The Divisional Director for Education and Partnerships and Head of Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) meet parents twice a year and hear from them about pressing issues.
Parents can make their views known, through the:
- Parent and Carer Council,
- various groups run by the Parent and Family Support Service
- SEND Information and Advice Service
- Parent and Carer Survey and Pupil Survey.
The council has trained local parents to become SEND Ambassadors. Their role is to provide outreach and attend events to promote Parent Participation. Their aim is to ensure a strong parental voice at a strategic level.
Tower Hamlets has supported the setting up of an independent SEND Forum and we have both a parent and student representative on the SEND Improvement Board. The student representative has recently presented a report with recommendations from the Our Time Forum, an all ability youth forum run for and by young people between the ages of 16-25 with SEND.
Before having a public consultation, we ran 15 pre-consultation engagement events to explain SEND funding. These were attended by 170 people, mainly parents.
Three examples of areas that parents and young people have influenced decision making include:
- our current increased focus on pathways into employment so that now TH has more than half of all the supported internships across the whole of London,
- our planning to invest more in intervention in the early years and
- planning to establish more support for pupils who have Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but are academically able.