The SEND Local Offer for the next 10 years

Ofsted are doing a thematic review of the SEND Local Offer this year. They want to better understand

• how local area partnerships understand the needs of children and young people with SEND in their area
• how local area partnerships provide strategic oversight and deliver the services outlined in the local offer
• how parents, carers, children and young people are involved in developing the local offer
• the experiences of children and young people with SEND and their families when accessing services in their local area

The model I like to use is the SEND Local Offer as the "axle" of the SEND Partnership "wheel". Centring the Local Offer reminds us to maintain it, or things will get out of kilter.

One of the most important areas of the SEND Local Offer is what schools and academies and MATs are doing. Local authorities are limited in what they can make settings do, but examples of good practice go a long way. Sadly I see so many school local offers that are "copy 'n' paste", and updated once a year by changing the date.

And I always like to frame any discussion of the SEND Local Offer using the principles from the SEND Code of Practice. These principles are collaborative, accessible, comprehensive, up to date, transparent. I change the order for the mnemonic ACCTUp.

This brings accessibility to the fore, though I'll be honest, the principle of "accessible" seems to only refer to "making it available", in the sense of there being a website, and maybe some printed materials. I would like to see Ofsted include conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and something about readability. But there's nothing in the thematic review guidance which covers this. Without these, we're building something that many SEND parent carers can't access.

Once the initial SEND reform consultation closes the government will be consulting on an update of the SEND Code of Practice, to clarify responsibilities for education settings and local partners, with refreshed 'areas of development' replacing the current 'areas of need', to make the guidance easier to use and navigate.

I suppose that the Ofsted thematic review will feed into any changes to the SEND Code of Practice, and will give guidance for "the next ten years".

What I'm setting out here is a kind of "manifesto", specifically for the SEND Local Offer website. Of course there's more to it than the website, but as a "web techy" kind of person I've reviewed the website in lots of different local authorities. I've had a bit of a love affair with the concept of the SEND Local Offer since I first did some work consulting in Lancashire in 2018 and 2019.

But in terms of the philosophy, 2 ideas strike me as still being important.

The Local Offer should "think family".

The Local Offer must be the place for parents and carers, children and young people, and professionals to come for useful information they need to make decisions for today and for next year.

Supporting the audiences of the SEND Local Offer

And so here we can see the 3 main audiences of the SEND Local Offer: parent carers, children and young people, professionals.

Some SEND Local Offers create content for specific audiences. This is a "bad idea". Firstly, it suggests that some content is "out of bounds" for some users, or that some content should be "dumbed down". I hate this phrase, with its ableist notion that people who can't speak are less intelligent.

Secondly, having separate sections for different audiences makes keeping the content up to date much more difficult, as you'll have the same content in 3 different places. And in any case, parent carers will definitely be looking at the "professional" content.

Thirdly, sites built like this take less care to make their content simple for the "professionals". They use abbreviations without full explanations, and long, extremely winding sentences, that only a doctor of philosophy would be able to parse, not a busy teacher, nor a parent carer, and definitely not a young person with SEND. Like this last sentence.

Information architecture

Our job as "web builders" is to figure out what these three groups need to do, and let them know how to do it, calmly and efficiently. It's about finding the relationships between ideas, understanding how users think, and allowing them to click through to find the answer to their question.

Breadcrumbs

One of the reasons that I decided to build a new SEND Local Offer platform was because our existing provider didn't allow a proper hierarchy of content. We use the term breadcrumbs to describe the navigation trail on a website.

There used to be a notion that users had to find what they were looking for in 3 clicks. That's no longer considered a useful metric, and people will happily keep clicking through from one page to another, as long as they feel they are going in the right direction. It's only once people feel lost that they'll give up and leave the site.

Our job with the local offer is to make sure people don't get lost, but also don't get sidetracked. They've come to do a task. Let them finish this before setting off on the next one.

Search

The search function is another way to help people find what they are looking for. One of the ideas from my Lancashire Local Offer Vision was to just have a single search bar on the home page. Nothing else. And it feels like with AI search this should be possible.

In any case, users are going to get pretty frustrated the next time they want to read the same information as they found in a previous visit, but can't find it because the AI is making up a different set of sentences, worded differently. Consistency is important.

So just let users follow links, the way Tim Berners-Lee intended when he invented the world wide web. It's much more reliable.

In Calderdale I've been surprised how few searches happen on the Local Offer site. Web traffic is up, but people simply follow the links. People don't need to use search that much if you've got well ordered content.

Collaboration

We're big believers in the idea of "doing the hard work, so users don't have to". Trying to outsource your careful writing of quality content to a word prediction machine isn't likely to give users confidence in your service.

Work with your parent carers, and your young people, and the service providers to figure out the information architecture of your pages. Use sticky notes and a wall. Do this work a section at a time. Ask what's missing. Build something you're all proud of.

I can recommend "Content transformation" by Hinrich von Haaren. He talks about working with subject matter experts (SMEs) and users to get the right content in the right format. In the UK government and beyond, this role is known as a content designer.

I've got a whole course on readability for the local offer, which has information on content design. And honestly one of the biggest problems I have seen in Local Offers is readability. But as a minimum, here are some basics.

• Unique page titles, in sentence case
• Use short sentences (maximum 25 words)
• Use bullet points to help make longer sentences clear
• Write meaningful alt text
• Avoid jargon

Again in gov.uk, there's a phrase "one thing per page". I often see local offer pages that scroll on for miles with all the information that is needed on a topic. Ideally, they should be broken into smaller sections such as a guide or a step-by-step, so that users aren't over faced with content and can easily find what they need.

Accessibility

What we're talking about here is to do with cognitive load. Too much going on in your head to be able to concentrate. This isn't about people with learning disabilities, it's all of us, living our busy lives. Writing well for the web helps everyone.

SEND experts know that some users have vision impairment, cognitive and neurological impairment, physical and motor impairment, auditory impairment. They also know that WCAG asks for colour contrast, alt text, captions for videos. And they should know about assistive tech, for example text-to-voice, improved colour contrast, Windows high contrast mode, and braille readers.

And yet somehow, SEND local offers are full of PDFs which are inaccessible to screen readers and braille users, or full of content hidden in accordions, so users can't scan the page headings. Occasionally people try to argue that it is possible to make accessible PDFs. This is true, but most of the ones I see are not, and they don't work well on mobile devices. Why add all this extra work, when we could just make clean up to date web pages?

People

There are many different roles needed to support the SEND Local Offer: platform support, content design, marketing, engagement and user research, training for settings.

A lot of this is free labour from parent carers and young people, and from service providers. There isn't usually a clause within their job description to "write for the website", so it ends up not being a priority for them.

I often hear from SEND Local Offer folks about how hard it is to get updated content from service providers. But by prioritising this we could well deflect a lot of calls to SENDIASS, emails to the service teams, and frustration when people engage with SEND services.

But I've also read in many Ofsted / CQC Local area SEND inspections that parents didn't know about the local offer. We need to get better at marketing. A full social media programme across multiple channels. Face to face events in schools, GP surgeries, parent and toddler groups, even supermarkets.

Engagement and user research is another full time job that kind of sits between content design and marketing. It's a conversation that will allow for true co-production of services, and how these are explained on the SEND Local Offer website. It's how we get to the principle of transparency.

Work in the open. Be honest. Listen twice, speak once.

The SEND reforms are an ideal time to start thinking about the SEND Local Offer afresh. Not just a "spit and a hanky" like your grandma gave you after eating chocolate. It's going to need a full, bank holiday weekend detox spa treatment.

Enjoy yours!

cheers
Jonny Holden

"The [SEND Local] offer is an attempt to restructure the relations and culture in an overarching framework that seeks to end conflict on SEND provision between parents and statutory authorities through encouraging co-production."

Brian Lamb, Chapter 6, Accountability the local offer and SEND reform: a cultural revolution?, in SEN Policy Research Forum "How will accountability work in the new SEND legislative system?", SEN Policy Paper, April 2013