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Accessibility Statement
Kirklees Local Offer

How do we create the Local Offer?

The Local Offer has been co-produced - this means that we have worked with lots of different people and groups from within Kirklees.  This means people from education, health, social care, general public services, the community as well as parents, carers and young people themselves who have SEND.

This page explains who we have worked with on the Local Offer - and continue to work with to keep the Local Offer up to date, relevant and interesting.

We want to make sure that information on the Local Offer is up to date and relevant, we do this through a 6 monthly review cycle where we contact all the people who have given us information to make sure the information is still up to date.

We also work with families, young people and services when they let us know if something is missing or not right and change things where we can.  You can see what we have done on the Comments and Reports section.

Education:

  • SENDACT (EHCP team)
  • Education Safeguarding
  • Educational Psychology
  • Specialist Outreach teams
  • EYSEND
  • Kirklees Learning Partners
  • C+k Careers
  • A range of local schools
  • Family Information Service
  • Kirklees Virtual School
  • School transport

Health:

  • CAMHS
  • Thriving Kirklees
  • Locala
  • CHFT
  • SWYPFT
  • NHS LD Teams
  • Sensory OT service
  • Children's Therapy Services
  • Dental services
  • Wheelchair Services
  • Northorpe Hall
  • Accessible Homes Team
  • Adult's therapy team
  • Kirklees Neurodevelopment Team

Social Care:

  • Early Support
  • Families Together
  • Children with a Disability Service
  • Shared Lives
  • Community Plus
  • Short Breaks team
  • Preparing for adulthood team

Other Services:

  • Department of Work and Pensions
  • Youth Offending Team
  • Cloverleaf advocacy
  • Auntie Pams

Parents, carers and young people:

  • PCAN
  • KIAS (young people)
  • Young people via Your Voice
  • Students at Ravenshall School
  • Individual parents from various local support groups (HSGA, ADHD Group and via facebook LO page)

We have worked alongside PCAN (opens link in new window) who are a local group which works to represent and support local parents and carers of children with SEND.

We worked with them from the very beginning by having weekly meetings with PCAN, we shared information and asked questions which PCAN would take to the parents and carers involved with PCAN.  They then fed back to PCAN their thoughts and ideas which we would then work with.

We continue to work with PCAN, as well as other local parent support groups in a more informal way to help review the content of the Local Offer.   We do this through Parental Listening Events where we invite parents via local support groups and the Local Offer facebook page to meet and talk about their views on the Local Offer and what we could improve, both in terms of Local Offer content and wider SEND issues within Kirklees.

We also have a 6 monthly review cycle and intend to include PCAN and other groups in this review.

We also have the facility for anonymous feedback to be left on every Local Offer page which we use to develop the content of the Local Offer, this is reflected in our You Said, We Did pages.  We also have a local offer survey where users can leave anonymous feedback.

We recognise that everyone is different and some parents & carers will not want to meet face to face or with others to discuss their views.

With this in mind we offer different ways for parents & carers to work with us, this can be through phone calls, anonymous feedback forms, surveys, email or 1:1 meetings.   We are very flexible as to when we meet with parents and can meet on evenings or weekend, virtually or face to face at a venue that suits them.

We work to make sure everyone can contribute by making sure we don't use complex "council speak" when speaking with parents & carers.

We have to be honest, this has been really hard!

The Covid pandemic meant that we found it really hard to work alongside young people with SEND as we worked on and launched the Local Offer right in the middle of lockdown.

Alongside KIAS, we worked with a small number of young people who helped to contribute their thoughts on the visuals of the site and provided some reviews of early videos.

We did do a small piece of engagement work with Your Voice to gather some views on what young people might want from a local offer (Your voice report), we also worked with Your Voice to do some engagement sessions with young people at Ravenshall Complex needs school.

These sessions are aimed at helping us understand what information young people would like to know more of.  We are also hoping to work with them to produce a video to go on the Local Offer about how to find fun stuff to do in Kirklees.

What the young people told us was:

  • They would only use a website if they knew about it, but some don't like sites with lots of writing.
  • YouTube is a very popular site that young people accessed. They liked the design, content and ‘video’ based approach.
  • Young people would be more likely to access the Local Offer Site, if they knew where to find it, it had content that interested them, it featured games, videos and audio and it was easy to use.
  • They rely on trusted adults they know to tell them about information, services and activities
  • They want information giving to them on a platform they already use, such as Instagram, youtube and facebook.
  • They find it hard to find out what they can do in the local area that is suitable for them
  • They find it hard to know how to get around in Kirklees

We are continuing to work with young people from Moorend, Ethos, Pivot, Kirklees College and hopefully a selection of mainstream schools.

We want to work with them to develop our social media offer so that the Local offer comes to them.

When we work with Young People with SEND, we try and work in their educational setting so that support can be provided for individuals in the same way that it would be in their setting.

We don't ask them to complete boring forms, but we try and make the work interesting and build a relationship with the young people and allow them to let us know what they think through enjoyable activities.

We also take the lead from those that know the young people the most and in some cases, we don't work directly with the young people, but rely on the specialist support these young people have as a way of capturing their voice, such as with schools like Castle Hill School (school for young people with profound learning difficulties and disabilities).

We have plans to have drop in sessions in local colleges for young people to be able to talk with us in an unpressured environment which is familiar to them.

Previous Kirklees Accessibility Strategy
Last updated: 23/09/2021