - Parent Carers Together

What is a parent panel?

Parent panels are groups of parents and carers who have an interest and experience of a particular subject and can give feedback which will benefit the wider SEND community.

Parent Views on Preparing for Adulthood Guide

Our second parent panel was held on 22nd February and focussed on PfA.

We wanted parents to tell us what they thought of the ‘Parent Guide to PfA’ document we have been developing. Once published, the guide will have links to local and national services and groups to help parents help their young person on their journey in preparing for adulthood.

The session was held at Bournemouth Library.

Short Breaks

Our first parent panel session focussed on the BCP Short Breaks service.

Local Authorities have a legal duty to provide breaks for carers and disabled children which are called ‘short breaks.’ The BCP Short Breaks programme provides activities for children and young people aged 0 to 19 years with special educational needs/disabilities (SEND).

A review of the BCP Council Short Breaks offer is currently being undertaken and the forum helped with this review by collating feedback from the two panels we held on the topic-a virtual session and a face to face session, both on 16th May 2023. Those who were unable to attend, were invited to email in their thoughts.

All feedback was anonymised and shared with members of BCP Council to help them to shape the Short Breaks service to meet local need.

Click through the slides below to read our Sway report which summarises the feedback gathered.

In November 2023, Parent Carers Together had a meeting with commissioners for the service and BCP data showed that the uptake of Short Breaks places were low. We asked them why that was, and they didn’t know and we wanted to find out.

Therefore, we devised a quick, four question online survey which we asked BCP parents and carers of children with SEND to take the time to answer. We wanted to know if they accessed Short Breaks or not and for their feedback about the service generally.

On 24th January, we thanked all those who completed our Short Breaks follow up survey informing them it closed on 14th January and we had submitted a report to BCP Council.

Pearl and Louise from the forum have been attending the Short Breaks meetings to discuss and plan the way forward.

We had a follow up meeting with Steve & Jenni at Short Breaks about some of the issues raised by parents and have started to develop an action plan to address these:

Better promotion of Short Breaks
Improving the way the Short Breaks brochure looks – images they use etc
Reviewing the application and payment portal
Making it easier for parents with more than one child to book activities on one form
Improving the way that parents can know that providers can meet child’s needs
Exploring capacity for the more popular activities
Exploring increasing capacity to promote independence for teens

These are just some of the things we will be exploring in the coming weeks as we develop this action plan. We will keep you posted!

Further parent panels

We want to run more Parent Panels in 2024.

Keep checking this page for updates.