Local offer annual report 2025

Introduction

Lincolnshire’s Local Offer annual report 2025 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.

Local area Ofsted and CQC SEND inspection

In February 2025, Lincolnshire local area partnership was subject to an inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission. The inspection found that Lincolnshire “should strengthen the effectiveness of its communication with stakeholders”  

The partnership should: 

• engage with education professionals to inform them about the partnership’s systems and processes to support children and young people with SEND effectively
• ensure parents and carers are well informed about the partnership’s provision to support children and young people with SEND. This includes ensuring that the local offer is accessible and understandable 
• ensure that parents and carers understand the range of activities and services available to children and young people. This includes support for next steps in education and towards adulthood, access to community activities, availability of transport and health care

The local area partnership recognises the need for further improvements to all of the communication channels including the local offer and an improvement plan has been established to ensure parents and carers have access to appropriate and up to date SEND  information, which is accessible and easy to navigate.

As part of the improvement plan, the local offer working group have been responsible for the implementation of the local offer action plan and have undertaken the following activities to support improvements:

• LO working group completed a comparative exercise by reviewing other partnerships Local Offers deemed high quality in Local Area Inspection Reports to better understand areas for development locally
• baseline review of Local Offer was undertaken by Lincolnshire Young Voices, with local education settings to provide fair and honest feedback on quality of Local Offer
• the findings were reviewed to support developments to continue to co-produce, inform and shape a strengthened Local Offer
• the findings of the Lincolnshire Parent Carer Forum annual survey was also considered when identifying areas of focus for improvement

The activities have helped identify the areas for development on the Local Offer and a plan to implement these improvements is now in place.
 

Developments and priorities

Specific developments

Along with the work highlighted as part of the SEND inspection improvement plan, the following specific developments have been implemented:

• better belonging inclusion strategy and sufficiency strategy added to Local Offer
• consultation on mainstream SEND hubs launched through the Local Offer
• new policies added to site
• ongoing review of Family Services Directory entries (6 monthly) to ensure all service information is accurate and up to date
• review of all sections of the Local Offer to ensure all service information is accurate and up to date
• launch of revised Lincolnshire ladder of behavioural interventions, along  with new toolkit, resource bank and suggested interventions
• promotion of Liaise new website for parents and carers
• ongoing support for the revised preparation for adulthood resources

Current priorities

• make site-wide changes to the Local Offer, ensuring it is easier to navigate and clear to understand for all users. This will include the introduction of images and tiles to identify each section and  more understandable information in each section
• review all sections and amend in line with improvement plan, ensuring the information in each section, is easy to understand, relevant and accessible
• preparation for adulthood section to be re-written, in line with changes to adult services information and resources
   

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 7558, with over 4553 active users.

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.

The visits have increased more than three times since last year, this will be due to the new layout being more accessible, the entries more accurate, and the link being used on many more pages.

Based on feedback from the Lincolnshire Parent Carer Survey 2025, the Local Offer and Family Services Directory has shown a significant increase in the reach to parents which now totals 73.2% from 59.4% last time. 
 

Further developments to last year's outstanding actions