Service feedback

Online survey

We appreciate your comments and feedback, good and bad, and welcome parents, carers and young people who have an interest in what we do to help shape our service.

Complete online survey

Complaints

We strive to give you the best possible service, if you have a comment or complaint you can put this in an email to: [email protected] – marking for the attention of the Service Lead.

Latest service feedback

Sample of positive comments received:

It just takes someone like you breaking it down and helping me understand what comes next, too much information is really difficult to process but I get where I am now.

This call has been really good, sometimes its hard to know what you can ask for or expect, but this has been helpful.

Thank you for listening to me and talking to me – I just want to make sure that I am doing all I can. We are so lucky to have access to a service like yours, its so so important for our kids.

This has been so helpful, there has just felt like there has been so much going on but this information will really help.

I really appreciate you helping and going through all these forms and things on the phone with me, thank you.

I really feel like I understand things better when you explain it, I can ask questions without feeling stupid and can tell you when I don’t understand something, I feel like I work really well with you and walk away from it understanding properly what’s going on.

You explain things and I get it, its so much easier. thank you.

You’ve been amazing and so informative, thank you so much.

This has been so helpful, there is so much information out there and you are never sure if it is all accurate, so this has been really good. Thank you so much.

I’m clear what I need to do next, I really appreciate your time explaining things and helping me make sense of it.

This is really complicated stuff so i’m really grateful to ask these questions and get some answers, thank you.

Thank you so much, I didn’t know what to do, and I feel better prepared now – I couldn’t have got this far without your support.

I feel like talking it through with you makes things clearer in my mind and I can see where some of the miscommunication might come from with the school, it helps me think straight. Thank you so much for being so kind and listening.

I feel like I understand better now after speaking to you and reading the information you sent. Thank you.

I really feel half a weight lighter after talking to you today, thank you so much for all of this information.
Service feedback, February 2025

Training feedback

I found this training really helpful, especially with talking about solution focussed meetings and i plan to use the pre-meeting template in the future. thankyou!
Very helpful, I will introduce the meeting plan to all staff and parents as looks very useful!

Thank you, it’s been very helpful, I loved the solution focussed part and makes me feel positive moving forward.

I enjoyed this training, the solution focussed meetings were really helpful.

The pre email was so helpful thank you.

This was helpful especially the pre meeting template was useful.

Ill definatley be taking away the pre meeting template idea! Really helpful, not just as a SENCO but as a manager , good advise for structuring future meetings, thankyou.

i found this very helpful in many areas.

I really enjoyed it and was very helpful and gave me some new ideas how to talk to parents especially the pre meeting idea

Thank you this was all so useful

Thank so much, really helpful

Thank you for all of the information you have all given me I hope you have a great day.

Thank you so much I will review the emails and links later.

Thank you so much for this, it’s been really useful and reassuring. Sometimes it feels like you are the only family going through these things.

Thank you really useful x 2

Thank you, a great session and lots of helpful info.

Amazing thank you so much, very helpful course.

Thank you so much for this session I really found it useful.

Thank you to the parents for sharing your experiences also, it is good to know we are going through similar things and was really helpful to hear the answers.

Many thanks for the training.
Training feedback, February 2025

Your views, we’re listening…

In response to our feedback survey question: ‘Do you have any suggestions about how we can develop and improve our service?’

We regularly review comments received to this question and follow up any concerns flagged (where we have contact details).

February 2025

‘I think it’s great. I can’t do this section of my life alone. Thank you so much.’

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for your kind comments.

‘I was disappointed after contacting you. I had already done a lot of reading and looked through your website for advice. You offered to look over my application for an ECH needs assessment, but as this was just to see if I had missed any sections, there was no point. I needed help to look over the content as I felt that I had written War and Peace and was concerned that I had included information that was not relevant.’

‘More isolated and realise that there isn’t any real help but links.’

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for taking the time to complete our survey. Our development plans include a focus around our Quality Assurance including being clear about what people can expect and we hope this will improve the experience of families using our service.

January 2025

‘I had use sendiass before and had fantastic advice and help with our son some yrs back . This time was was a while different experience, had to talk to someone other than leaving a message a call back several days later with very little advice/ help . Felt very let down not sure I would use again, what has happened to a service that was absolutely brilliant.’

‘Answer the question I asked and help me deal with the phone problem, being a parent your views get overlooked and not taken seriously, people like you can influence but you don’t really get involved just give advice.’

‘Personalised responses, speaking to a human rather than just generic advice, helping families feel valued and supported.’

‘Phone service so it’s easier to explain why U are looking for.’

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for sharing your experiences and ideas for ways we can improve the service. We want to provide families with high quality, information and advice.

We try to tailor our responses for more specific enquiries, though we will often include general information (about the processes around SEN Support and EHC plans, for example). We respond to enquiries via the method originally used to contact us (or as specified by the enquirer on our web contact form). We acknowledge emails can feel less personal. Many parents find it helpful to talk things through with us and we will often suggest this option in an email response.

Our service aims to empower people to understand and take part in discussions and we would only be directly involved when the person using the service has let us know they have support needs of their own (and are therefore unable to independently navigate SEND processes or communicate with school/the local authority).

We’re sorry we fell short of your expectations on this occasion. We hope very much you give us another opportunity and encourage you to let us know about any specific additional needs should you use the service again – so that we can provide you with the right level of support.

November 2024

‘Not at all. Could not improve, amazing service.’

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for your kind comments.

October 2024

‘I understand that the service may be busy but to employ more advisors… sometimes families are in mental health crisis like myself dealing with the issues with the SEN educational system in Suffolk. I feel that to also have a coding on prioritising needs and considering when someone needs more support quicker than someone else. Maybe a green amber and red with red being crisis and very distressed. I had to wait 4 days for a call back and in that moment of need I was in a very bad way and emotional and stressed when you don’t receive an answer on a call.‘

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for your helpful feedback. We are currently reviewing our processes and exploring digital technologies which might help us to manage enquiries efficiently and focus resource where it is needed.

August 2024

‘Improve on communication and time scales for things to happen.’

SENDIASS response – We are aware that the delay in responding to enquiries can be frustrating. We aim to meet our published response times (within 5 working days). Due to high demand, we sometimes exceed this and we have been working on ways we might build capacity.

We followed this up with the parent – thank-you for sharing your experience of using our service, this will help us to work out where we can improve.

July 2024

‘Contact parents by telephone if they requested that rather than just sending an email of info that isn’t personal and doesn’t particularly give specific support. It was the first time I had contacted you, I was desperate for advice. However I waited over a week to hear back then just received a email of information that was very vague and didn’t address my concern.’ (anonymised – unable to follow up)

SENDIASS response – We aim to provide a high quality, personalised response to queries, via either the method originally used to contact us or the method specified by the enquirer on our web contact form. The nature of some enquiries about specific processes means that the email response can feel less individual. If you might be willing to contact us with your name, we can check back to our record of the enquiry and respond to you.

April 2024

‘I appreciate your knowledge and support so much. It just takes a long time. I couldn’t get through on the phone and no one responded to my voicemail. Emails take a long time to get a response, although it is clear that this will be the case from the auto reply. So… thank you for your help, but the main improvement, as I am sure you are aware, is to have more of you.’

‘I had to wait a week for someone to ring me back which I wasn’t expecting and it meant we didn’t have the answers to our questions when we had a caf meeting.’

‘As with anything SEN related, more resource, and by that I mean more people employed to offer the expert support you provide.‘

‘…advice has been instrumental in helping us win our appeal! Only thing I will say is it’s not always the easiest to get through on the phone but XX has always called me back as soon as she can. Thank you!’

SENDIASS response – Thank-you for sharing your experiences and ideas for ways we can improve the service. During March and into April our response times were much longer than we would like, up to 6 working days. We are aware of this concern, and we are working out ways we might build capacity within the service to manage the high demand.

March 2024

‘I feel with the number of children in the system it needs an overhaul with more resources and to cut wait times. Not directed at yourselves as I said xx was extremely helpful once I got to talk to her.’

‘More face to face workshops for parents in Saxmundham and Leiston area would be beneficial to parents of child with SEN needs.’

‘Online live chat feature that could help answer small questions.’

SENDIASS response – We are very grateful for the helpful suggestions for ways we can improve and will consider these when planning next steps for our service.

We are already exploring online chat options to improve accessibility to our information and advice, and working out ways we might build capacity within the service to manage the high demand.

We re-introduced face-to-face training sessions after Covid and were surprised to find there was very little interest from families (we had an average of 3 people attend our sessions around the county which wasn’t sustainable). We therefore made the decision to offer training predominately online with the option of offering a face-to-face session on request. The positive feedback we receive from families suggests this works best for the majority. However, if you know of a group of parents and carers who would like a face-to-face session, please encourage them to contact us so that we can agree a venue, day and time which suits the group. Email: [email protected]