Lincolnshire’s Local Offer annual report 2024 provides an update of key developments on the Local Offer website since the previous annual report. It includes feedback from service users and how this has impacted on the information provided.
What is the purpose of the Local Offer?
The Local Offer has two key purposes:
- to provide clear, comprehensive, accessible, and up to date information about the available provision in the local area and how to access it
- to make provision more responsive to local needs and aspirations by directly involving young people with special educational needs and their parents and carers, and service providers in its development and review.
The Local Offer is not simply a directory of existing services. Its success depends as much upon full engagement with the users as it does on the information it contains. Its aim is to meet the information needs of families living in Lincolnshire, as well as supporting professionals who may be directly working with families across the county. Every local area in England must have a Local Offer as per the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice 2015.
Key features of the SEND Local Offer
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer brings together information for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and their families.
It has a wide range of information for families, including:
- eligibility for childcare
- where to start with special educational needs and disabilities
- wellbeing advice
- support with education
- preparing for adulthood
- upcoming events with the Lincolnshire Parent Carer Forum
Alongside the Local Offer is the Family Services Directory
The Family Services Directory provides information about available services in your local area such as:
- childcare
- support groups
- charities
- education providers
- children’s centre activities
- other leisure opportunities
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer and the Family Services Directory are both maintained and developed by Lincolnshire County Council.
Co-production
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer is co-produced with a range of stakeholders. There is an active working group that is made up of partners across education, health and care, alongside Lincolnshire Parent Carer Form (LPCF) and Lincolnshire Young Voices (LYV).
Feedback
When accessing the Local Offer, visitors can provide direct feedback and suggestions about how Lincolnshire’s Local Offer can be improved via the ‘Your Views and Feedback’ page
Within this section, the ‘You Said, We Did’ provides information about all the feedback we have received, and the actions taken to address and improve Lincolnshire’s Local Offer.
For example:
- ‘How to do I create a page? What is a record? How do I advertise with you?’
- Some of the most common questions we receive are around how to use our system and how to advertise. We have created a support and guides page that currently holds a user-friendly guide with both task steps and screenshots.
- ‘I want to tell parents that I work during the holidays, but I don't know where to put it.’
- We have updated the amount of information areas you can fill in and have made sure you have to fill them in to continue.
Specific developments
- the FSD has been totally revamped and is now live
- we continuously look at the pages to see if they can be improved or if there is something missing which needs adding. The sections of the local offer have been looked at, and moved into different sections to make it easier to navigate. There are quite a few strategy documents which now have their own sections
- we continuously go through all records on the family services directory to check links work and that they are still active organisations
- we reviewed our local offer against other regions. We are happy that ours is easy to navigate and information is accessible
Current priorities
- preparing for adulthood section review
Who has been looking at the Local Offer?
The information below show data relating to the use of the Local Offer page and Family services directory. (This is a slightly different format to previous reports, due to new reporting programmes)
Local offer homepage views
The number of views for the year was 8843, with over 5300 active users.
The graph shows that the views are more on weekdays than weekends, with spikes in use in March and September.
FSD views
This chart shows that there have been many users over the past year on the directory, but most visitors only use it once.
Most people would not need to return immediately as they are looking for a specific service and would get the details they need in one visit.
Promotion of the Local Offer takes place throughout the year through digital promotion, service area promotion and workshops hosted by LPCF, with the expresses purpose of publicising this resource amongst their members.
Further developments to last year's outstanding actions
| Action | Solution | Status |
| Information on adult care porcesses for families of youn people preparing for adulthood could be developed further | LCC SEND Employment Lead is now a member of the Local Offer Working Group Development of content on Local Offer to cover preparation for adulthood, specifically transition from education to employment and training. Further content development required to cover transition to adult services. | This is an ongoing work strand within adult social care. The working group are kept up to date with progress and further information will be placed on the local offer once complete |
|
It would be useful to have more video content which explains very clearly what the Local Offer is and how young people can use it. |
Lincs Young Voices approached to develop video resource discussing what to expect at various stages of statutory process. At present this is not possible due to other priorities within the groups workplan. To be revisited as part of next years work plan. | This remains under consideration |
| Outdated design on Family Services Directory | Currently working with the supplier to refresh and redesign the directory and help with searchability. | Completed |
