Category: Practitioners

An update from our Business Development Team, supporting practitioners working with families with disabled children.

10% discount on our virtual workshops

Our Christmas Gift to you and your families.

Throughout December and January, we’re offering a Virtual Workshop Bundle Offer. 

Book three virtual workshops before the end of January and take advantage of a 10% discount on the whole package. That’s a massive saving of £195* on our standard prices.

If there’s a suite of workshops you have been thinking of booking for your setting, support group or charity, now might just be the time to do it.

Our series of workshops

You can choose from any of our popular and highly-rated virtual workshops for parents, including:

• Toilet training for children with disabilities.
• Support for your child’s anxiety.
• Encouraging positive behaviour.
• Helping your child sleep.
• Money matters.
• Early years entitlements.
• Growing up.
• Educational support for children.
• Preparing for adult life.
• And more.

Or you could choose to book one of our practitioner workshops.

How to use our offer

All three workshops must be invoiced by 3 February 2023. So please do act quickly to make sure you don’t miss out! We can arrange delivery at a time and date to suit your families.

Please note that this offer only applies to our off-the-peg virtual workshops. We can also support you by designing bespoke workshops to suit the families that you work with at an additional cost outside of this offer.

For advice about which workshops to choose for your bundle and to discuss your options, get in touch at [email protected]. 

*Virtual Workshops normal price £650+VAT each. 3 workshops normal price £1950+VAT.  Discount £195.  Offer price £1755+VAT.

Meet Ellie and Emma

Passionately supporting parent carers.

Our Business Development Managers, Ellie Goff and Emma Weatherdon, are dedicated to passionately supporting parent carers. They use their own experiences as parents of children with additional needs.

Ellie has worked for Contact for three years. She works on projects that make a transformational difference, through the delivery of training, consultancy and co-production support across the UK. 

As a qualified teacher, Ellie left the mainstream teaching environment in 2005. She became the founder and CEO of a successful, nature-based alternative provision on a farm in North Essex. Ellie is also a mum of three children, one of whom has additional, complex needs.  She believes in the power of building a community of support around children and their families to overcome the difficulties they face.

Emma has worked for Contact for seven years, first as a parent adviser on various projects in the Midlands area and on our helpline. Emma recently moved into the Business Development Team in October.  She continues to work on our By Your Side project, supporting parents with children at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Previously, Emma has worked in other disability charities in a variety of roles.

Emma has two children, and her son has special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). She understands the difficulties of advocating and caring for a child with SEN and the impact this can have on the whole family, and she wants to help every family feel supported and understood. Emma is experienced in working with partner organisations to design and develop programmes to support families.

We’d love the chance to discuss how we can help you support the families you work with.  If you have an idea for a project or are interested in our training offer for parent carers or professionals, please get in touch at [email protected].

Creating a sensory-friendly space at Alder Hey Hospital

We’ve been working with Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool to help them create a more sensory friendly environment for children, young people and their families when they visit.

Read our report about the project.

To find out how we can support your co-production project, or for more information about working with our team of highly-skilled consultants, get in touch at [email protected].

Or to purchase a sensory pack like the ones used at Alder Hey for your setting, take a look at our online shop Fledglings. We sells toys, clothing and sensory products, and remember: there’s a 10% discount for your first order when signing up to receive emails.

Fledglings is Contact’s not-for-profit shop. Any profit made from every purchase goes back to helping families with disabled children.

Inspirational training for practitioners

“The training was very inspirational and thought-provoking in thinking about the impact of disability on families.”

Our unmissable workshop for practitioners, “Working with parents and carers of children with SEND”, continues to receive praise from attendees and amazing feedback.    

100% of those who attended said they will be able to make improvements to the service they work in to better meet the needs of families with disabled children. And 94% have an increased understanding of the issues facing families with disabled children and better informed about the support available.

Our trainers really enjoy working with our growing community of practitioners, and the feedback we receive makes us so happy. We couldn’t be prouder to share just a few more of the comments we have received. 

“Excellent and practical overview of how to improve the ways professionals work with parent carers.”

“It was great to get a parents perspective on navigating services.”

“This has allowed me to be reflective of my practice and will go on to have further conversations with the team and the families whom I work with.”

If you want to feel equally inspired, why not join us at our next workshop on 25^th January? More details and booking information available on Eventbrite.