About
www.pps-speakup.org was set up during the Aiming High for Disabled Children Programme to enable greater transparency, and a wider knowledge of the planning and development of new services to support families with a child with a disability. Crucially, it aimed to promote the participation of parents and carers in this work by publishing dates of planning meetings and minutes of those meetings containing decisions and actions to be taken forward. Anyone interested could comment on this material and comments were fed back to the AHDC Steering Group and to the chairs of the various planning groups involved.
The AHDC Programme has now been embedded into the general service offer from each local authority (LA) to families in their area. The participation of parents and carers, as potential and actual service users, in planning and shaping services is still a very strong expectation. In addition, parent/carer forums set up as part of the AHDC work are now expected to continue as independent bodies, albeit generally with significant funding input from the LA.
Parents & Carers Forum
The PPS-speakup website has therefore taken on a new life as parentscarersforum.org.uk as a means for parents and carers of children with disabilities across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire to remain linked into a network, both as a virtual group through the website and as real groups through the Notts PaCT (Nottinghamshire Parents and Carers Together) and Rainbow (hosting the Nottingham parent/carer forum) groups. The reframed website links closely with Iris, the information service for families with disabled children set up through AHDC and operating across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, to provide the widest reach for parent/carer participation.
Notts PaCT and Rainbow each have their own web area, to provide contact details and information about what the groups do. There is also a facility to feedback comments where parents/carers can contribute their views to a range of different consultation and participation activities. Some of these will be more relevant to City parents and others to County parents, but there will also be instances where parent/carer views generally are sought. After all, parents are parents wherever they live!
