Getting families to the local offer

Inspectors have been saying the same thing about local offers for ten years. Camden, 2019, parents are generally unaware of the local offer website. Newcastle, 2021, confusion about it, and the people who use it cannot find what they need. Devon, 2022, staff and parents do not use it. The Education Committee heard in 2019 that many parents did not know it existed. Back in 2015 the pathfinder evaluation found a quarter of families had looked at one.

So the problem is mostly not the website. It is that nobody sends anyone there. We can see that in our own numbers. Calderdale's local offer holds people once they arrive, nearly four pages a visit and over two minutes each. Only six and a half per cent of visits come from another website. Almost nobody, not a school, a GP surgery or a family hub, is pointing at it.

This year Ofsted and CQC are running a thematic review of the local offer, and four of its lines of enquiry are about reach. Whether practitioners know it is there. Whether young people know what is in it and how to get to it. How the partnership checks it is working. How families are involved in reviewing it. If you want to be ready for that, the councils below already did the work.

Ten things that worked, with the numbers

1. Get every school website linking to it

Rochdale's parent carer forum went school by school until every school website linked to the local offer, up from 12 per cent. Visits rose fourfold between 2016 and 2018 and the inspection finding was lifted. Every school publishes a SEND information report and every one should link to the local offer. Most do not. This is the cheapest thing on the list.

2. Take it to where families already are

Stoke took the local offer to family hubs, libraries, school SEND coffee mornings, transition fairs and autism next steps sessions, and made a video for library staff so they could show people the site. Users a month went from 1,600 to 4,400 in sixteen months. West Sussex went to 27 family hub events in a year and put an A5 flyer in family hubs, libraries, early years settings, GP surgeries and schools.

3. Hold a Local Offer Live

A yearly marketplace, run with the parent carer forum, where every service has a stall. Kirklees had over 80 services in one room in 2025. Calderdale's first, in June 2025, had 45 stalls and over 200 visitors. Leicester, Leeds, Sefton and Wokingham run one too. It also gives you the photos, quotes and posts for the rest of the year.

4. A roadshow in every locality, with evenings

Leicestershire's local offer strategy commits to a roadshow in each locality across sixteen months, with evening sessions, and counts recorded visits to locality teams as a measure. West Sussex plans ten roadshow sessions this year.

5. A newsletter families choose to get

Manchester's local offer newsletter has 8,179 subscribers, and drop-in attendance doubled alongside it. Stoke sends one for families, one for professionals, and a short round-up every school holiday. Norfolk sends a half-termly bulletin. Ealing built an email group of over 200 families who signed themselves up.

6. A name, a logo and a face

Rochdale ran a pupil competition to design the local offer logo, then put it on communications from every agency. Inspectors credited it with raising awareness. A local offer with its own name and its own web address is easier to point at than a section of the council site.

7. Train the people families already trust

Stoke went to family network meetings so professionals understood the site and passed it on. Leeds built a toolkit for professionals who support families to use it. The Ofsted review will ask whether practitioners know the local offer exists.

8. Ambassadors and navigators

Westmorland and Furness trains young people and parents as local offer ambassadors and runs drop-ins for parents and professionals. Southampton set up a volunteer programme of parent navigators for families who need information in person.

9. Say what you did with the feedback, in public

Swindon's inspection revisit named its You said, we did as the reason parents now trust the local offer. Publish it as a page, not a spreadsheet, and put a feedback button on every page.

10. Set an awareness target and measure it every year

Hammersmith and Fulham wrote a marketing plan with two numbers in it, 60 per cent awareness and 30 per cent usage, and reports against them each year. Lincolnshire reports reach to parents, up from 59 to 73 per cent, and saw directory visits triple after putting the link on many more pages. If you do not have a number, you cannot tell whether any of this is working.

A year you could run

• Term 1. Audit every school website for a local offer link, give the parent carer forum the list, and chase until it is all of them. A flyer with a QR code into family hubs, libraries, GP surgeries and early years settings. Start a termly newsletter for families and one for professionals.
• Term 2. A roadshow in each locality, one evening each. Twenty minutes at every family network and SENCO network meeting.
• Term 3. A Local Offer Live with the parent carer forum, and ambassadors recruited from it.
• All year. Publish You said, we did as a page. One awareness question in the annual survey, with a target, and the analytics open every month.

Everything here is in the Library with the source it came from, and if your council has done something that worked, we would like to add it. Tell us.