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The Local Offer - Two Years In

In April 2015 the Care Act placed additional duties on Adult Social Care to make information available to residents of Nottinghamshire about the support that is available to them. It made sense for information relating to adults, families, children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities and their communities to be brought together in one place. As a consequence, the Local Offer became part of the wider Nottinghamshire Help Yourself website.

One of the key aspects of the Local Offer is that it should be responsive to feedback from the people who are using the site, and we respond to individual comments and queries where possible throughout the year.

On an annual basis we also pull together a summary of the specific feedback that we have received over the last 12 months and the action that we have taken in response to that feedback. We also report back to you about progress on the developments that we proposed in the previous year and finally we outline areas for future work and development.

This is the second annual report and review of Nottinghamshire’s Local Offer. We begin by reflecting on some of the changes that occurred during 2015-16.

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From September 2014 it became a legal requirement for all Local Authorities in England to publish information about the services and provision that are available to children and young people aged 0 to 25 years with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and their families. This is known as the “Local Offer”.

Introduction

An initial version of the Notts Help Yourself site, incorporating the Local Offer was developed over the second half of 2015. The increased number of records created some challenges, particularly in relation to how information was structured within the site and the effectiveness of the search facility.

General feedback indicated that the way that the Notts Help Yourself homepage was arranged was more reflective of the way the County Council organised itself, than the way that the public wanted to access information. In light of this feedback and following a retender, work was

2015 - 2016

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undertaken to redesign the site (including the Local Offer) during the fi rst part of 2016. Improvements were also made to the search functionality. User-testing was then carried out with public volunteers giving feedback. This enabled further adjustments and refi nements to be made prior to the offi cial launch of the new site in April 2016.

To coincide with the relaunch of the site we have initiated a county-wide publicity campaign to promote the Notts Help Yourself site. The materials and literature included reference to special educational needs and disabilities and utilised the image of the girl using an iPad which formed part of the original publicity campaign for the Local Offer, back in 2014 - 2015.

An example of one of our Notts Help Yourself leafl ets is shown below:

Leafl ets and posters were sent to a variety of community venues including libraries, GP surgeries and Children’s Centres. Advertising was placed at a number of bus

shelters around the county and lamp post banners were also used on major roads across Nottinghamshire. There was also a full page advert and feature in the County Life magazine which is delivered free to all homes in the county.

We have continued to give talks and presentations on Notts Help Yourself and/or the Local Offer, where we have been invited to do so with community groups, as part of the process of awareness raising. The work to promote the site remains on-going.

During the week of the 20 June 2016 the area of Nottinghamshire (excluding the city) was inspected by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC). These inspections are conducted on behalf of the Department for Education and all local areas in England will be inspected over the next 5 years. The focus of these inspections is to identify how effective the local area has been in implementing the SEND reforms and this includes an evaluation of the area’s Local Offer.

In Nottinghamshire the inspectors noted that:

“The local offer website outlines a good range of provision across education, health and social care. However, although many people are using the website each month…too few parents and young people spoken to during the inspection knew anything about this resource.”

We recognise that in promoting special needs and disability information as part of the Notts Help Yourself website, we haven’t suffi ciently developed awareness of the Local Offer as a resource in its own right. One of the key areas for development over the coming year will be publicising the Local Offer, in addition to, as well as part of, the Notts Help Yourself site.

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• A suite of eight instructional videos have been added to the Local Offer homepage covering a range of topics from How to search for information; how to use the accessibility features on the site and how to provide feedback. These fi lms are subtitled for the hearing impaired.

• The “Rate and Review” facility has been added to both the Local Offer and Notts Help Yourself sites. This enables members of the public to provide a star rating and written feedback about the services and

provision that they have used. This can be used to fl ag issues where appropriate, but also to signpost other individuals or families to things that people value or recommend.

• In the last report we indicated that we wanted to add symbols to the website to support understanding of the text. This has been delayed by the redesign and relaunch of the site. We do however envisage that symbols technology will be available on the site by the end of 2016.

Updates on developments referred to in the 2014-15 Local Offer Report

You said:That you didn’t understand the term “Local Offer”.

The next part of the report gathers together the specifi c feedback that was received over the course of 2015-2016 and outlines the action that has been taken to address these points

We have:Introduced a number of points on the Local Offer website, which explain what the Local Offer is intended to be. Many of these are accessible directly from the Local Offer homepage. These include:

Clicking on this link provides background information about the Local Offer, as well as an external link to a video produced by the Council for Disabled Children, which explains in general terms what the Local Offer is and what it does.

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We have also produced our own fi lm in collaboration with young people, which sets out more specifi cally how the Local Offer works in Nottinghamshire. Again this can be accessed via the Local Offer homepage:

The video is supplemented by the:

which provides information about the Nottinghamshire approach and how you can feedback on either the services or provision you and your family has accessed, using “Rate and Review”. You can also tell us about your experience of using the Local Offer, both what worked and what wasn’t so good.

We are aware that some people don’t like the phrase “Local Offer” or think that the term is unhelpful. The Local Offer is a term that was defi ned by the Department for Education and forms part of the legislation (the Children and Families Act 2014) and the revised Special Educational Needs Code of Practice (2015). Providing a Local Offer is something that all Local Authorities in England must do. It is about offering the public a single place where they can access information about all the services and provision that are available to children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities. This is regardless of whether they have an Education, Health and Care Plan or not.

The DfE termed this a Local Offer because it is about describing what services and provision – “the offer” is available in the local area. The intention behind the adoption of the term “Local Offer” appears to have been around clarity and consistency i.e. that parents and young people would have a clear understanding and expectation about what local authorities should be publishing, no matter where they lived in England.

We have:

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You said:You didn’t understand the EHC process even after visiting the site.

We have:Added the Education, Health and Care Plan Pathway to the Local Offer homepage. Each of the stages from 1 to 7 can be clicked on and this will take you through to another page, which provides more information about that particular stage in the pathway.

We also have an animation on the home page that explains Nottinghamshire’s Education, Health and Care Plan Pathway in more detail

Information can additionally be found under the Support for Special Educational Needs tab:

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Or by clicking the “Education” button on the Local Offer homepage and then selecting the link titled “Education” which appears in the “Related information” box:

Both these pages have additional information about the Education, Health and Care Plan Pathway, including a downloadable leafl et, specifi cally for Nottinghamshire parents.

If you would like some additional help and support “Ask Us Nottinghamshire” are able to offer impartial advice and guidance about the Education, Health and Care Plan Pathway. Their details are available on the Local Offer website.

We have:

You said:That further improvements to the accessibility of the Local Offer could be made.

We have:Replaced the previous “ReadSpeaker” technology with “Browsealoud”. You will fi nd the “Browsealoud” logo in the top right hand corner of the screen.

This technology means that now not only can the content of the screen be read out electronically for the user, at a speed which they can set, but it will also read documents that are downloadable from the Local Offer site. As before the text colour and size can be

enlarged and highlighted, as the text is read. We have produced a short fi lm entitled “accessibility”, which is intended to guide the user through the features of “Browsealoud”.

“Browsealoud” will work on both desktop versions of the Local Offer site and when using a smartphone or tablet.

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You said:You wanted to be able to not only translate the content of the site into a different language, but also for there to be the capacity for that translation to be read out by a screen reader.

We have:The “Google translate” feature is available on both the desktop version and the smartphone and tablet versions of the Local Offer and is able to translate the text on screen into one of 70+ languages. The translation is, however, very literal and the previous screen reader we had for the site could only read the content in English even if “Google Translate” had been applied to the page.

Whilst we have retained the “Google Translate” functionality, “Browsealoud” now enables the text on screen to be translated much more accurately and the translated text can then be read in the translated language (at present the technology won’t translate downloaded documents, such as leafl ets or policies).

You said:That members of the deaf community who were British Sign Language (BSL) users were not being supported to use the site.

We have:Commissioned BSL interpretation of all eight of the instructional fi lms and the Education, Health and Care Plan Pathway animation. We also have each of the stages of the EHC Plan Pathway BSL interpreted:

• Referral • My Story • My Plan • My Budget• My Life • My Review

And fi nally BSL has also been added to some of the key information and advice pages:

• Support for Special Educational needs • Preparing for adulthood• You said we did (SEND) • Money Matters and Personal Budgets

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You said:Within the “supported condition” fi lter it would be better if the category of “hearing impairment” was changed to deaf/hear impairment

We have:Changed the wording as requested:

You said:The information does not display on mobile phones and tablets the same way as on a PC.

We have:Ensured that the site is fully compatible with all devices, so that users can access exactly the same content whatever device they are using. The way that the information displays is different because the size of the screen being used to view the information is that much smaller on mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.

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You said:That improvements needed to be made to the search function to make it easier to fi nd information using key word terms.

We have:Added more key words onto records in order to make it easier for people to fi nd the information that they are looking for.

Over the course of the next 12 months we are planning to:

• Continue to publicise the Local Offer as part of the Notts Help Yourself website, but also to further raise awareness of the Local Offer as a resource in its own right. This is in response to feedback from parents to inspectors through the Ofsted/Care Quality Commission inspection.

• Extend and develop the information relating to transitions, whether from pre-school to school; infant to junior school; primary to secondary school; or from education to work or training; and from children’s to adult services. We know that these are key points where parents and young people themselves often say they would welcome additional information, support and guidance.

• Explore with young people how we can ensure that the Local Offer best reflects their views, aspirations and interests.

• Add symbols across the Notts Help Yourself website including the Local Offer, to support access to the site for those who experience difficulties with written text.

• Produce easy read versions of key pages on the site, to make the content accessible to all.

• Promote the use of Rate and Review across the site, so that users of the site can see what other parents, carers and young

people thought about the services and provision that were on offer, and can use this information to make informed choices about what they might want to access themselves.

From September 2016, Phil Smith will be taking on the role of Local Offer Lead for Nottinghamshire Council. I would like to thank the many groups and individuals who have worked with me and given so generously of their time to help develop the Local Offer so far – the Nottinghamshire Participation Hub (NPH); the Young Pioneers; the parents group at St Giles Special School; parents at Ernehale Infant School; Simon Bernacki and the apprentices at A Place To Call Our Own (APTCOO); The National Deaf Children’s Society; the many groups of practitioners within Nottinghamshire County Council; health and schools, early years settings and colleges who have attended workshops and presentations on the Local Offer; colleagues working on the Notts Help Yourself website; and finally all the individuals who have provided feedback on the site.

Simon Ray

Local Offer Lead, Nottinghamshire County Council August 2016

Going Forward

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For further information contact:

Phil SmithNottinghamshire Local Offer LeadChildren, Families and Cultural ServicesCounty Hall, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7QP Telephone: 0115 804 0944Email: local.offer@nottscc.gov.ukwww.nottinghamshire.sendlocaloffer.org.uk