The Big SEND Survey - parents and carers

Welcome to the 2023 SEND Survey. We really value feedback from our families across the borough to find out what is working well and what can be improved in services that support children, young people and their families with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).

Wigan has a current population of 74,259 children aged 0 to 19 (up to 25 for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND). Of this cohort 6,970 are recorded as having a Special Educational Need and 1,843 have an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP).

We have followed the national trend of growth in EHCPs and requests for assessment. Last year the requests for EHCP assessment went up by 27%.

We acknowledge that there has been significant disruption to children’s learning and development over the last few years due to the pandemic and that our recovery journey will take time. We are also really pleased that our high needs funding (the money the government gives us to fund SEND) has increased over the last few years but this has not kept up with the growing demand.

Whilst we don’t want to talk about money, we do need to look at the most effective way to spend what we have effectively to ensure we are meeting all children’s needs.

We know that the journey for families who have children with SEND can be really challenging and that is made more complex by the support pathways not always being clear. So you don’t know what is available, from who and at what stage. We are determined to get this right moving forward.

We also know that early intervention doesn’t always work how we would hope. We are particularly mindful that for children who are neurodiverse or who display challenging behaviour, we don’t always get it right at the earliest point and therefore the interventions aren’t always successful.

We are committed to focusing on earliest intervention and our graduated response. We want all staff in our education settings to feel confident that they have the appropriate training, skills, support and resources to help our children to be in and stay in their local mainstream school (where appropriate). We also want parents and carers to feel confident that their child/young person’s needs will be met in their setting. We will continue to have a key focus on this as part of our Education and SEND strategies for the next 3 years but we would like your input so that we can produce our plans together. We can’t say that we will do everything all at once but where we can’t, we will discuss why and look at alternatives and where we can, we will progress things with you.

This survey is to understand your experiences and how we can improve them, not just in education but across health and social care. We know that this survey is longer than you might usually be used to participating in but we want more detail and we want as wide a range of responses as possible. We are keen for you to be involved though this survey and other face to face events as this will shape our plans for the future.

Please complete one survey per child with additional needs.

The survey should take approximately 20 to 30 minutes to complete.

This survey will close on the 31st October 2023.