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: enquiries@suffolksendiass.co.uk – marking for the attention of the Service Lead.

Latest service feedback

Sample of positive comments received:

‘Thank you for explaining – It feels less stressful now.’

‘Thank you – I have been so worried about all of this. It’s good to have someone else to talk things through with.’

‘Thanks so much for calling, I really appreciate having someone’s help because I feel like I haven’t ever had much support with this before.’

‘That was the most productive meeting I have ever had at that school. Thank you very much’.

‘Thank you for your time. You are a wonderful service. I so appreciate everything you have told me today. I am a single mum and it’s very difficult finding anybody to speak to about all of this stuff’.

‘I always feel so much better after speaking with you, your service is awesome. Thanks so much for all the help, I’m so grateful’.

‘Thank you so much for speaking with me about my options’.

‘Super – thank you for getting back to me. I looked on-line but couldn’t find the answers to my specific questions so I’m very pleased you called me back’.

‘Thank you, that is very reassuring and helpful.  There is a lot of advice out there but sometimes it can be overwhelming’.

‘I always assumed I needed help but maybe I can have this meeting by myself, with a bit of help from you to prepare first. Thanks so much for your call’.

‘It has been so worthwhile to talk my situation through with firstly someone who actually cares and secondly someone who can actually help and is a source of so much information’.

‘Thanks, I really needed to talk about this because it’s been making me feel crazy, its been really nice to talk’.

‘Thank you, I feel clearer about what I’m going to do – it’s good to have a plan of action’.

‘Thank you so much for calling me – I need your help with an email I received that I don’t understand’.

‘Many thanks for your time speaking to me. It has been worrying me a lot and I fell much clearer now’.

‘I really appreciate you speaking to me – you have acted like a sounding board and it has helped a lot’.

‘Thank you so much for your call and explaining how the process works’.

‘Thanks for talking through all of this, it’ll be really helpful to prepare for a meeting’.

‘Thanks a lot for your time, its been really helpful to distinguish between the different issues, and to have these policies explained to me, I just wanted to understand how it worked and now I am so much clearer, thank you’.

‘Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today, I do feel clearer on what options I have and really appreciate it’.

‘Thanks so much, this has been really helpful, I’m so grateful for your time and really appreciate going through this with someone outside of the school’.

Parent feedback, October 2024

Training feedback

‘it was really helpful and so clearly explained – thank you!’

‘Really informative session and has encouraged me to clarify what support is in place at school’.

‘Great thanks. Very helpful to also hear that children can be different in different environments/settings. Thank you’.

‘I’ve written a lot of things to try and things to bring up with the school too so thank you’.

‘Very informative, clear and helpful. Thank you’.

‘I’ve taken loads of notes and you described my kids perfectly with the communication skills. Thank you so much, I have so many things to put into place at home. Thank you’.

‘Thank you. Really helpful with questions too 🙂 appreciate your time’.

‘Everything was so helpful thank you’.

‘Really appreciate this, all ideas are helpful, thank you so much for your time’.

‘Thank you! So many wonderful ideas and things to think of which I really appreciate. My daughter is 5 and almost at the end of her diagnosis journey so every bit of info is a help!’

‘thank you so much, very informative and helpful’.

‘It was brilliant, thank you so much for all the info’.

‘A HUGE help thank you! Great course’.

‘Very informative sessions with good links and signposting to additional support tools’.

‘Thank you, both sessions have been so useful. I’ve attended SENDIASS webinars for parents too and they are always high quality and worth the time. Thank you for all you do.’

‘Thank you for all the information, I’ll definitely be taking some of this forward in my next monitoring visit.’

‘Thank you I am very new (to governing) and this was very helpful.’

Training feedback, October 2024

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 services?’

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

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: enquiries@suffollksendiass.co.uk

Parent testimonials

Parent testimonial June 2024 – plain text version (opens PDF)

Parent testimonial 2 August 2024 plain text version (opens PDF)

Parent testimonial 3 August 2024 plain text version (opens PDF)

Short videos of Suffolk parents talking about how SENDIASS helped with concerns and questions around their children’s education:

Your experiences

Have something to share with other parents? Please get in touch we would love to hear from you at enquiries@suffolksendiass.co.uk