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London: Parents Consultation on the Local Offer

RBW Rachel B. Wickert Public Seen by 7

The Westminster Parents Participation Group, aka Make it Happen (@annalisa) has commissioned MetM (team includes @rachel and @jenni ) to enable them to conduct a parent-led consultation.

This consultation has been commissioned by the local authorities. Since the 2013 Children and Families Bill, it now falls under their duty to publish a Local Offer of services available to support children with special educational needs and disabilities.

We'll be recording some of the outputs here.

The 2 key outputs will be:

Output 1- end of March: Consultation response translating the views collected during the 2 consultations/workshops into a co-created policy-type document.

Output 2 - end of March: Graphic design of the aggregated journey of the parents across the services they receive throughout key phases of their Child’s life.
It will offer a visual record of the consultation for the parents to reflect on. It will also give them a tool to replicate the exercise and capture a fuller picture of their collective journey.

CG

Claire Grauer Thu 8 May 2014 11:46AM

Hi, great job that you did there. I had a look at the report and find it very interesting - I imagine that a similar exercise in Germany would identify similar issues as pressing.
@rachelbwickert your idea of including a stakeholder mapping is useful, I'd say.
I once attended a workshop where we used those little game figures for mapping stakeholders and their relation which I found very useful and so I like your suggestion of a "Monopoly" style approach. Especially if children should participate.

RBW

Rachel B. Wickert Fri 9 May 2014 4:20PM

Hello @clairegrauer,

Thank you so much for taking the time to look at the report. Iam glad you find it interesting. Because the scope of disabilities was so large (from genetic conditions to the autistic spectrum as well as purely physical disabilities) and we were covering the whole service journey, the issues surfaced are indeed (and unfortunately) far reaching. It highlight how difficult it is for families dealing with the complex needs of their Child to navigate a disjointed system of well-meaning organisations. That is what I had found also in Belgium 3 years ago and am not surprised that Germany might have similar issues.

That is why I am keen for MetM to find partner in different countries to develop a simple tool that could be used in similar workshops where participants could tailor it based on their needs.

I am thinking something very simple but well designed, basically a nice poster with instruction and a set of cards. Maybe the little game figures could be things that each participant bring to represent themselves. There are more sophisticated multimedia platform for people with dementia for example. I found this one really inspiring but developing such a thing will be quite resource intensive: http://nutshellcomms.co.uk/product/

Maybe we could have a German version?