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Inside this issue:
Rachel Clark: Parent Partnership Officer Mon-Fri
Denis Tully: Deputy Partnership Officer/Training Manager Mon-Fri
Carol Greaves: Helpline Advisor Mon-Fri
Edwina Cosgrove: Volunteer Support Worker Mon-Fri
Frances Coleman: Partnership Development Worker Mon, Tues, Thurs
Noreen Shiekh: Asian Support Worker Mon-Thurs
Nicola McGrath: Senior Admin Assistant Mon-Fri
Clare Trusswell: Admin Assistant Mon-Weds
Nottingham Office: 0115 9482888
Mansfield Office 01623 422223
E-mail: ppsnotts@hotmail.com
Editorial
Hello and welcome to the autumn term edition of Partnership Matters. We hope you all had an enjoyable summer. I particularly enjoyed my summer as I took some time off to spend with my daughter and I also got married, hence the name change.
Autumn term has been an exciting time for us, not least because by the time you read this, we should have filled all vacant staff posts. Frances is continuing to develop her role as Partnership Development Officer and is working on parents groups and building links with other organisations, particularly in the Bassetlaw area.
Autumn term sees the release of the Government‘s Green Paper on Children’s Services. Whilst not perfect, it is the most radical reform of children’s services in recent memory and if implemented, should result in better services for parents, children and young people. We are organising a series of consultation days around the Green Paper, the details of which on Page 4-6.
Autumn term also saw the publication of the Nottinghamshire’s OFSTED inspection report. The report classed the LEA as being generally good and singled out Parent Partnership Service for praise and an example of the LEAs continuing commitment to building positive relationships with parents. Nottingham City LEA is going through the same process this year and their report will be available next year.
So, it would seem that the autumn term has given us many things to celebrate, as well as presenting some new challenges. Onwards and upwards!
Rachel Clark, Parent Partnership Officer
Major Reform of Children's Services
The government has recently set out it plans for children’s services in its Green Paper, ‘Every Child Matters’. The aim of the paper is to improve children’s life chances by reforming children’s services.
The Paper states that the five things that really matter for children are:-
The Green Paper says that this will be achieved in a number of ways, including supporting parents and carers, by services getting involved early on and by services working more closely together.
In terms of supporting parents and carers, the Government wants to improve services such as a national helplines, parent’s information meetings at important stages in their lives i.e. moving from primary to secondary school, support for fathers as well as mothers, better communication between parents and schools and joint training and development around behaviour for all professionals working with children. The government would also like to see home visiting, parent education and stress and relationship counselling services developed. The Government has set aside £25 million into a Parenting Fund to support these developments. However, the Green Paper also recommends greater use of compulsory measures for parents who will not engage with services, such as parenting orders.
In terms of services getting involved at the earliest opportunity, the Green Paper states that professionals must share information and concerns more effectively. It sees this happening by each local area developing an information centre with information such as a child’s date of birth, name and and address, their school, GP and whether they have contact with agencies such as Social Services, Youth Offending Teams, Education Welfare Service etc. Whilst this will prove very useful, there are issues around what information about parents and carers should be shared and how it should be used.
The Government would also like all services to use one assessment process, instead of the separate processes that each service has at the moment. A lot of work has already gone on in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire around developing this.
It would also like to see people from different services working together in the same teams and it sees these teams being located where children spend most of their time i.e. schools, Sure Start Centres and GP’s surgeries.
The government wants to ensure that people working in children’s services are accountable for their actions and cannot “pass the buck”. In order to achieve this, they want local areas to appoint a Director of Children’s Services who will come from either education or social services. It means that there will be one person in charge of children’s services and represents a major joining up of education and social services.
By 2006, it would like all key services for children to be joined together in Children’s Trusts. These will include LEAs, Social Services, Health, Youth Offending Teams and Connexions. These trusts would be expected to pool their budgets and jointly decide on what services they will provide. The Director of Children’s Services would be responsible for these trusts. Nottinghamshire is currently in the process of setting up a Trust for disabled children.
There are some rather noticeable things missing from the Green Paper. It doesn’t mention play at all, something which is essential for all children. This then leads on to the question of whether or not the Government talked to children about what they want when they put this paper together.
Overall, however, it presents a clear vision for the future and reflects a lot of what parents and carers have been saying for years.
As the proposals are in a Green Paper, this means that they are out for consultation, and they have not yet been passed into law. The government is interested in getting people’s responses to the Green Paper by December 1st 2003.
PPS have organised three consultation events specifically for parents. The first is on November 3rd at the Barnardo’s Sherwood Project, the second is on November 6th in Mansfield (venue to be arranged) and the third is in Bassetlaw on November 14th at the CVS. All the events will run from 10.00am -12.00pm. Everyone attending will receive a £10 Boots voucher. The aim of the events is to get your views and feed them back to the government. You can make a difference!
For further details, please contact Rachel or Frances on 01623 422223.
Asian Fathers
The Parent Partnership Service once again is trying its hand out at innovative, groundbreaking and challenging work. For the past four months, we have been doing some research, training and outreach work with Asian families who have children with special needs and/or a disability in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire in the hope of increasing contact with fathers. Obviously, we realise that this is an almost untouched territory, and participation of fathers from any community or background is a very sensitive area, but for Asian fathers, there are additional issues relating to their culture, religion, local community and mainly from the family structure and the expected role of the father within the family.
However, our aim is to make some positive in-roads and offer Asian fathers an opportunity to have a forum where any issues regarding their disabled child and their circumstances can be raised within a non-threatening, friendly, completely confidential arena.
If anyone has any thoughts or ideas, or would like to support us in this piece of work, please feel free to contact any of the following people.
Noreen Sheikh – Asian Support Worker for PPS 0115 9482888
Jaspal Virdi – Asian Link Nurse for Children 0115 9627658
Nadeem Salim – Social Services 0115 9141500
Fathers Direct
Fathers Direct led us two days training looking at issues around how we engage fathers effectively within our services. The training was led by David Bartlett.
Fathers Direct is a charity established in 1999. The charity works to promote the well being of children by harnessing the full potential of fathers to reduce delinquency and crime, to raise educational achievement, improve health and prevent child abuse. The training focused on our own personal experiences with our fathers or males within the role of our fathers. This make us look at how we perceive fathers and the roles they have to play within the family life. We were a group of approx 15 people and within the group the experiences were vastly different.
We then went onto look how we engage with non-resident fathers, this again made us look at our own practices and as with a lot of training you come away thinking ‘as a service we need to look closer at this issue’
The training was attended by all our service and by colleagues from The Play
Centre for Children with Disabilities, the Health Service, Sure Start Sneinton and Social Services.
If you require further information on Fathers direct and the services and support they provide, please contact them.
Fathers Direct, Herald House, Lambs Passage, Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TQ
020 7920 9491 www.fatherdirect.com, enquires@fathersdirect.com
Notes from the Frontier
Once a parent has crossed the rubicon from Helpline to Independent Parental Supporter referral, the IPS becomes the active face of the Parent Partnership Service for them. And let us be in no doubt that the IPSs are highly valued – by the parents they support, by the PPS they represent in so many situations, and ever increasingly by the LEAs and schools they negotiate with, cajole and harry into delivering better quality services for the children at the centre of it all.
There are children in school today who would not be there were it not for the dedication and sheer dogged persistence of these volunteers. There are parents and schools who are working together equably (for the most part!) who before the intervention of the IPS had come almost to a stand-off. There are LEA officers who more fully appreciate the involvement and commitment of parents to the process of developing the right kind of support for their children, thanks to the support offered to those parents by our volunteers.
They are often the ones in the direct line of fire – at school meetings, at mediation, at meetings with LEA officers - talking to angry parents and exasperated teachers, seeking to defuse, to negotiate, to improve the communication on all sides. IPSs now have a much wider remit of support, the issues are often more complicated and difficult to unravel than before and it is to their credit that IPSs have risen to this challenge. Sometimes they need a break, to deal with situations in their own life; sometimes they move on to pastures new, but we still manage to maintain a core band of around 30 dedicated IPSs who support parents in all kinds of education scenarios.
We welcome to this group some newcomers fresh from their training course with Denis, most of whom have now ‘had a go’ at some kind of support. As the person initially responsible for their management, I’d like to ease them in gradually, but the reality is that as usual we are snowed under with requests for support and I rather fancy that things will move along much faster than would be ideal! Their keenness and willingness to get going on real-life support is balm to the souls of those of us in the office trying to spread the help and advice around fairly and to the best advantage. So, a big welcome to Jane, Janice, Milton, Roger, Dorcas, Jo, Aysha and Louise!
As for me, well it looks as though I shall be around for a while longer! I am so enjoying working with you all, on the other side of the fence, as it were. Having been an IPS myself for a number of years, I know exactly how it feels when you get a phone call from the office asking you where you are with one of your cases that you haven’t actually been in contact with for a while! And I know how it feels when the parent you have carefully supported into a negotiating position suddenly changes tack and goes for another option altogether! I love it when an IPS phones me to say “It’s a success!!”, and I do appreciate the huge amount of hard work it has sometimes taken to get to that point. I can also sympathise with the frustration of cases which just don’t progress, and I very much see it as part of my supporting role to be there to be moaned at if required.
So, things are looking good from the frontier – new blood, new gusto, new challenges and new successes. The problem with frontiers is that as they get pushed back, they get wider, so I don’t think we’ll ever be short of situations to be involved in.
Edwina Cosgrove - Volunteer Support Worker
Welcome
Welcome to Louise Potts, our new office volunteer, and to Ruth Iveson and Susan Day, our new helpline volunteers. We welcome them to our team, and hope they enjoy the experience of working in the office. We certainly appreciate their help!
Training Opportunities with the Parent Partnership Service for Parents, School and Voluntary Sector staff and anyone concerned about children with additional needs in education
Parent Partnership Service is developing an annual training programme. It is hoped that such events will bring together parents, school staff, Local Education Authority officers and people from the Voluntary Sector. As well as enabling parents and others to be better informed an aimed is to improve relationships between people with differing points of view. If you wish to register for any of the training opportunities below, please fill in and return the form provided. You will be sent further details nearer the date of the event.
The Personal Advisor and Young People in School
This workshop will be lead by a member of the Connexions disability team and will focus on what should be done to help a young person move from secondary school to higher education or to work. Preparing for this transition should begin in year 9. It will be explained what the Connexions Personal Adviser is able to offer a young person with additional needs and how parents can be involved.
Date – 19th November 2003 Venue Newstead Community Centre
Time – 10.00am – 12.30pm
Powers and Structures of the LEAs
Giving insight into the role of Nottinghamshire LEA, what it can and cannot do and making clear the relationship between the LEA and schools. There will be information about the right way to make a complaint, who to complain to and on how Special Educational Needs are funded.
Date – 11th February 2004 Venue Newstead Community Centre
Time – 10.00am – 2.30pm (Lunch will be provided)
Inclusion and the Social Model
Sometimes the LEA makes a decision that is difficult to make sense of. The social model of inclusion informs many of the decisions the LEA makes about children with SEN. This session will introduce the social model of disability and provide the opportunity for discussing and exploring its implications.
Date 17th March 2004 Venue (Nottingham)
Time 10.00 am – 3. 00 pm
Supporting Parents
The Parent Partnership Service supports parents and schools in a variety of ways. This workshop will give information participants about what the service does and how parents can use it.
Date 27th November 2003 Venue Nottingham CVS
Date 12th March 2004 Venue Bassetlaw CVS
Time 10.00am – 12.30pm
Independent Parental Support for Parents
This course gives insight into the SEN Code of Practice and how to support parents. Participants will learn about the SEN Code of Practice, the role of Parent Partnership Service and the Independent Parental Supporter and the skills and qualities required supporting parents. This course is accredited by the Open College Network. Those who complete the accredited course are able to apply to be and IPS volunteer with Parent Partnership service. The course runs for 12 sessions.
Date: The next course runs on Wednesdays from 24th March to 30th June 2004 (not including Easter and half term holidays) Venue: (to be arranged)
Time 10.00 am – 12.30 pm
Ask A Parent
How can schools develop positive working relationships with parents? This workshop is for parents and school governors and will provide ideas about encouraging parents to engage with their school about their child’s education and taking stock of what a school might do in practical terms.
Date 2nd Feb 2004 Venue (Worksop)
Date 31st March 2004 Venue (Nottingham)
Time 7.00 pm – 9.30 pm
Registration for Training
I wish to register for the following training event/s:
Title of training Date of training:
Name
Address
Post Code
Telephone
Return to Denis Tully, Parent Partnership Service, Suite 5 Clarendon Chambers, Clarendon Street, Nottingham NG1 5LN
Planning Positive Futures
Parents for Inclusion is a network of parents of disabled children and/or children labelled as having ‘special needs’. We offer our own experiences of including our disabled young people for over 20 years.
In our families and as an organisation we have worked together with disabled people to build inclusive communities, where all people are truly welcome.
We invite you to explore with us:
Parent Partnership Services Nottingham together with Parents for Inclusion invite parents of disabled children or children labelled as having ‘special needs’ to try out a free Taster day for the three day course Planning Positive Futures.
Planning Positive Futures will run in your area if the Taster days are successful and work for you.
Taster days are planned for spring 2004.
Please ring PPS to say you are interested.
Come to a free taster day and find out more. Please phone Denis Tully for further details at Parent Partnership. Telephone number 0115 9482888.
Planning Positive Futures - Ayesha Subedar
Planning Positive Futures is a course that offers you tools for planning a positive future for your disabled child. It enables you to see your disabled child as a brilliant star, and to see yourself as a brilliant parent! It covers the history of disabled people and their ideas for change by explaining the medical model of disability and the social model. The medical model of disability sees the disabled person as the problem, and expects them to be adapted to fit into the world as it is, focusing on the impairment rather than the person. The social model of disability identifies prejudice and discrimination in institutions, policies, structures and environments of society as the principle reason for disabled people’s exclusion, rather than the particular impairment of the individual.
The first Planning Positive Futures course in Nottingham was held in the summer over 3 days. It was organised by Parents for Inclusion in Nottingham and the trainers were Laura Chapman, a disabled person, and Caroline MacKeith, the parent of a disabled young person. As well as discussing education, the trainers asked us to talk about an immediate task to improve our social lives and also helped us to confront our fears.
This is what parents who attended the course in the summer had to say:
“I began to realise it wasn’t personal. Our school system just hasn’t been designed to meet individual, so we all have to work together for change.”
“It was really powerful to hear a disabled adult speaking about he childhood experiences and the pain she felt at being excluded. I could relate to it because it was the same pain that I feel when I struggle to convince others that my child is entitled to the opportunities other children have.”
“Together we dreamt about the ambitions our children could fulfil. It felt so good to share dreams around our children’s strengths and interests; we could enjoy ‘planning positive futures’ for our children whilst recognising their rights to choose a different path if that’s what is right for them.”
For me, on my ‘Training Pathway’ as a parent trainer, it was inspiring to be with a group of parents who are so passionate for their children to be included in all aspects of life. Working with disabled adults moves me on in my thinking all the time, so I think the training partnership is essential.
This course was an important energizer in my journey towards making my child’s life a better reality. Brave and inspiring; especially when we examined our own dreams and nightmares. The training team of a disabled adult with their life experiences and a fellow parent is essential! (Powerful, not humbling or pitiful!) For me, it was just the refuelling and reinforcement that was needed.
Connexions Direct
I am a personal adviser in Nottingham for black and ethnic minority young people. Such young people may be African Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Kurdish, Bangledeshi or come from other ethnic backgrounds. My main role is to engage young people who are not using the Connexions service.
The Connexions service is a new youth service providing advice, guidance, support and personal development services for all 13-19 year olds. It is about helping young people navigate their way through decisions about studying, jobs, and careers. Other young people will have problems or barriers to overcome on the way to adulthood, for example, health and drug issues, homelessness, pregnancy, family breakdown to name but a few.
Some young people may not be attending school and will need help in getting a school place or to do something different. Other young people will need help in getting a job or college place. Parents may feel that their child may need a positive role model. I will gladly help with all of these and much more.
If you feel that I can help your child in anyway, do not hesitate to contact me on 0115 9926129/07734273685. You can even send a text and I will call you back.
Remember, Connexions is about helping young people fulfil their potential so do not hesitate to contact me.
Mark Bigmead—Connexions Personal Advisor for Black and Ethnic Minority Young People
Special Educational Needs in Nottinghamshire - Nottinghamshire County Council
“A chance to learn a little more”
Over the past two years, we have been planning with schools and parents to improve educational provision for children with special educational needs. In the last series of discussion meetings, parents, governors and school staff said that they would like a chance to discuss particular types of special need, and different approaches to working with children.
We have arranged four meetings to discuss different types of need, as follows:
Tuesday 4th November, Autism, Durban House, Eastwood
Monday 10th November, Down’s Syndrome, Holme Pierrepont Watersports Centre, nr West Bridgford
Wednesday 19th November, Dyslexia, Chadburn House, Mansfield
Monday 24th November, Listening to Children, National Fluid Power Centre, Worksop
Each meeting will involve a specialist teacher or adviser providing some information in a short talk. Then there will be time for discussion and questions. If you are interested in any of these topics, why don’t you join us for a discussion evening.
All meetings start at 7.00pm and end at 9.00pm.
Refreshments will be available from 6.40pm
If you would like to join us, or find out more, please see details below.
e-mail: bestvalue.sen@education.nottscc.gov.uk
Fax: 0115 9773114
Internet: www.nottscc.gov.uk
Children's Information Services
Nottinghamshire Children’s Information Service has moved, which means we have a new telephone number.
If you are a parent or carer combining work with bringing up children, you might need childcare for when you can’t be there. The best place to start is the Children’s Information Service. We can send you a list of registered childcare in your area and give you advice on how to choose the best care for you and your child.
On our database, we hold information about:
We can also give you information on how to get help covering the cost of childcare. If you work for more than 16 hours each week, and use registered or approved childcare, you might get up to 70% of the costs back through the childcare element of the Working Tax Credit.
Alternatively, if you are receiving a benefit or on a low income and you are returning to work or attending a training course, you might be able to get help through the Childcare Voucher Scheme, if your child is under eleven yours of age.
If your child has additional needs, and you want to use local childcare, Inclusion Funding could help. It does not pay for the cost of a childcare space, but it will help day nurseries, pre-school playgroups and out-of-school clubs to provide extra equipment, staff or staff training. Parents should enquire about this funding through their chosen childcare provider.
Call the Children’s Information Service to find out more about childcare in your area 0800 781 2168.
Go on, it’s free!!
Competition Alert!
Design our Christmas card
We are again running a competition for you to design our service’s Christmas card. The design should be A5 size and either portrait or landscape. The competition is open to 0-19 years and the design needs to be in the office by Monday 1st December. On the back of your design, or on a separate sheet of paper, please write your name, address and how old you are.
The winner receives £25 in your choice of vouchers.
Please send your design to us at:
Parent Partnership Service,
Suite 5 Clarendon Chambers
32 Chaucer St
Nottingham
N1 5LN
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