LocalGov Drupal Show and Tell July 2025

A 7 minute walkthrough of the Calderdale SEND Local Offer, for the LocalGov Drupal (opens in a new tab) community show and tell, July 2025.

Transcript

Back in 2022, the Calderdale Parent Carer Forum held a conference where they put together three pages of solid, practical ideas for what was missing from the existing Local Offer.

As part of our commitment to transparency, we put all feedback from parent carers and young people on the Local Offer site.

These ideas became the foundation for what you see today.

I worked with parents, young people, and service professionals for a year, and now Sophie Singleton, the Local Offer SEND Partnership Officer at Calderdale, meets weekly to co-produce content with them.

As LocalGov Drupal is open source, we're not selling a product, but a service. So Sophie and I also meet every week to review content and plan next steps, which is part of our commitment to developing the SEND Local Offer for Calderdale and all councils.

When we started, we were working with a proprietary platform, but it quickly became clear that it just wasn't flexible enough, especially with no possibility of hierarchical content.

So we made the decision to build the new site using the LocalGov Drupal framework, working on a tiny budget. It's still very much a work in progress.

The site is organised into several LocalGov Drupal sub-sites, each with its own colour and icon, making it easier to navigate. One of the parents' requests was to make the site welcoming and colourful, but we also wanted to maintain the look and feel of the legacy site.

With LocalGov Drupal we now have hierarchical pages, guide pages like this one, and step by step guides, so families can find the information they need, in the order they need it.

You'll notice all the menus, guides, step by steps, publications, are on the right hand side. We did this for consistency, and because we found that top menus often made it hard to see the actual content. This way, the information is always front and centre.

Some councils see their Local Offer as nothing more than a statutory duty. But for me, the vision of the SEND Local Offer is to create a calm, supportive journey for children and young people with SEND and their families.

And to do that, the Local Offer needs to be more than just a website. It must be the beating heart of SEND, connecting people, services, and information.

And this is certainly the attitude at Calderdale, where the strategic management have committed to this vision.

Here you can see one of the outcome statements of the strategy. We sprinkle these throughout the site to really bring them home.

Everything starts with the SEND strategy. Calderdale has a new strategy for 2025 to 2030, which you can see in this LocalGov Drupal publication.

We know the Local Offer is about people. It brings together parent carers, young people, education, social care, health, the voluntary sector, schools, and businesses, all held together by the SEND partnership.

Here, the Calderdale Cares Partnership is actually made up of 8 individual health adjacent organisations.

This diversity of stakeholders is one of the reasons we believe the SEND Local Offer needs its own dedicated platform, not just a section on the council's main website.

I'd love to see every local authority have a dedicated three person team for the SEND Local Offer: comms, content, and community engagement.