We have developed some publicity resources and are encouraging professionals to use these when they meet with families.

We are developing a training module to help people who advise families to understand what SEND is, what the Local Offer is and how it can be used.

We have attended events such as Careers Fairs and Family Fun days with a stall to help raise awareness.

We are updating custom search terms to help promote pages that you might be looking for.

We are using a separate, bespoke search for directories – SEND services, schools, and childcare. This allows more control over the order of results to make relevant to you – location, age group, type of services etc.

We have made clearer pathways through information

• Where processes are complicated, we have a design pattern to help to take you through each step
• By laying out the process using steps we can help to give you an understanding of where you are and what comes next

For example Education, Health and Care Plans – The page takes you on a journey breaking down the process into steps (often numbered). Eligibility criteria and supporting documents or referral forms are available in the relevant steps to avoid overwhelming before you get to that point. It is clear what comes next but also what should have happened before.  We are now updating other areas to use this format.

We have made an A to Z of the different professionals you may come across.  We explain what their roles do and where to find more information.  We also explain some of the meetings these professionals will have together.

See more at What SEND professionals do.

We used to write for example CYP instead of ‘children and young people’ to make the text shorter.  But people have said this gets too confusing.  We try to avoid using acronyms now.  We are updating older pages.  But there are times when an acronym is frequently used by both professionals and parent carers – for example SENCO .  We have developed a new tool to make it easier for people to check what the acronym means whilst reading the text.  You don’t need to navigate away to a new glossary page to find out what it means.

Test it out now – hover over an acronym in the paragraph above.  If you spot a page we’ve not updated yet then don’t forget to point it out to us using the feedback link at the bottom of the page.

The Unstoppables told us that they found it hard to find reliable information about what things they can do when as they grow older, and if their additional needs will have an impact on that.

Parent carers have told us that they would love a list of “when your child turns this age, you might want to look at this”.

Alice, our Local Offer Young Person’s Champion has been updating the Preparing for adult life section which will be ready soon.  Read more about it in this news article.

All Community Inclusion and Activity Team events are now on the SEND events calendar and can be found using the ‘CIA Team’ category filter.

We are now taking to events QR codes to help you quickly access the filtered online calendar, or to download a pdf in the traditional style.

We are looking at options for subscribing to updates.

We have a program that tells us if there are dead links (the web page no longer exists) so we can try to make sure this does not happen. This automated process can only tell us if the links is dead though. It won’t tell us if the webpage linked to still works but no longer has the content we told you they have. Somerset Parent Carer Forum audit pages every 6 months to catch these broken links. But please continue to use the feedback form at the bottom of every page to let us know if you find any links not working or not showing what you expected to see.