SENDMatters October 2022

Updates on SEN Services in Bromley

Down Syndrome Act 2022 guidance: call for evidence

The Department for Health and Social Care want your views on what should be included within the Down Syndrome Act statutory guidance.

This call for evidence will inform the development of the Down Syndrome Act statutory guidance. Your views on what should be included within the guidance are sought and will be considered when producing draft guidance which will be published for full public consultation. More information on this will be provided in due course.

This Down Syndrome Act 2022 guidance: call for evidence will run for a period of 16 weeks, closing on 8 November 2022, and is open to everyone. People under the age of 13 will need consent from a parent or guardian to submit their response.

You can respond:

• as an individual
• on behalf of someone else
• on behalf of an organisation

The easiest way to respond is to respond online.

See also the easy read version of the online survey

Bromley Healthcare Update

As part of a range of ongoing developments for the graduated response, the Bromley Healthcare Children’s Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy teams have undergone a mapping exercise and have published concise documents to provide an overview of the current service offer across the 5 strands of the Balanced System and level of need -Universal, Targeted and Specialist (UTS).

These documents will be reviewed each academic term. The Autumn offer is being promoted by LBB and shared with other services and can be found under Local Information and Services on our Bromley Education Matters website.

Bromley Healthcare are also developing the therapy landing pages of their website to make them more user friendly and to promote the offer by level of need at UTS levels and in a way that website users would intuitively seek out information.

This is being done in conjunction with feedback from young people, parent and carers following an engagement event which is being planned for early October.

In addition to the layout of the therapy pages, the services have been developing and updating their suite of self-help tools to include more videos, “how to” guides, advice sheets and webinars. They have also provided materials for the new London Borough of Bromley b-HIVE website with toolkit. Created by Bromley Health and Local Authority services, this resource aims to support the development of communication, physical skills and independence of children and young people in Bromley.

Other work includes a workshop on adaptions in schools between the SEND Advisory Service and the Bromley Healthcare OT and Physio which has led to a task and finish group and touch base meetings to map children coming through and ensure timely information/decision making about individual cases where adaptions are required for children and young people.

In addition, termly meetings have been set up with the SEND Advisory Service to clarify roles and responsibilities across the various teams supporting schools, families and pupils with therapy needs and explore opportunities for joined up working and training.

Autism Education Trust

The Autism Education trust (AET) offer a 360-degree support programme for education professionals, providing training, practical tools, and a wealth of free resources to better support autistic children and young people aged 0-25.

Bromley have become a national AET hub and have secured three delivery licenses across:

• Early Years
• Schools
• Post 16

In addition to this comprehensive free training, Bromley are now able to offer bespoke training to professionals working across children’s and adult’s Health and Social Care services.

AET training and resources are co-produced and scrutinised by a panel of Autistic young experts. These young people bring a wealth of lived experience to all programme content.

The programmes support development of practitioners, pupils, and all settings through its:

• Progression framework supporting practitioners to identify learning priorities, apply intervention and track progress of autistic pupils.
• Competency framework supports practitioners as a self-evaluation tool to rate their understanding and knowledge of Good Autism Practice.
• Standards framework for leaders/leadership teams to support the implementation of Good Autism Practice across a whole organisation

For further information, please contact Matthew or Stephie:

Matthew.Catchpole@bromley.gov.uk

Stephanie.Withers2@bromley.gov.uk

Bromley Mencap Children's Services Team

Our services provide support for disabled children, young people and young carers through to their transition into adulthood. Whether it is advice and information, signposting, opportunities for peer support, support with short breaks, or leisure activities, our services work with disabled children and young people and their families in order to make lives better. Our outreach service can help to support you with DLA applications, Short Breaks assessments, grant applications or if you just need someone to listen. Please have a look at our website to find information on all our services and to how you can become a member of Bromley Mencap, you can also follow us on twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Specialist Autism Family Support Service

Our family support workers, provide specialist short term, intensive support to families who are experiencing more challenging difficulties and may need some targeted input from our service. Over the summer we have done some outreach sessions at Beckenham and Bromley Libraries in collaboration with our 16+ Autism service and we are hoping to do some more in the near future.

If you feel that you and your family could benefit from some specialist short term support, signposting, and information, please contact Cat Hardiman at Bromley Children's Project in the first instance on:

autisticspectrumcondition@bromley.gov.uk / 0208 461 7697

Short Breaks

The Short Breaks Services have been busy matching our short breaks workers and Buddy’s with children and young people aged 0-25 with a disability. The workers support children and young people to get out and about in the community and have some fun, while their parents and carers have a short break.

Our Buddies and Community Support Workers have been busy supporting families over the summer holidays, to give both families and children some much needed respite. We have some reports of fun days out to the seaside and local events. If you feel that your family would benefit from this please contact us, the information is on the Bromley Mencap Website.

We always make sure that our workers are up to date with their training and have run sessions on asthma medication, communication and local days out, it is also great for the workers to get together to swap ideas and experiences.

If you think either a Buddy or a Community Support Worker might be of benefit to your family, please contact either Sarah or Eleni:

0208 466 0790 or email shortbreaks@bromleymencap.org for more information.

Holiday, Activities and Food Programme (HAF)

Bromley’s Holiday, Activities, and Food (HAF) programme provides free holiday club places, including activities and healthy meals outside of term time, for families with children and young people from 5-16 years old who are in receipt of benefit related Free School Meals. The HAF programme allows children and young people to enjoy fun activities that will enable them to develop new skills, build confidence and meet new friends. Each provision enables our children and young people to take part in creative and physical activities, learn about food and cooking, and the nutritional aspect of the food they eat whilst enjoying a free nutritious meal each day.

This Summer the Holiday, Activities and Food programme worked closely with our providers to support as many children as possible with SEND. We worked with our Short Breaks provider Sport Works who ran a 4-week HAF provision to cater for children and young people with additional needs. Bromley also worked with CASPA’s and Lay Witness via the Bromley, Children and Family Voluntary Sector Forum to put on SEND specific provision to support those children and young people with more severe needs.

All our programmes were a great success and parent/carer feedback was fantastic. We were advised that one parent had tears of happiness due to the fact their child could attend HAF, as many other holiday clubs had refused to take their child. Looking forward to future HAF programmes, Bromley’s objective is to be as inclusive as possible in line with the programme requirements. We hope to have as many eligible children and young people as possible in the borough taking part in and experiencing HAF. To achieve this, we will work more closely with our Short Breaks Team to bolster our SEND specific provision as far as possible within the grant conditions.