Parents of children with additional needs and disabilities use lots of services to get support for their child and themselves. This can include getting additional support for their child’s education, health and day to day activities.
When parents with disabled children meet other parents, they often find they are facing similar problems in accessing services. Over seventeen years ago, parents in a few areas in England were running parent carer forums, sometimes called a parent carer councils, to improve how services were run in their area. They decided that they would approach their local authority and health services and offer to work with them to try and improve services.
They were successful in doing this. The professionals they worked with realised that the parents’ knowledge and experience of using services was important. It helped them understand what was not working well and improve services, so they better met family’s needs.
Since 2008, parent carer forums have set up in most local authority areas of England. The Department for Education has helped by providing a small grant to forums and funding a team at Contact to support them.
Each forum is led by parent carers of children with additional needs and disabilities from the local authority area. Forums change and develop over time, for example when parents running the forum move on and other parents take over.
More information about the great work forums do can be found here.
Key moments in the development of forums
The children and Families Act 2014 expressed the importance of families and services working together, setting a legal foundation for the role of forums. The role of forum’s was expanded in the SEND code of Practice.
Together with the National Network of Parent Carer Forums we provided training, support and funding to help forums develop.
Forums began as informal groups of parent carers coming together to share their experiences to help improve services. They gained recognition as strategic partners with local authorities ensuring parent carers have a say in creating, designing and evaluating services.
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Looking for something else? You can find a full list of pages on our Parent carer forum handbook contents page.
