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.

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Latest service feedback

Sample of positive comments received:

‘Thank you very helpful. I always contact SENDIASS at times of transition because I know you are in the middle and not taking sides.’

‘I’m really glad you called. I cried when I missed the last call. I feel like you have listened to me and understand. Thank you so much.’

‘in our experience have found your support for them absolutely amazing.’

‘Thank you, after years of battling to get heard, this is the most useful conversation I’ve had.’

‘It’s so refreshing to speak to someone who understands about SEND.’

‘Thank you for your call. You have really cheered me up this morning and I feel like I am not on my own dealing with this anymore.’

‘thank you so much really glad to have found you wish i found your service sooner.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate your reply especially as I imagine you’re overwhelming with people requesting advice and support right now.’

‘You go above and beyond to help I can’t thank you enough for your help and support it’s made such a difference.’

‘Thank you for that information. It’s very clear now. I feel much better knowing my options.’

‘Thank you for listening. Much appreciated and for your advice and options to consider. I know what they are now. There is far too much confusing information out there.’

‘I am so grateful for all your help and kindness I really appreciate everything ❤️.’

‘Thank you so much for calling me back and for speaking with me. I feel like I have support now.’

Thank you again for all of your help with this it’s such an exhausting and confusing thing to be going through, grateful to have people like you who can help.’

‘You’ve been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for your reassurances and your service.’

‘Thank you for calling me. I am at my wit’s end. You are lovely – the nicest person I have spoken to in this whole process.’

‘You are my angel and I am sending you a big hug down the phone.’

‘I am fighting a lot of fire. Thank you Thank you Thank you for all of your advice, support and reassurance.’

Parent feedback, February to March 2024

Training feedback

‘This has been brilliant, I have some experience of these (strategies) from work but for some reason hadn’t thought about doing them for my child.’

‘Brilliant thank you, I look forward to receiving the resources and putting them to use. We want to make our child’s school experience as good as possible.’

‘Thank you! I feel rather emotional now I realise I have been misunderstanding my daughter’s behaviour and how I can now help her so much more.’

‘It’s such a shame you are a small team, because your knowledge is fantastic. I know personally I would appreciate someone from your team advocating for my son at school.’

‘I’ve been finding it a minefield when it comes to specialist units and things and this has been absolutely fantastic.’

‘This has been so helpful, and given me a much better understanding of the EHCP.’

‘I think it’s really great practitioners are able to join the sessions even to just refresh their memory especially when the forms or process has changed.’

‘Really useful session, thank you. It will be great to have the slides for future reference and I appreciate the help and advice.’

‘Really useful session, thank you. It will be great to have the slides for future reference and I appreciate the help and advice.’

Parent and practitioner feedback, February to March 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?’

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 web 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

January 2024

‘Not to copy and paste advice from your website. Actually take the time to read the question and scenario given and offer practical advice that would help in the situation.’

‘Respond to people. I filled out the online registration/ referral/ application form in December when we were at a crisis point and have never heard back.’

‘Reply to queries’

‘Ensure the person answering the emails reads the original query properly, as they hugely misunderstood the advice I was asking for and instead told me they cannot recommend home education for my child, despite this not being what I was asking!’

‘Be more proactive. Reply much sooner. Listen and help parents navigate this whole SEND minefield much earlier on in the process. Allow parent’s opportunities to get together and talk to each other if they needed to. Be honest and helpful instead of sounding like you’re just reading from a text book.’

SENDIASS response – We are aware that the delay in responding to enquiries can be frustrating and we have updated our published response times to ‘within 5 working days’ to help us to better manage expectations. We always 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. However, the nature of some enquiries about specific processes means that the email response can feel less individual.

We will take on board the comments received and follow up with those that left their contact details.

We want to meet the needs of families and are working on how we can provide tailored information, advice and support with the volume of referrals coming through.  

Older...

‘It was hard to get help/advice nearly 2 years ago but it’s improved a lot since. The best thing was asking for help very recently and your worker came to our school meeting which helped us immensely. I don’t think it would have been suffice just us parents going. Can’t thank xx enough – she gave us clarity, where the school was very hazy.’ (November 2023)

‘Follow up phone call to see how it all went.’ (September 2023)

SENDIASS response – We follow the national intervention levels guidance when deciding any ongoing support that might be needed. We explain to the parent (or the young person) that they can get back in touch as and when they have further questions for us – this might include revisiting their situation, perhaps after a meeting, for example. Some people using the service have support needs and the “empowering families” section of our website explains how we tailor our support: About us – Suffolk SENDIASS

‘I understand that you are probably understaffed as every other department but having tried to ring several times then emailing with no response is tiring.’ (July 2023) and

‘You could contact me back’ (July 2023)

SENDIASS response – We are aware that we have not been able to respond to all enquiries as quickly as we would have liked this month, and the survey results reflect this. We have now caught up with outstanding referrals and are able to respond within our advertised 3 working days. We are aware that this incredibly high number of referrals may return as an issue once the new academic year starts and are looking into routes to address this.

‘Realise that age doesn’t mean they would call themselves’ (July 2023)

SENDIASS response – If a young person is over the age of 16, we are able to provide general advice to a parent but would usually require the young person’s permission to discuss their situation in more detail. We are able to support the young person directly and are currently developing our young person offer. We understand that this can be difficult for parents and have many contact routes whereby the young person is able to contact us themselves, or give their consent for us to speak to their parent or carer, without them having to phone us.

‘Become an Advocate and support the mother who was very upset. I needed help to communicate to the school about how overwhelmed I felt. I really needed support but I didn’t get it.’ (July 2023)

We help families take part in conversations about SEND, and this includes advice and support to communicate with schools. We follow the national intervention levels guidance when deciding any ongoing support that might be needed.

Some people using the service have support needs and the “empowering families” section of our website explains how we tailor our support: About us – Suffolk SENDIASS

Our remit does not include providing ‘statutory advocacy’ and we would always signpost to relevant organisations: Read the definition of advocacy which SENDIAS services use.

‘Provide free resources that parents can access to help their child when having a meltdown.’ (July 2023)

SENDIASS response – We guide parents to the information on our own website, to our training/information sessions, and to resources available from other services, such as the Psychology and Therapeutic Service or Specialist Education Services. We also signpost to external organisations such as “Autism & ADHD” and “The Girl with the Curly Hair” project. We keep our content and resources under continuous review.

‘An online portal to track the progress of an enquiry would make it much easier to contact the service and would have stopped me from leaving further messages and sending an email too which I’m sure just gummed up your system even more.’ (April 2023)

SENDIASS response – We’re sorry we fell short of expectations on this occasion. We have one person answering the helpline at any time. This does mean that incoming calls frequently divert to voicemail. We are currently experiencing high demand too and we are exploring how we might build capacity to meet the continued high demand.

As the volume of referrals to our service increases, we may well need to explore digital solutions to improve the customer experience.

‘Read the email sent before sending a generic template.
I have been recommended the service several times and was disappointed at the response’ (April 2023)

SENDIASS response – We’re sorry we fell short of expectations on this occasion. We think this might be linked to the ways people are choosing to access the service. It can be difficult to provide a more personalised response to an enquiry (or assess whether there are any support needs) for someone who contacts the service by email, text or web contact form.

We can provide the same information and advice through these routes though, unlike a phone conversation, we cannot check understanding and whether someone is able to take next steps independently. We recognised this issue prior to this feedback and have already changed our digital responses, to include text explaining our levels of support and suggesting people provide their phone number if further explanation is needed or they do not understand. We hope this will be an improvement and will continue to carefully monitor.

Parent testimonials

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