What is a parent carer forum?
- By Southend SEND Crisis
- •
- 23 Mar, 2022
- •
Southend SEND Crisis with a searingly honest and very timely post what is, by general consensus amongst SEND activists, the absolute truth when it comes to Parent Carer Forums...
The consensus...
A parent carer forum is a tiny group of uninformed parents specially selected and groomed by the LA to take up co-production seats and waste them ensuring that voices aren’t heard and information is lacking.
They can be seen looking nervous at meetings where they have nothing to say - or don’t show up. They treat the forum as their own family company and hold on to key roles for years and years as if it is their automatic right while activists who enter the realm of SEND and find it lethally dangerous are forced to go through hell and support others/fight for better while being sneered at by local authorities and gas lit councillors.
Mistreatment of others...
They consider local volunteers to be their skivvies because they aren’t interested/don’t know enough to support others/analyse the failed systems that they fiercely prop up etc. They ride on the back of the hard work of others claiming to have improved things.
Do you like a *free* buffet?
If you like free buffets and meaningless titles and you don’t like to do any real work, please join one. You will be handed thousands of pounds to waste at your convenience and you will have years to destroy any hope of good outcomes for others but you will benefit personally.
Note - In Haringey you can add *free* money
Note - In Haringey you can add *free* money
Key roles (and it is a "role")
- Big smiles for Ofsted/DfE. Knockabout banter with officers for show
- “Oh they’re tough but we have grown to love them. They put us through our paces!”
- The promotion of companies charging thousands to support parents failed by the services you support and enable.
- Co-producing in areas you have no knowledge or lived experience of enabling contracts to be signed that fail children for years
Forum caught out failing - your LA needs YOU!
If activists manage to remove a failed forum we will need you to be ready to rush in and take over by forming a new one in order to keep everything consistent. Please ensure that you grab as much as you can for yourself as fast as you can and close all doors for those who you know should have been there.
Are you sure
you live in Southend and not Haringey? - Ed
The 'interview' questions
- Perhaps you need a vehicle to self-promote? This is the group for you
- Paid fraining* for yourself in order to further your personal ambitions? Tick.
- Are you able to forge close bonds with the LA for years while ignoring parents? Great! Go for it!
- Are you happy to prevent others joining because you need to cement your own position for personal gain?
- You will need to be the inexperienced but arrogant and ineffective parent of very young children who has no prior knowledge of SEND and you will need to be able to commit to 15 minutes a month.
You will find them all over the nation…..
They are not just in Southend - they are very much in Haringey too - Ed
*fraining is derived from Middle English meaning to ask
They are not just in Southend - they are very much in Haringey too - Ed
*fraining is derived from Middle English meaning to ask
The irony?
The irony? : Activists fought for parents to have the right to speak..
What is a Campaign Group? : We don’t know.
What are activists? : People who work alone in horrific circumstances unsupported because they are forced to.
If you thought SEND was bad - the NHS is seemingly prepared to throw away money to private companies
About 3 or 4 times a year we get the euphemistic message 'Parents please note we have put a letter in your child's bag' - its a world away from how a child's death was handled in my child's first school
More of a trial by ordeal than a well organised clearly set out administrative process for moving the care of vulnerable young adults from Haringey's Children's Services to Adult Services. We have been failed at every stage of the process.
Never EVER get on the bus without a camera running if you need the priority wheelchair space
The reality of using a London Bus in the teeming rain on a Sunday afternoon is no joke when the parents of a paraplegic person in a wheelchair clash with the self-entitled buggy-pushing parents of toddlers.
At 3pm today I received some barefaced lies from Haringey Council Adult Social Care in response to a photograph I published online yesterday and the media interest it generated
Haringey SEND Transport are insisting that a 17 year old minibus with no air conditioning is a suitable vehicle to transport my paraplegic son in this heatwave. The appalling conditions inside the minibus inside the bus is something they knew about last summer, yet they have to date done nothing whatsoever provide a suitable minibus this year nor appropriately mitigate the temperatures inside the minibus.The conditions inside the minibus are so bad that they triggered multiple seizures during the heatwave as my son has epilepsy, which they SEND transport department know about and they also know that they are triggered by heat.It is not just son who is impacted: last year we know of one child who died on Haringey SEND Transport in the summer heatwave and another who had seizures.
I am simply asking a question - are we all absolutely certain that the road closure / travel restrictions (commonly know as LTNs) placed on some of the most severely disabled people who are wholly reliant on cars are absolutely necessary
Haringey's road closures exemptions policy for disabled people is not fit for purpose, unduly burdensome and intrusive - it's time to stand up against the pro-LTN lycra-clad cycling bullies
Is the argument for and against exemptions for disabled people in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods really a case of GOOD versus EVIL?
