Making Participation Work creates spaces for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities to influence decision making at a strategic level. As part of the programme, the Council for Disabled Children (CDC) are looking to partner with a small number of existing groups of children and young people, whether a youth group, a class at school, an after-school club, or a participation group, to work alongside FLARE. FLARE are the young advisors to the Department for Education supported by CDC.
This partnership will give opportunities to the children and young people you work with and support them to feed in directly to the Department for Education.
What does the partnership involve?
The partnership is 1 year, and your group would commit to 6 x 1-hour sessions a year which would coincide with the dates of FLARE’s meetings. The dates of the sessions are: May 2023, July 2023, September 2023, November 2023, January 2024, and March 2024.
CDC will support the group and the group leader to deliver the same activities that the FLARE group participate in, and the information gathered from the activities will then be collated and sent to the SEND team at Department for Education and form part of our work to develop best practice for the ongoing implementation of the SEND reforms.
We are looking specifically to partner with groups of up to 14 young people with SEND who are particularly seldom heard. This might be:
- A group whose members are predominately Black, Asian and from other minority ethnic groups
- A group of 7-11-year-olds
- A group of young people who have sensory or communication support needs.
What do you need to do?
The session material and activities would be fully prepped by CDC. If the session is online, the session can be delivered by the group leader or by CDC staff. Face to face sessions would be delivered by the group leader.
The topics of the sessions are set jointly by the FLARE group and the Department for Education and are all related to the implementation of the SEND reforms.
This is an amazing opportunity for the young people you work with to contribute to strategic decision making in Government and to develop a range of skills that they can use and evidence as they move through their academic career and into adulthood!
Please click here to access the application form.
Expressions of interest close Monday 1st May 2023.
If you have any questions please email Ga-Ling at [email protected].
Find out more here
