As well as our online information, we run an advice helpline for parents and carers with disabled children. Get in touch via phone, email or social media for advice and support from our team.
Please take the time to read the information on this page first so you know how we can help.
If you’re looking for emotional support, find out about our Listening Ear telephone support service.
In this article
Who is our helpline for?
Our helpline is for parents and carers in any part of the UK with a disabled child aged from birth to 25.
Your child can have any kind of disability or additional need, and you do not need to have a diagnosis.
Who we can’t help
As we are a charity for families with disabled children, unfortunately our helpline doesn’t have the resources to help everyone.
Our helpline is for parent carers and those who provide unpaid care to disabled children and young people (up to 25). Our service is not intended for professional advocates, or legal advisers who receive a fee and are instructed by a parent carer to provide a service or represent them at appeals, reviews, at tribunals or court.
If you are a professional advocate, please see our advice for practitioners.
We’re unable to support:
- Adults caring for adults over 25.
- Young carers caring for people over 25.
- Disabled adults.
- Adults looking for information and advice on medical conditions and diagnosis – unless it is relevant to a child.
- Parents of disabled children or young people living outside the UK – unless they are planning to return to or are relocating to the UK.
- Professionals and practitioners seeking specific advice about the families they are working with. We can only provide general information and signpost to UK law and guidance. See how we support practitioners.
In the above situations, we will signpost to alternative national helplines or websites where possible.
How our helpline can help you
We understand that life with a disabled child often brings unique challenges. Our helpline advisers can help you feel more confident and informed about tackling them.
We can give you advice, information and support about any concern or question you might have in the following areas.
We can talk through how to get a diagnosis for your child. We also have reliable and trusted information on hundreds of conditions, including rare conditions. If you’d like us to, we’ll put you in touch with national and local condition support groups and introduce you to our online community, where you can chat with families across the UK affected by the same condition.
We’ll help you to understand how to ask the local authority for practical help and support for your family. This includes making requests for needs assessments and accessing short breaks.
Our advisers can help you to find out what benefits you might be entitled to as a family and identify other potential sources of financial help. Our website contains information on benefits you may be entitled to. You can use our website to access the Turn2us benefits calculator, search for a local benefits adviser and the Turn2us grants finder.
If you’re calling to discuss your family’s benefits, the parent advisers on our helpline can provide initial advice on the benefits you may be entitled to. They will assess your situation and may offer you a telephone call-back appointment with our specialist family finance team.
A call-back appointment might be offered where you have doubts about the accuracy of a benefit calculation; where you need advice on challenging a benefits decision; or if you are dealing with a change in your family, including:
- A child is going into hospital long term or into residential or supported accommodation.
- The effect on entitlements after separation from a spouse or partner or a new partner joining the household.
- Where you need to know the impact a change in your employment status or earnings will have on benefit entitlement.
- Families with a young disabled person, aged 16-24 in education (or temporarily out of education).
- Where a parent is seeking advice about the impact of forthcoming benefit reforms.
- Issues relating to deprivation of capital, and the treatment of capital other than savings, e.g. property.
- Families challenging the refusal to backdate disabled the child, carer or Limited Capability for Work Related Activity (LCWRA) elements of Universal Credit.
- Erosion of Universal Credit transitional protection due to change in disability or carer status, or the termination of transitional protection due to a change in earnings.
We do not provide a casework service. This means that, for example, we cannot complete benefit claim forms for you or represent you at an appeal tribunal. In exceptional cases we may draft a letter or online Universal Credit journal entry for you, to assist in challenging a benefits decision.
There is high demand for telephone call-back appointments, and we cannot guarantee you will be offered an appointment. If we do offer a call-back appointment, this may be with a different family finances adviser than you have spoken to previously.
We have access to a range of resources that can help, including information on behaviour, sleep and toileting. We can also help you to understand about your rights to free childcare and how to find childcare places in your area.
Our advisers can explain how special educational needs (SEN) are identified and assessed in England, and what to do if you’re not happy about the support your child is getting. If you live in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland, we can provide you with information and guidance and signpost you to alternative sources of advice in those nations where appropriate.
Our education advisers can help:
- If your child is struggling at nursery, school or college and you are not sure how to get the help and support your child needs.
- If you need advice about local authority duties, and processes relating to EHC needs assessments and plans.
- If you need initial advice about routes to challenge school practice and local authority decisions, including complaints and lodging appeals to the SEND Tribunal.
- If you need help about eligibility for transport to school or college, or advice on challenging a refusal to provide transport.
- If your child has health needs that affect their education or attendance at school.
- If your child with additional needs has other difficulties in education, including attendance, exclusion, bullying or discrimination.
We can also put you in touch with local sources of help and advice.
What our helpline cannot do
As a national UK-wide service, the helpline cannot help with the following:
- Providing legal advice.
- Providing medical advice about treatments or second opinions.
- Casework or representation at meetings and tribunals.
- Filling in forms, checking paperwork or writing letters on your behalf.
- Attending meetings at the school or with the local authority.
- Providing funds or grants for items or holidays.
Getting ready for your helpline call
Demand for our helpline is high. Please check if you can find the answer to your question in our online information and advice pages first. You can use our chatbot Charlie to help.
When you call, you may have to wait to speak to an adviser. Please be patient, and we will get to you as soon as we can.
The busiest times of the day tend to be between 10am and 11.30am; lunchtime between 1pm and 2pm; and between 4pm and 5pm.
It’s helpful to prepare for your call:
- Try to organise a quiet place where you can talk if possible.
- Have a pen and paper to hand and any documents you wish to discuss.
- As your call may take 30 minutes, or longer, please set aside some time.
- Please do not call when you are driving.
Your call is confidential – but please see our confidentiality and data protection statement below.
Social media, email and web form queries
If you’re contacting us through social media, email or via our web form, please provide information such as the age and needs of your child and the area you live in. This helps us to provide more specific advice in response. We will make an advice record of your email/web form or social media enquiry on our database.
We are currently receiving high volumes of emails and web forms.
If your enquiry is urgent, please call our helpline instead.
Information we might ask for
When you contact us for advice, we will ask you for information that is relevant to the issues you are contacting us about. The lawful basis on which we will seek to collect this information from you is “legitimate interest”.
The information that a parent adviser may ask you:
- Your name, postcode, address, email address, phone number, local authority (council), and region/country.
- Whether you have been in touch with the Contact helpline before.
The information we may ask you about your child or children includes:
- Age.
- Disability.
- Identified special educational needs (SEN), additional learning needs (ALN), or additional support need (ASN).
- If they have an education, health and care plan (EHC) plan, Statement of SEN, Independent Development Plan (IDP) or Co-ordinated Support Plan (CSP).
- Health conditions diagnosed and awaiting diagnosis/assessment.
- Confirm your relationship to the child or children.
The reason we do this is to:
- Identify that our service can help you, and how.
- Identify any records relating to previous contacts with the helpline or other Contact services. This will help our advisers understand the background and the advice you have previously received.
- Provide you with advice and information about your current situation, to help you understand your rights and entitlements as a parent carer, and to support and empower you to take the next step.
- Send you a follow-up email with links to our information and advice and signposting links to other organisations for additional support.
- Book you a call-back appointment with one of our family finance advisers.
We keep this information in an advice record, which we create on our database. We will explain this to you on the phone and ask you to confirm whether you agree to written record being created.
If you do not consent to providing your name or identifying information, we will create an anonymous record including the issues we have discussed. We will ask you which local authority, region or country you reside in for statistical purposes.
We treat the information you give us as confidential; we will only break confidentiality in exceptional situation – see below.
Other uses of your information
The main reason we ask for your information is to help us to provide the most accurate information and advice to help you.
We will, however, also use information for the purpose of:
- Training new parent advisers.
- Quality assurance purposes to ensure we are providing a high-quality service.
- Looking into complaints.
We will also use your information to help us understand more about the experiences of parent carers, and the challenges you face. This includes gathering statistics on our enquiries and written summaries of issues raised. This helps us monitor:
- Who is contacting us for advice and information.
- The issues and concerns parent carers face.
- The information and advice we provided to help.
This information is always anonymised. We share this information with funders and government departments, and publicly in reports, articles, press releases. The statistics also inform our policy research, campaigns, and other media work.
Sometimes after a call or advice from the helpline team, we may ask you if you would like to share your story as part of a case study. If you expressly agree to this, we will send you an email with further details. If you are interested, our press officer will contact you and explain the options to you.
Confidentiality, data protection and safeguarding
Our helpline is confidential. This means we will not share your personal details with anyone outside of Contact without your permission.
There are a few exceptional situations where we may have to breach confidentiality and pass on your details without your consent.
Situations where we might need to break confidentiality:
- A child or vulnerable adult is at risk of harm – see our safeguarding statement.
- A terrorist threat has been made.
- We have been ordered to share information with the courts.
- A person poses a serious risk to others.
- A person is threatening or abusing staff or preventing us delivering our helpline service to others.
If we make a decision to break confidentiality, we will make reasonable effort to keep you informed of what we intend to do.
We are committed to protecting your privacy. Whenever you share personal data with us, we aim to be clear with you, and not to do anything with your data that you wouldn’t reasonably expect us to do.
We will never sell your personal data to other organisations and will only ever share it in appropriate, legal or exceptional circumstances. View our privacy policy.
Training and quality assurance
When you call our helpline, sometimes another member of the helpline team (for example a Senior Parent Adviser, the Head of Information and Advice, or a new starter in the team) may listen in on your call. This is for training and quality assurance purposes.
Feedback
At the end of your helpline call, the adviser may ask you to stay on the line and respond to three questions about your helpline experience. You do this by selecting a number on your keypad.
Twice a year (March and September), we conduct a survey on our helpline and online services, including our website, live chat and social media.
In our survey of September 2025::
- 95% of telephone helpline respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
- 93% of website users said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
- 84% of members of our social media networks were satisfied or very satisfied.
- 93% of respondents would recommend Contact to others after using our services.
- 92% of respondents felt better informed after using our services.
In addition to anonymous feedback, we welcome individual feedback. Find out how to provide feedback or make a complaint about our services.
Accreditation and evaluation
We are a member of the Helplines Partnership, and our helpline is accredited to their quality standard.
Our last assessment took place in February 2023, and our current accreditation lasts for three years.
Visit the Helplines Partnership website to find out more.
Helpline contact details
Tel: 0808 808 3555
Open Monday to Friday, 9.30am-5pm.
Every Tuesday, the helpline opens at the slightly later time of 10:15am due to a team meeting.
We are not open on public holidays.
Press 1 to speak to an education adviser, or press 2 for all other helpline enquires.
If our helpline is very busy you may not be able to join a call queue. You’ll hear a busy message and be asked to try again. You cannot leave a message; we are not able to call you back.
You can contact the team, via alternative options below.
Will the call cost me money?
Calls from the UK are completely free, including from mobile phones. We cannot guarantee that calls made from outside the UK will be free.
What if English is not my first language?
If you do not speak English as a first language, we can call you back with an interpreter. Phone the helpline and tell the adviser which language you need and provide your phone number. We will aim to arrange a call with an interpreter on the line the same working day.
What if I am deaf or hearing impaired?
Deaf and speech impaired callers can access our helpline via the NGT Text relay service. Text users can prefix their call with 18002.
Use our chatbot, Charlie, to find the information and advice you need quickly and easily, 24/7.
Click on the chatbot button in the bottom right-hand side of our website to start.
If Charlie cannot find the advice or information you are looking for, select Live Chat and a member of the team will respond. Our team are usually available:
- Monday, Thursday & Friday: 9.30am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
- Wednesday: 9.30am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
- Tuesday: 10.15am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
If Live Chat is not available, you can fill in our web form, send us an email or call us.
Use our web form to submit an enquiry.
We aim to respond within 10 working days.
Email: Undergoing maintenance
We aim to respond within 10 working days.
You can ask us a question on our Facebook page or our Twitter page.
You can also use our chatbot, Charlie, via the Facebook messenger service.
