On Wednesday we held our day-long, in-person EHCP workshop here at the Sunshine Hub in Derby. This is an incredible whole day event where attendees not only get one to one time with our Head of Advocacy Kelly Jarvis and members of her team, they also get a huge amount of knowledge from Kelly plus the opportunity to start to write their EHCP application letter under her guidance.
Our Events and Marketing Manager Vicky Saunders was one of those parents who attended and here’s her summary of the day…
I’ll start with a little bit of background – I’d not been to one of our EHCP workshops before and went along very much with my Mum hat on. This is my second time applying for an EHCP – last time was school led and happened in the blur of lockdown whereas this time, for my daughter I’m looking to put in a parental application.
I’m struggling to get the support that she needs from school and am also being met with a lot of ‘she’s fine when she is here’ or ‘it’s not too bad’.
One of the biggest things to come out of the EHCP day for me was the validation. I felt validated with what I learnt that she could be eligible for an EHC Needs Assessment and I felt validated that more could be done to support her. This has then grown my confidence in advocating for her needs.
Despite being very much a veteran SEND parent, with a son in a specialist provision and a robust EHCP to support it, I realised that I am still falling into the trap of just accepting what the school is telling me.
During the day we went through many exercises to test out our new knowledge and one of the key ones Kelly led us in was to question ‘so what’. The idea is that you identify a need your child has, for example my daughter has been having friendship difficulties. I had been taking this at face value, accepting that 6-year-olds are still learning about friendship and that not everyone can get on. But what the ‘so what’ exercise does is it expands upon the identified need by asking ‘so what does that mean’ and what I found is that when you do that, you really uncover a lot more that needs to be addressed. That initial need becomes:
‘My daughter has been having friendship issues which leads to her feeling isolated and lonely at lunchtimes, it’s affecting how much she eats as she ends up very anxious, and this is then affecting her in the afternoons when she is regularly needing a sick bowl as she feels poorly.’ (You could even go into more detail about how this impacts her learning and also how it makes her feel in front of the rest of the class).
The ‘so what’ method allowed me to draw out more from an individual situation, and it also then validated my concerns that friendship issues aren’t the small issue they might be dismissed as.
It was a day where we had a huge amount of information given to us but, having not seen Kelly present in person before, I was amazed at her ability to relay so much hugely useful information in such an easy to understand way.
There was opportunity for all us parents to chat and that’s always such a great moment of realising that you aren’t the only one finding this difficult, wondering if you are doing the right thing and hoping that an EHCP might provide some resolution.
Overall, I’ve left feeling much more confident in what I need to do to prepare for an EHCP application, how to present the letter to give myself the best chance of it being accepted, I understand more about the legal timescales and what to do if they aren’t met and I feel a confidence in the fact that my daughter needs an EHCP and will benefit from having one.
As a Mum facing the daunting challenge of applying for an EHCP, I really would strongly recommend coming along to our next EHCP Day which is going to be on 7 October. There’s something very special about being in the room and getting all this info fed to you – I definitely felt a shift when I left, a new confidence that I could do this – and I’ve even already emailed school to say ‘we need to talk’
Tickets for our EHCP in-person workshop always go quickly so if you would like to come along in October – all the details can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1345139842479
