{"id":17003,"date":"2026-05-05T18:36:01","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T17:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/?p=17003"},"modified":"2026-05-05T18:37:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T17:37:37","slug":"the-send-consultation-what-it-is-asking-how-you-can-respond-and-what-weve-learnt-building-our-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/the-send-consultation-what-it-is-asking-how-you-can-respond-and-what-weve-learnt-building-our-response\/","title":{"rendered":"The SEND Consultation: What it is asking, how you can respond and what\u00a0we\u2019ve\u00a0learnt building our response"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What we think<\/strong><\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The PDA Society\u2019s position is that if changes are to be made to the school system generally and to how people with SEND are supported, then its important those changes make things better not worse for PDAers. To help us understand what children and families want we have sent out a snap questionnaire that was answered by 150 families and held 5 consultation meetings focusing on distinct parts of the consultation document. These meetings have brought together parents and education professionals as well as academics and clinicians to talk about what in the consultation is helpful \u2013 and what isn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This short document<\/a>\u00a0outlines\u00a0the headlines of our concerns and hopes around the consultation. Please feel free to share this document in any conversations you have with people who have influence over the process, including MP\u2019s,\u00a0Ministers\u00a0and government officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your opportunity to have your say<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are 39 questions in the consultation response form which you can find here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u00a0is\u00a0a long document and can feel quite overwhelming,\u00a0but\u00a0you\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have to answer every question,\u00a0you can choose to just focus on the ones that are important to you. You also\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0need to worry about sounding academic or\u00a0professionalising\u00a0your answers \u2013 the experiences you\u00a0have are important and relevant and however you choose to share them is useful.\u00a0If you want to respond to the consultation and are interested in what our findings from conversations were \u2013 and what we have interpreted each question as asking \u2013 we have a much longer document here<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The document might be useful as you work your way though a response. In it we have listed all the consultation questions \u2013 what you might want to think about in your responses and what we\u2019ve heard from people when preparing our response.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hope it is helpful. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The government have recently published a school’s white paper talking about changes they would like to make to the education system; alongside this they have published a consultation document. The consultation document describes changes they plan to make to how children with SEND are supported. The consultation is open until midnight on the 18th May and we strongly recommend that PDAers, parents and professionals take the opportunity to tell the government which of the ideas in the document you think will work, what you think won\u2019t and share any experiences you\u2019ve had that might help them understand PDAers needs in education better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":8498,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[151,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pdasociety.org.uk\/pda2025staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}