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8 July 2021
We have launched our brand new Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) website, designed for children and young people with SEND and their families to help them find the right information about education, health and care support available in the local area to help them achieve their goals in life.
The new website has been developed alongside parents and carers, those working with children and young people and young people themselves to make sure families can easily find the information that matters most.
In Devon, our vision is for all children and young people with SEND to dream, believe, and achieve, and fulfil their potential. This new SEND Local Offer website will play a vital role in helping families to understand what help and support is available in their area and will also help us to make sure our SEND provision is more responsive to local needs.
The site is initially being launched as a ‘Beta’ site. This means that we will continue to work on it behind the scenes to make sure it has all the information you need and you can easily find what you’re looking for.
Your SEND Local Offer website
Every local authority is required to provide a Local Offer for children and young people with SEND, signposting to the support and provision available across the local area.
Our Local Offer website contains details about what SEND provision is available across education, health and social care for children and young people aged 0-25. This includes;
- early years
- pre-school settings
- schools
- colleges
- health support
- care support
- preparing for adulthood
- independent living
- training and employment opportunities
- voluntary and community services
- activities and support networks and much more.
Find out more about the SEND Local Offer on our website.
We want to hear from you
We have worked closely with a wide range of people; professionals, parents and carers, children and young people to make sure this website is helpful, interesting and easy to use. We would love to know what you think, so please use the feedback button on the website to let us know.
We will use your feedback to continue improving the site and making sure it's helping people find the right information at the right time.
The feedback button can be found on the bottom right hand side of the screen and looks like the image below.
Sign up for our SEND Improvement Board newsletter to stay up to date with SEND news.
You can also follow us on social media to hear more about SEND related activity across the county.
You can find us on Facebook at Devon SEND Local Offer and on Twitter at Devon SEND.
School communities across Devon completed over 23,000 active journeys during this year’s Sustrans Big Pedal, the UK’s largest walking, wheeling, cycling and scooting to school challenge.
During the competition, which took place between 19 to 30 April, Devon school children were physically active – walking, cycling, wheeling and scooting to school, and completing physical activities – for a total of nearly 240,000 minutes.
This follows data released by Sport England earlier this year that suggests there was a decline in the physical activity levels of children due to the pandemic, with almost a third of children in England engaging in less than 30 minutes of daily physical activity in the 2019 – 2020 academic year.
If the children taking active journeys during Sustrans Big Pedal had travelled to school by car instead, this could have created 14 tonnes of CO2 and 27kg of NOx. That’s enough to fill over 510,000 party balloons with harmful CO2 emissions.
This follows a YouGov survey commissioned by Sustrans and published in April which showed:
• Just under half (49%) of UK children worry about air pollution near their school.
• 40% of UK children believe the best way to bring down levels of air pollution near their schools is for more people to walk, cycle or scoot to school.
Photo created by rawpixel.com
Devon County Council and Public Health Devon are working very closely with schools across the county, following a rise in cases across all ages, but predominantly among Devon’s younger and young working age population.
The rise is reflected in the number of young people needing to self-isolate for ten days, most of them because they have been identified as contacts to people who have tested positive for coronavirus, rather than them testing positive.
Schools are therefore seeing numbers of pupils off, and are supporting them with learning from home.
Find out more on our news centre.
We recently held roadshows to share our new SEND strategy and suggested SEND Delivery proposals with practitioners, schools and parents and carers. All were given the chance to share their views and attendees were sent a follow up survey to help us gather feedback.
We have collated all the feedback from both the breakout sessions and the survey, and it has been used to inform our preferred SEND Delivery model.
The insights will also be used as part of the next stage of development where we will be developing the organisational structures, systems, processes and measures needed to bring the new SEND Delivery model to life.
Feedback on the service options people would like to see offered through the new model showed the provision of SEND support and advice was one of the most important requirements for all stakeholders.
See the results from these roadshows on our website.
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