DiAS (Devon Information Advice and Support) provides information, advice and support on special educational needs and disability (SEND).
It’s a statutory service, which means it must be provided by law. Every local authority in England has this type of service and what they provide is shaped by chapter 2 of the SEND Code of Practice and the National Minimum Standards for IASS services.
Our service
Our main activity is to provide a service for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, aged up to 25, and their parents or carers. We give support around SEND issues at every stage of a child’s education, including into further education and adulthood. The service offers:
More information:
We do much more than provide our information advice and support though. These are our some of our other activities and roles.
Listening to, and working with, parents, carers and young people
DiAS has a reference group made up of parents, carers and professionals from schools, inclusion and early years. The group’s role is to guide the growth and development of the service. They meet three times a year to talk about a wide range of issues for DiAS, including:
- the parent’s perspective on key issues
- evaluating what we do and how we do it
- how we work with other SEND services
- responding to pressure on SEND services
DiAS Information Principles
These are the principles that parents and carers feel should underpin the development and production of information resources and services for parents and carers.
Information should be clear and accurate, accessible and relevant.
If you want to find out more about our work with parents and carers, or about our information work, contact Sarah Smith.
Training
As part of our quality standards we deliver training to parents about SEND issues and support. We work with parents to deliver our training.
For parents, we offer three online information sessions:
- Demystifying SEND – about how to find the right support and access services if your child has special educational needs
- Listening to your child’s voice – about how to help your child share their views about school and how these can help them get the right support
- EHC plan review myth-busting – about how parents are involved in the EHC plan review in Devon
If you want to find out more about our training for parents we regularly post information about them on our Facebook page. You can also find out more on our page about training and information events.
Influencing policy and practice
We work with national and local organisations and teams to influence policy and change or improve practice.
We gather themes and trends from our work and share these to inform strategic decision making of Education, Health and Care commissioning and services. We always take care to be impartial and maintain confidentiality.
Here are some of the things we do.
- Working together with Parent Carer Forum Devon to manage the Ambassador Volunteer Programme. This promotes the involvement of parents in developing local and county wide services.
- Contributing to the SEND Partnership Board, which sets the strategy and direction for SEND in Devon.
- Being a member of several strategic working groups. These are are focused on improving aspects of the SEND strategy for example, Operational Delivery Group, Early Year SEND, Communication and Engagement workstream.
- Contributing to the Local Authority inclusion agenda, by attending meetings focussed on children missing education.
You can find out more about our work over the last year by reading our annual report 2019/20. If you’d like to know more about any aspect of our work, please contact us.
Page created: January 2022
Page due for review: January 2024