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Blog: Thanking our SEND Online Feedback Group


Published 10 August 2023

It's really important to us that families who use the Local Offer website can have their say in what goes on it. Our SEND Online Feedback Group is the way we make sure families can own decision making for our information service.

Our SEND Online Feedback Group is a group of over 270 parent carers and young people who signed up to help us make continuous improvements to the website. We want to take this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to them for all their help and feedback.

We also want to encourage others to join them! So here's a little bit about the group, and some of the meaningful ways they have contributed, and made an impact on the Hertfordshire Local Offer website.

By completing short, online activities (usually taking 5 - 10 mins to complete), the group helps us make informed decisions on the Local Offer website. This includes decisions on design, the information itself and how things are organised.

Some have also agreed to help us with face to face interviews where we ask them in a little more depth about their experience with SEND services or particular challenges they face, in order that we can make sure we understand more about the needs of those using the website. 

Over the past few years, we have sent over 70 different tasks to our feedback group, ranging from short 5-minute computer tasks, to more in-depth face-to-face interviews. Through these tasks, we received over 1,650 pieces of feedback! We're grateful to every single person who has got involved and helped us by completing tasks, sharing views and talking to us about their experience of SEND services and the website. 

We value all feedback - whether negative or positive - and carefully consider it to make sure that we have understood what families are telling us.

How have they made a difference?

Some recent examples of how they've helped us improve the website include: 

Making information on SEN funding clear and easy to understand

We asked SOFG members to answer questions about SEN funding, to see if they could easly find the answers on the website. These answers showed us what was working well, and what was confusing. It also helped us to identify what extra information to add. 

Getting the language right around the topic of 'behaviours that challenge'

We know that this is a sensitive topic and we really wanted to make sure that families with lived experience dictated how we discuss this topic. SOFG members completed a survey on this topic, and we also had some in depth conversations with a neurodivergent parent who guided us in using the right language when talking about behaviour. 

Our Talking about Behaviour blog tells you more about this.

Demystifying information on Mental Health in Hertfordshire.

We asked members of our feedback group to complete tasks on webpage design mockups. This is how we create pages which are easy to navigate.

We also spoke to families with experiences of mental health services to inform the page - and we fed back to the services too, for their benefit.

Read our blog on demystifying mental health support to find out more.

Join us and help us make the Local Offer a better resource for families

We want to get more and more points of view from families across Hertfordshire. If you're a parent, carer or young person aged 16 - 25 with SEND, join us and help us make the Local Offer website a great resource for families.

  • Our tasks are never a test of your abilities - it's always to better understand families' experience and to see how successful the website is
  • You don't need to complete every task that we send - you can just pick the ones you want to
  • When you sign up, we ask for a few details about you - this is so that we can send you the most relevant activities to you.