Local Offer – one more sleep

As of tomorrow (1 September, 2014), every LA in England has to publish their Local Offer.  A few months ago, we published a list of all the Local Offers we could find.  Given that today is Sunday, and the Local Offers have to be available from tomorrow, we had presumed, wrongly, that most of the Local Offers would be available in some form or other on the LA website.

Our list of Local Offers can be found here

Local Offer

We have today trekked through the list to check if all links were still current and also to find links to Local Offers that were not available when we initially produced the page.  However, there are many with only a holding page or a basic summary of what the Local Offer means but even sadder, there are many Local Authorities with absolutely no information about their Local Offer at all.  Now it may be that their Local Offer is on the site but not easy to find.  Or perhaps their Local Offer is being hosted by a third party but this isn’t clear.

We haven’t spent just a minute or two looking, we have googled each Local Authority + local offer, if no joy we have then gone to individual LA sites and searched Local Offer, if still no joy we then looked at SEN and Disability sections of their sites and if still no joy, we have then looked at parent partnership and parent carer forum sites for each LA.  So, in effect, we have searched in the manner that most parents would search.

However, as you will see, we have still got many LA’s where we couldn’t find the information.

So let’s just hope that several Local Authorities have staff working hard on a Sunday evening/night to ensure that they comply with the new legislation.

Sadly, as families we know there is often little accountability so who is going to hold them to account if they don’t comply?

Debs Aspland

Mum to three great kids, each with a different SEN.
Transplanted from the NW to the SE.
Co-founder and Director of Bringing Us Together