A 7 minute walkthrough of the Calderdale SEND Local Offer, for the LocalGov Drupal community show and tell, July 2025
Transcript
Back in 2022, the Calderdale Parent Carer Forum held a conference where they put together three pages of solid, practical ideas for what was missing from the existing Local Offer.
As part of our commitment to transparency, we put all feedback from parent carers and young people on the Local Offer site.
These ideas became the foundation for what you see today.
I worked with parents, young people, and service professionals for a year...
... and now Sophie Singleton, the Local Offer SEND Partnership Officer at Calderdale meets weekly to co-produce content with them.
As LocalGov Drupal is Open Source, we're not selling a product, but a service. So Sophie and I also meet every week to review content and plan next steps, which is part of our commitment to developing the SEND Local Offer for Calderdale and all councils.
When we started, we were working with a proprietary platform, but it quickly became clear that it just wasn’t flexible enough, especially with no possibility of hierarchical content.
So, we made the decision to build the new site using the Local GovDrupal framework, working on a tiny budget. It's still very much a work in progress.
The site is organised into several LocalGov Drupal sub-sites, each with its own colour and icon, making it easier to navigate. Of course one of the parents' requests was to make the site welcoming and colourful. But we also wanted to maintain the look and feel of the legacy site.
But with LocalGov Drupal we now have hierarchical pages, guide pages, like this one, and step-by-step guides—so families can find the information they need, in the order they need it.
You’ll notice is that all the menus—guides, step-by-steps, publications—are on the right-hand side. We did this for consistency, and because we found that top menus often made it hard to see the actual content. This way, the information is always front and centre.
Some councils see their local offer as nothing more than a statutory duty. But for me, the vision of the SEND Local Offer is to create a calm, supportive journey for children and young people with SEND and their families. .
And to do that, the Local Offer needs to be more than just a website—it must be the beating heart of SEND, connecting people, services, and information.
And this is certainly the attitude at Calderdale, where the strategic managment have committed to this vision.
Here you can see one of the outcome statements of the strategy.
We sprinkle these throughout the site to really bring them home.
Everything starts with the SEND strategy. Calderdale has a new strategy for 2025 to 2030, which you can see in this Local Gov Drupal Publication.
We know the Local Offer is about people. It brings together parent carers, young people, education, social care, health, the voluntary sector, and schools, businesses—all held together by the SEND partnership.
Here, the Calderdale Cares Partnership is actually made up of 8 individual health adjacent organisations.
This diversity of stakeholders is one of the reasons we believe the SEND Local Offer needs its own dedicated platform, not just a section on the council’s main website.
I’d love to see every local authority have a dedicated three-person team for the SEND Local Offer: comms, content, and community engagement.
For Comms, we have a Facebook page, and we have a news channel, with a newsletter emailed out twice every half-term and also saved on the site.
This covers what’s on during holidays, and important updates during term time.
For community engagement, Sophie recently held a Local Offer Live event, where hundreds of parent carers and young people came together to meet council and health services and local organisations.
We’re also working to expand our case studies. Right now, we have some testimonials, but in the future we want to share more real-life stories to help families see what’s possible.
Sophie also goes into schools
The community role is vital—someone who’s out and about in family hubs, schools, supermarkets, the wider community, talking to families and professionals, making sure the Local Offer reflects current needs and future possibilities for children and young people.
When it comes to services, each service has its own page in a directory...
... with details like opening times and contact information.
Services belong to Organisations, which we don't show by default, but it is possible to see all the Services that belong to one Organisation and then go on to look at another service.
Services can also list Events—like activities for young people, training for parent carers, or support groups.
And there's an all Events search too
Schools play a vital part in the Local Offer, and we link to each school's SEN page through the directory.
We’re excited about developing this public directory further, using LocalGov Drupal’s Finders module. This will let us not only show relevant services for SEND, but also connect with adult services and childcare, all from within the same directory, but displayed on the appropriate website.
It’s important to remember that 40-45% of all school children will have special educational needs at some point during their school career. An area that is under huge development is Mainstream Inclusion.
The adage "Every teacher is a teacher of SEND" is not wrong, but not all teachers have the training and resources to hand.
This is why we’re currently working with Leeds and Calderdale on an effective mainstream practice resource directory, for SENCOs and teachers to find the right resources to support children and young people in the classroom.
There's also an audit for schools, to help SENCOs and mainstream teachers support children with SEND in the classroom.
We've built a strong foundation here, and we're excited to continue to collaborate with councils to build a better future for all. We're currently looking at using Ai for search and to create easy read versions of pages.
So thank you for joining me on this little walkthrough of Calderdale's SEND Local Offer. If you have any questions, ideas for how we can make the Local Offer even better, or if you want to see the code, please get in touch. You'll find our contact details at the bottom of the footer.