SEND and You (SAY)

Your Local SENDIAS (Special Educational Needs & Disability Information Advice & Support) Services

You said

In the survey 10% of parent carers said that access to the SENDIAS Service was poor/very poor.

We did

In an average week the SENDIAS support line receives more than 90 calls.  Depending on the enquiry it can take a member of staff anything from 15 minutes to 3 hours to support you.  Often the number of calls exceeds the number of staff we have available to answer calls so we also operate an answerphone system.  Whilst we endeavour to contact service users back within 24 hours we appreciate that this means that because our staff are busy making call backs some of you are often unable to speak directly with an advisor when you call the support line.

In response to this, in November and December 2021 we ran a trial on our telephone support line in which we triaged all incoming calls in an effort to speak with more of you directly as soon as you called into the service.  During the trial we answered an average of 70% of all live calls, up from approximately 20%.  We are now in the process of trying to secure funding to be able to put the trial into full time practice to increase the immediate accessibility to our most valued element of our service.