Talk to me about talking to Empowering Families of Children with SEND.

“The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions,” according to Oscar Wilde, but how do we know what to ask?

With almost (at the time of writing) over 21,000 members on our Facebook community support group, we get asked a lot of questions. We answer questions here, all day, every single day of the year – that’s a lot of questions and even more answers.

Many people start with, “Sorry if this has been asked before.” This statement alone speaks volumes about the SEND system and how it disempowers people. ‘Sorry.’

On phone calls and meetings we hear “sorry” and even more heartbreaking “Sorry for crying”.

Sorry.

We are sorry that the system has made you feel that you need to apologise for something that is not your fault, but we understand why you feel this way.

Why?

You may well ask us this, given our professional occupations. Did you know that each and every member of our team has lived through this experience, too? Our team members are also parents and siblings of those with additional needs, and each of us has our own SEND and/or health needs – we ‘get it’. We, too, know how this feels. It’s isolating, often lonely, frustrating and exhausting.

With so much ‘information’ at our fingertips – just put a question into your search engine of choice and there you are. Thousands of different answers to one question. Do you feel better now, or even more confused, even more frustrated?

This is why we do what we do.

Our reason for starting Empowering Families of Children with SEND was to be the people we, as parents, needed. We may have had the knowledge, but we didn’t have peer-to-peer support. That isolation was deafeningly silent. Going to the local library to use Ceefax (anyone remember that?) and ordering books and directories to research as parents. Having no one to share the frustration, and when victory was finally ours – no one who really understood everything that we had to go through to achieve this.

Which is precisely why we knew that a welcoming community of understanding, supportive, and like-minded people were exactly what we needed to create.

This is exactly what our Facebook Community are: It is exactly that, and we are thankful to each and every one of our members for the support and understanding they provide. People ask us questions that others may know, or may not know the legal answer to – sharing professional knowledge is key, giving reliable answers over SEND myths is key – and this is just what we do.

There is no such thing as a silly question, and no question that anyone ‘expects’ you to know that you must ask, or indeed know the answer to.

If you don’t know – it’s just that you don’t know – yet - so ask away.

We know that sometimes it can be tricky to get all of your concerns and ‘what about?’, ‘what happens if?’, ‘what should I do?’ into a Facebook post.

This is where our two weekly Drop-In events come in. These are as varied as our SEND community’s questions are. Some weeks are dedicated to SEND and EHCP-specific difficulties or areas – for example, so applications for Needs Assessments or Annual Reviews.

Others are open to questions about any concerns regarding EHCP’s and SEND. Some Drop-in events will be for questions that our Facebook community has posted specifically about an area of SEND difficulty, such as Phase Transitions.

All of our ‘Drop In’ events are FREE! No paid-for subscription, no membership fees. You can be anonymous, have your camera off, or post a question in advance.

Anna and Sarah, Company Directors of Empowering Families of Children with SEND, our Facebook Coordinator, Amy, and our Family Support Advocate, Leanne, answer your questions directly. These events are held every other Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. and are informal. You can be in your pj’s if you want to be!

If you have complex questions or feel that a more personal bespoke approach is the way forward for you, we also have bookable slots of half or one hour duration as part of our

professional paid-for professional advocacy support. These can be booked via this link:

https://empoweringsendfamilies.simplybook.it/v2/?bdp-pixel=1&widget-type=fbdp#book

For examples of our some of recorded answers to Q&A’s, visit our YouTube channel.

Drop-in events are via our dedicated Facebook group, sign up via our FREE newsletter and information via the group.

You can find testimonials to our bespoke services on our website and Facebook business page - here