We want to reach out to as many families of children and young people with Special Educational Needs and disabilities in Cumbria as possible.
To become a member of SENDAC, you must be a parent/carer or grandparent to a child or young person with additional needs (age 0- 25 years old). Your child does not need an official diagnosis for you to become a member and we support families of children with any type of additional need from complex and profound needs to learning difficulties like dyslexia and physical disabilities.
SENDAC needs members in order to arm us with feedback from parent carers in Cumbria, so we can present these to senior leads to show them what is really happening on the ground. We can then hold them accountable if SEND services are not working well for families and need improvements.
We receive core funding from the Department for Education and our purpose is to ensure that the voices of parents, children and young people are heard in the planning and implementation of SEND services in Cumbria, without our membership we have no voice!
The easiest way of supporting us is by becoming a member and Membership is FREE! There are no commitments as a wider member, but it does mean you get feedback opportunities and service updates straight to your inbox. as well as, SENDAC membership benefits such as free training offers and workshops!
We know that for most parents, and for parents of disabled children in particular, time is in short supply. Yet it is vital that we join together, pool our knowledge and exert real influence, instead of fighting the same battles in isolation.
SENDAC is YOUR forum. We are YOUR voice.
You will be the first to receive our newsletter and any events we are hosting/attending
You will be the first to be notified of free parent carer training opportunities we host and fund!
You get membership benefits such as our current offer of a free MAX card as a thank-you for becoming our member! Check out our Video about MAX cards!
Your own log in to our Members area portal on our website. This enables you to find out what we’re currently wanting parent carer feedback on, and you can post directly and anonymously, your opinions on each post!
You will be regularly updated on our current work streams and the general work of SENDAC
You will be added onto our mailing list where we send you a variety of updates and information such as current parent carer workshops available, activities in the community etc.
You can Join our SENDAC Parent Carer Community Facebook Group, which already has 200 + members!
ClICK HERE TO BECOME A MEMBER
Some frequently asked questions
Membership is completely Free, including all of our events, training, online sessions, raffles and other things that we host / that we invite you too! Everything is free!
When you become a member you will be added to our mailing list, don’t worry we never bombard our members with emails. We send out approximately 2 emails Per month, so we won’t be clogging up your inbox. We understand the struggles of emails in this day and age where organisations send multiple emails a week, we will never do that!
Every county has a statutory parent carer forum and you’re legally entitled to become a member of yours- which is SENDAC! by being a member, we offer you various things:
- Free SEND training opportunities (on various needs, sensory, visual impairment, makaton, autism, SEND law)
- Updates about SEND services e.g. Therapies, School transport, EHCP processes etc that will Likely be relevant to you
- Currently a Free max card for becoming a member
- We will also send surveys to our membership about services, these are completely optional for you to fill in, but if you do, as we’re a statuary body, we can take this directly to the most senior people in the NHS and LA and hold them accountable if there are no improvements
- You will be the first to notified of our events, training and other things where there are limited spaces
- You will be kept up to date with improvements to SEND services that have happened directly from the feedback you have given us!
- We are ran by parents who have children with additional needs, so we understand the challenges and the journey as a whole!
but the biggest reason – POWER IN NUMBERS! to enable services that our children access to improve we need to evidence that things aren’t working for families, we have to evidence this to senior leads. without these numbers our evidence just isn’t strong enough to prove that things need to improve.
This is the same for things that are good too and we don’t want to change! If we don’t evidence that families are happy with something, we may not have the evidence to argue that it’s valuable to families and that we don’t want to get rid of it.
No, nothing at all! The only thing you have to do is fill in the membership form which can be found at the top and bottom of this page and that is literally it!
There are optional things you can do additionally, for example answer a survey that we send out in emails, but this is always optional!
We know it sounds too good to be true, but it is true! From one parent carer to another, we would always advise you to become a member of your forum, you’re entitled and there are literally no negatives at all!
Being part of the forum isn’t a benefit to us who volunteer our time to do it, we do it because it benefits all families who have children with additional needs and we are passionate about improving services.
To put it bluntly, us who run the forum don’t benefit from, profit from or get a wage out of running the forum and we wouldn’t donate our free time to persuade you to become a member, if we didn’t think it was important for you or a benefit to you to be one!
We are just like you parents and carers giving our time to make sure the needs of SEND children in cumbria are met!
No, there is no diagnosis needed at all! We also cover all needs e.g Down Syndrome, autism, ADHD, Deaf children, children with rare disorders, Cerebral palsy, children with development delays, Learning disabilities etc
