A year on the campaign trail in 2017
Tuesday December 19, 2017
Our head of policy, Una Summerson, outlines how this year we
have helped families to take action for each other.
It's been a challenging year trying to cut through the focus on
Brexit and a surprise election that saw us lose some important
allies in Parliament.
However, despite this, together with a growing network of 20,000
people, our campaigns have not only led to policy change but have
helped secured new funding, press attention and helped us reach
more families.
January - March
We started the year announcing the winners of our
first ever Awards. John Bercow MP hosted the ceremony in
Speaker's House at the Palace of Westminster. We launched our
awards to shine a well-deserved spotlight on the amazing things
families do when caring for disabled children. You can read about
all the finalists in our
Awards 2017 booklet [PDF].
In February we launched a call for evidence as part of our
biggest ever inquiry
into school transport. We knew this was an important issue for
families as calls to our helpline had doubled on the previous year,
but we didn't anticipate that we would have 1,000 responses in the
first 24 hours.
March - April
Our CEO, Amanda Batten, also chairs the Disabled Children's
Partnership, a brand new coalition of leading charities
fighting for better health and social care for families with
disabled children. Find out more about
the Disabled Children's Partnership
We held an evidence session in parliament as part of our School
Transport Inquiry, where parents, our helpline and transport
providers were able to share their experiences.
Read more about the inquiry. We closed the call for evidence
with more than 2,500 responses.
April is always a busy month for changes to the benefit system -
see
our benefits webpages on the ongoing changes including cuts to
ESA and limiting tax credits. We are one of the few charities
campaigning against the cuts to financial support hitting families
with disabled children, and that's why it's important when we get
opportunities to appear in the media, such as we did on BBC
news this month.
Sadly over Easter, we heard one of our star childcare
campaigners, Stacie Lewis, passed away.
Read about Stacie and how she helped us secured
early years funding to improve access to childcare.
May - July
In May, we launched our Universal Credit
#KnowYourClaim campaign. We produced lots of new resources,
including podcasts, and after the election we also launched a
petition calling on the PM to stop cuts to 100,000 disabled
children's payments.
In June, we launched the Disabled Children's Partnership first
campaign: The Secret Life of Us. The first phase of the campaign
aims to raise awareness of the challenges, and joys, families with
disabled children face that most people are simply unaware
of.
In July, we also joined forces with University College London
(UCL) to launch a
national research trial - the first of its kind in the UK - to
investigate reducing behaviour that challenges in
pre-schoolers. The research will help raise awareness with the
government on why families need help with behaviour.
August - October
Through the school holidays we prepared to launch findings from
our School Transport Inquiry. We
launched on Radio 5Live with a campaign win, because the
Secretary of State for Education announced plans to review school
transport statutory guidance. The decision was made as a result of
findings from our School Transport Inquiry.
As part of the campaign we also produced new advice on how to challenge local school transport decisions
and consultations. Read about
how this has led to a successful school transport policy challenge
by a parent.
As part of the Secret Life of Us campaign we published new
statistics on
offensive comments families face. Linked to this our helpline
manager and CEO appeared on Radio 5Live to talk about disability
hate crime against children.
November - December
We published
Caring More than Most in parliament and to the press. The
report (download
the executive summary [PDF]), reveals the significant
disadvantage many families face in key aspects of life and shows
that 24 percent of parent carers provide 100 hours of care every
week - the equivalent of working three full-time jobs
simultaneously.
Alongside Caring More than Most, the Disabled Children's
Partnership is calling on the government to follow our
five step plan [PDF] to address this growing crisis in health
and social care for disabled children. We also continued to support
the
Save Nascot Lawn campaign, the respite centre providing short
breaks for children with complex health needs and learning
disabilities, which will cease being funded by the CCG, it was
announced this month. It is set to close in May 2018. Sign our
petition calling for a review of short breaks funding.
Through this period we continued to campaign
on Universal Credit. While some changes were made in the
November budget, more than 100,000 disabled children remain
worse off. Sign our
petition to the prime minister and help us reach our target of
5,000 by the end of the year.
Looking ahead to 2018
We will keep the pressure up on school transport and Universal
Credit. We will also start to plan for Counting the Costs 2018 - it
will be 10 years since we started.
Support our campaigns work
We are a charity, and our campaigns to tackle the inequality
faced by families with disabled children depends on donations from
our generous supporters.
Help us stop this never-ending cycle of disadvantage. Make a
donation to Contact today.
Sign up
to our campaign updates.
Written by Contact
at 00:00