About SEND Local Offer
Barking and Dagenham’s SEND Local Offer is for You – children and young people with special educational needs (SEN) or disabilities and their parents.
Our Vision: One borough, One community. No one left behind.
We believe in the potential of Barking and Dagenham people. Our priority is to support residents to prosper from good education, skills development, and secure employment. We apply our principles of partnership and coproduction to support our work.
Our Local Offer is developed in close discussion with parents and carers as part of the desire of agencies within the area to work together in partnership. Working together in true partnership with parent carers and other interested agencies to improve support available is referred to as co-production. You can download our Co-production charter.
What is the Local Offer?
Local authorities must publish a Local Offer, setting out in one place information about provision they expect to be available across education, health and social care for children and young people in their area who have SEN or are disabled, including those who do not have Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans. In setting out what they ‘expect to be available’, local authorities should include provision which they believe will actually be available.
The Local Offer has two key purposes:
- To provide clear, comprehensive, accessible and up-to-date information about the available provision and how to access it, and
- To make provision more responsive to local needs and aspirations by directly involving disabled children and those with SEN and their parents, and disabled young people and those with SEN, and service providers in its development and review
The Local Offer should not simply be a directory of existing services. Its success depends as much upon full engagement with children, young people and their parents as on the information it contains. The process of developing the Local Offer will help local authorities and their health partners to improve provision.
For full details, please visit: SEND Code of Practice Chapter 4 The Local Offer – PDF – GOV.UK
If you do not have access to the internet, visit your local children’s centre where they will be able to help you access the internet. Your child’s school may also be able to help you with internet access. If you would rather speak to someone, please contact Barking & Dagenham Carer’s Hub on 020 8593 4422 or carers@carerscentre.org.uk
We want to improve the website and welcome feedback. This may be on how easy it is to access, the content and anything which is missing. Please get in touch by email sendlocaloffer@lbbd.gov.uk or complete our online form.