2024 Local Offer Annual Report | Local Offer Reports

Introduction

Welcome to the annual report on the Kirklees SEND Local Offer for 2023-24. This report explains what developments have happened with the Local Offer over the last year.

‘Local authorities must publish a Local Offer, setting out in one place information about provision they expect to be available across education, health and social care for children and young people in their area who have Special Educational Needs (SEN) or are disabled, including those who do not have Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans. In setting out what they ‘expect to be available’, local authorities should include provision which they believe will actually be available.'

The Local Offer has two key purposes:

to provide clear, comprehensive, accessible and up-to-date information about the available provision and how to access it; and
to make provision more responsive to local needs and aspirations by directly involving disabled children and those with SEND and their parents and carers, and disabled young people and those with SEND, and service providers in its development and review.’

SEND Code of Practice

The Kirklees SEND Local Offer is more than just a website. We aim to help families and young people with SEND to have access to good information advice and support via a wide range of different methods:

Comprehensive website which is regularly updated
Regularly updated facebook page
Telephone, email and facebook messenger support for specific questions
Face to face drop in sessions within the community, alongside community organisations.
Large scale “Local Offer Live” market stall event (this year co-produced with PCAN) to bring services face to face with families as well as offering video workshops delivered by a range of SEND professionals from across Kirklees
Inclusion Support Offer which offers support around emerging SEND issues for professionals who are working with families of young people with SEND - this includes schools and LA professionals.
Local Offer Booklet produced which provides a summary of the SEND Offer within Kirklees

This year there is a requirement for all public facing websites to meet the Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG), this is something which is enforceable by the cabinet office. At the end of 2023, the Local Offer received a WCAG report which highlighted some accessibility issues that needed to be addressed.

The issues may have appeared minor, but for users of screen readers or any other kind of accessible technology, these issues needed to be addressed. Most of these issues have been resolved, but some where related to the Google translate feature, which are out of our control.

The details of these can be found in the Local Offer privacy policy.

Local Offer privacy policy (opens link in same window)

Following working through the recommendations within this report, we have focused on regular accessibility assessment using some software called Silktide.

This helps us to keep on top of any issues and refer them to our web developers.

New Features

We have not added any additional features in the last year.

Move to Early Support

Previously the Local Offer team sat within a team called Education Safeguarding & Inclusion, this team had the EHCP team, education safeguarding, attendance, educational psychology & the specialist outreach team in it, alongside the Local Offer.

We have now moved into the Early Support team, the aim here is to support families to get the right support at the right time and for the Local Offer to sit alongside other offers of support, such as from Families Together. The success of the Local Offer has been recognised and the aim is for this model to be used for wider family information across Kirklees.

We have continued to engage with families and young people from across Kirklees:

Monthly co-production meetings with PCAN - we would like to expand this to include members of other family support groups.
Regular community drop in events for families to come and speak with the Local Offer team face to face alongside other community teams such as Community Plus and the 4 Families Together place based teams.
Attending support groups (such as PCAN) and school coffee mornings to explain what the Local Offer is and discuss any concerns they have.
Large scale “Local Offer Live” market stall events to bring services face to face with families as well as offering workshops delivered by Kirklees SEND experts.

Following the success of the Local Offer live in 2023, we ran another event this year.

This was held at the John Smith Stadium and had over 80 stalls from local services and activity providers. We also had a range of workshops running throughout the day. We had over 300 people attending the event.

The event this year was co-produced alongside PCAN and was considered a tremendous success. We want to work like this on future events as it ensures that SEND families are at the heart of what the Local Offer is all about and that we have the right services, activities and information at the event.

For the workshops we trialled using pre-recorded video workshops, this allowed us to run them throughout the day as well as putting them on the Local offer. This allowed many more people to see them.

The workshops can be found here:

Local Offer Live 2024 - Workshops | Local Offer Live | Kirklees SEND Local Offer (opens link in same window)

The SEND Code of Practice requires that we provide the Local Offer to those without the internet, we do this via a telephone number which families can speak to a member of the Local Offer team or leave a message. We also have produced a 19 page Local Offer booklet which brings the essential information about SEND into one easy to read place.

We are aware that one of the issues with a paper booklet is that it can become out of date quickly, so we plan to review this booklet annually. The current booklet has been reviewed and is currently being proof read by the Local Offer team and PCAN. We hope to get the second edition of the booklet issues at the end of 2024.

We distribute this booklet whenever we meet with families at any face to face events and following feedback from PCAN, we have added a link to the PDF for this to the Local Offer website so that it can be printed at home.

Summary of the Local Offer performance

The information below shows the user data 11th November 2023 to 11th November 2024 (when this report was written).

Views - 423,662 - this is represents a significant increase in users to the site.

We have a total user base of 89,196, which is an increase of around 20,000 users.

The most popular page continues to be the search results page, which demonstrates that this is the most popular way that users access the Local Offer.

Facebook performance summary

We have a had successful Facebook page in place since 2021, last year the reach was of over 62.9k, which is 20% than last year. It currently has over 1,800 followers, which is an increase of 400 users.

We also use this as a way of advertising engagement events where families can talk with us face to face.

This also provides a rich source of feedback from users and influences the continued development of the Local Offer service.

‘The governing bodies of maintained schools and maintained nursery schools and the proprietors of academy schools must publish information on their websites about the implementation of the governing body’s or the proprietor’s policy for pupils with SEND.

The SEND Information Report should give details of the school’s contribution to the Local Offer and must include information on where the local authority’s Local Offer is published.’

SEND Code of Practice

In Kirklees all schools and further education colleges are expected to have a link to the Local Offer as part of their SEND Information Report. Furthermore, we are promoting the new Kirklees Local Offer in schools through SEND newsletters, SENDCO (Special Educational Needs & Disabilities Co-ordinators) Net, Heads Up (school newsletter) and through conversations with school staff. All existing links to the current Local Offer go to the new Kirklees Local Offer.

The Local Offer invites visitors to feedback on their experience of using the site. When appropriate feedback is passed on to the relevant service managers and commissioners to respond to.

We publish feedback in our Your Said We Did section, which explains what we have done once we received this comment.

What is "You Said, We Did" | You Said, We Did | Kirklees SEND Local Offer (opens link in same window)

We continue to work closely with families, young people and colleagues across education, health and social care as well as in the community sector to co-produce the Local Offer and ensure it meets the needs of children & young people with SEND and their families.

We are constantly learning about how we need to deliver information, advice and guidance to those who need it in different ways.

We are committed to continuing to be more than just a website, with more community drop in sessions, the Local Offer Live event, SEND workshops and sessions alongside PCAN to help teach people how to use the Local Offer website.