Last Updated - October 5, 2024
We produced two surveys in 2023 to ask people what they thought of Torbay’s SEND services.
The surveys were available during June and July – there was one for parents and carers and one for children and young people.
There were 77 responses to the young people’s survey, many of them carried out by face-to-face interviews with our participation officers. The rest were done online.
There were 89 respondents to the adults’ survey, all carried out online.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the surveys – your feedback is really important because it helps us to improve the services we offer to families.
Below you can see some of the main points raised by both adults and young people and what we’ve done in the past year to address those concerns.
| You said: | We did: |
| Children and young people told us that good provision and positive relationships with the people that help them were important. They rated the professionals supporting them very highly. | We’ve created a Point of View service with young people to hear and act on their feedback. We’ve set up a SEND Youth Forum for 12-25 year olds and Torbay Hospital is running a youth forum pilot project for 13-20 year olds. A group of our SEND young people took part in two video projects – one produced a series of three videos explaining what Education, Health and Care Plans are; the other produced a video to explain the help available from our Graduated Response toolkits. Watch all the videos. |
| The majority of parents and carers said they didn’t feel heard and felt let down by some of the services supposed to support them. They report a lack of joined up thinking. | We’re reaching more parents than ever through our SEND newsletters – Torbay Council. We ran an engagement event for parents and carers of SEND children in April. SEND Family Voice Torbay (SFVT) has been engaging with parents to provide support for their children’s needs. We’ve collaborated with parent/carers and professionals to run Bridging the Gap workshops for parents whose children have speech needs or who are neurodiverse. We trialled an Autism and Us parent programme of events. Family Hubs have been co-produced with parent carer panels. |
| Parents and carers talked about the need to fight to get their children’s needs met, having to chase up appointments and provision. | The SEND Team has a new duty service responding to parental enquiries on the same day. They can be contacted on: 01803 208274. The Children and Family Health website (CFHD) has been relaunched. This provides information and links to services as well as providing contact details and information on how to refer, what to expect once referral is made, and early help and resources. All self-referral for support from social care will be processed within one working day. We’ve launched the Family Hubs website, a one-stop shop for children and families. We’ve launched a new Early Help webpage so parents and young people can access that first stage of help. |
| Many parents and carers felt it was difficult to get support unless their child has a diagnosis. | We’ve been working to transform services for children with Neurodiversity and Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN), to enable them to get the help they need without needing a diagnosis. The Autism in Schools project offered training to all secondary schools to improve staff knowledge and skills. SFVT is building better communication between families and schools and intends to establish three autism community networks across the Bay. The Partnership for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools (PINS) project will help a small group of primary schools identify and address gaps in their knowledge/skills. NHS Devon is working with families to produce bitesize information videos in 2024. Social care has reviewed its complaints process to ensure that all formal complaints are responded to with the offer of a face-to-face or virtual meeting, as well as a written response. |
| Parents described difficulty accessing health services and experienced unacceptably long waiting times. | New neurodevelopmental key worker posts have been established to pilot providing direct support to children and young people waiting for an autism assessment. Community Paediatrics are working to streamline their referral pathway, increasing capacity for more clinics; they’ve reviewed and updated the First Steps guidance given to families when joining their waiting list and they’ve transferred this to an app. |
| Parents and carers said they experienced poor communication, having to repeat information and didn’t feel listened to. | CFHD has a new electronic patient record. It has integrated mental and physical health pathways which include joint working with paediatricians. This should mean that families and young people tell their story once and experience more joined-up health care. We will be introducing the ‘Tell It Once’ platform through the Family Hubs website to reduce the need for families to repeat information. There’s been more joint working between Torbay and South Devon’s Child Health Team and CFHD with the aim of providing a single point of access for all community referrals. |
| Families that received appropriate levels of health and social care praised individual providers. | Feedback from families is passed on to teams and discussed in regular meetings by all of our providers. |
| Some parents and carers described a lack of provision of social care even where funding was available. | We have established a Short Breaks Task and Finish group to focus on expanding the Short Breaks provision available in Torbay. |
| Less than half of parents and carers felt confident that their child’s educational setting could meet their child’s SEND needs. Parents and carers feel that more specialist provision is needed. | The SEND roadshow visited most of the mainstream schools in Torbay to talk about the new Graduated Response toolkits and supporting mainstream schools to meet need. There has been local engagement in the Dingley’s Promise training offer, designed to increase staff confidence in supporting Early Years children with SEND. |
| Trust appears to be low, with parents and carers stating that they feel unsupported. Many parents and carers felt shamed and blamed. | We’ve introduced our Language that cares policy to ensure our staff use plain English and compassionate language when writing about and to children and their parents. CFHD has created 17 YouTube videos explaining each of the interventions provided by the Mental Health in Schools teams. |
