A Salford Mum-of-two who struggled to find help with her autistic son after he could no longer attend school is reaching out to support other parents in difficult situations.
Lucy Collins, 35, set up the Salford Parent Carer Forum to help families of young people with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND) after finding a ‘lack of support’ with her own child.
The Mum-of-two created her own forum after finding that there was no one there to help her or offer support when she had to take her own son out of school. She said: “I would say there was little peer support, people weren’t experiencing the difficulties that I was with my child being out of education. The school and local authority were dodging their legal responsibility when a child was unable to attend school.”
In response to the situation and with the realisation that she could no longer rely on other people to get the help she needed, Lucy took it upon herself to put a group in place to see if there were others going through the same things as her. She followed: “I had to make complaints but I still wasn’t getting anywhere, I swatted up on legislation and started accessing support groups on Facebook.”
Lucy’s initial group of 223 members on Facebook was a place to support and provided advocacy for parents and carers of children with SEND and she used it to offer them advice on EHCP (Educational Health and Care Plan).
“Once people started to contact me I was appalled with the way people were being treated and how the children were being ignored”, Lucy added. “In setting up that group I also realised there was no parent career forum in Salford because the previous one had been dismembered in Lockdown.”
Lucy now works in partnership with Salford Local Authority, Education, Health, Social Care and other providers to make sure the services they plan and deliver meet the needs of Salford families.
The forum was set up with initial funding from the charity Contact. Lucy followed: “We have been going for only 18 months so are very new but we already have nearly 500 members. Originally we started with just me as the Chair but we now have a Co-Chair and a Secretary as well.”
Lucy continued: “We sit on the SEND board that meets every month with the council and we are getting involved with a lot of work streams.”
Lucy and her team’s main focus within the forum is to ensure that parent and careers of children with SEND receive the support that she didn’t. She followed: “We want to improve the services like the local offer, we want to look at the developing offer of short break services as well as improving communication and the process of educational health care needs assessments.
“Most importantly we want parent and careers to feel empowered… to understand their legal rights and responsibility’s and for people to be able to access the support that they are legally entitled to.”
As part of Lucy’s on going work the parent and careers forum is running a survey on twitter via Salford City Council to try and gather opinions on how well or not families have found services offered to them in Salford.
Salford parents and carers of children aged 0 to 25 with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities are being asked to share their views.
We’re working with Salford Parent Carer Forum to find out what support is good and what needs to improve.
More: https://t.co/a5m1BjITnt pic.twitter.com/1KNOe3VNDy
— Salford City Council (@SalfordCouncil) October 17, 2022
“We want people to know that there is someone here to help… we run coffee mornings every month where we will provide a friendly ear and advice. We are also hoping that in the future we can do well being sessions at the RHS for parent and careers. It is just all about just helping people as best we can.”
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