From Carrie White, Early Years SEND Lead Teacher

Wow March is flying by and Spring is sometimes in the air and then at other times it still feels like winter.

It was lovely to see you all at the cluster briefings earlier in the month - a huge thank you to those of you who made the trek to Gun Wharf. Following on from feedback, we will be aiming to move our Cluster Briefings back into the Children’s Centres. The Summer Cluster Briefing will be held at the Gillingham hub – details of which are included in this bulletin. We are currently looking for spaces within our Children’s Centres for the next academic year so we can get dates out to you as soon as possible.

Attached to this March 2023 bulletin post is a PDF containing the SEND Transition - All About Me booklet and the updated EY Parental Consent form. Please note these are two separate, stand alone documents combined solely because the Site News only allows one attachment per post. You do not have to complete an EY Parental Consent form every time you fill out a SEND Transition booklet for your children and vice versa.

EY SEND Funding Requests

Please may we ask for any funding requests to be sent to eyhighneeds@medway.gov.uk by the second Friday of every month so that it can be included in that month’s funding panel which is usually every third Tuesday of the month, although this may be subject to change. Any requests received after that day will automatically be included in the following month’s funding panel.

EY SEND Training

Thanks to everyone who’s already booked to attend EY SEND training. You should have received a reply confirming your place on the training.

Our training offer is free to our settings and open to all members of staff - it does not have to be the SENCO who comes along to the training. We do have a limit to the number of people at the training session and can only accommodate 1 person per setting, but we plan to run the sessions a few times over the year.

To sign up, please email Tina Newman at tina.newman@medway.gov.uk with the name of who will be attending. We will accept bookings until 2 weeks before the course date or when we’ve reached the maximum number of delegates. We encourage those who’ve been put on a training waitlist to contact Tina and book on new dates as soon as you can to secure your place.

May we ask that if you are already confirmed to attend a session and you are not able to attend anymore, please contact Tina via email or at 01634 334016 so we can give your slot to the next person on the waiting list. We also ask that you let us know if someone else is taking a delegate’s place to make sure there is a certificate for the attendee.

For EY SEND Training at Gun Wharf, please note there is no parking available. The nearest paid parking is Chatham Riverside next to Chatham Library or The Pentagon.

Course Title	Date and Venue	Maximum Number of Delegates	Session Time
Play Skills	Thursday, 30th March 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am to 11:30 am
Play Skills	Thursday, 30th March 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	12:30 pm to 2:30 pm
New to Role of SENCO	Thursday, 27th April 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 2:30 pm please bring your own lunch
Sensory Workshop (not suitable for settings who have previously attended sensory training)	Tuesday, 16th May 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	15	9:30 am - 12:30 pm
How to hold an Annual Review for EHCP?	Tuesday, 23rd May 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 11:30 am
Behaviour which Challenges	Tuesday, 13th of June 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am – 12 noon
Provision Maps	Thursday, 15th June 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 11 am
Hearing Impairment/Visual Impairment Awareness Training	Tuesday, 20th June 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 11 am
EHCP	Thursday, 22nd June 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 11 am

Cluster Briefing

The next cluster briefing is on Thursday, 29th June 2023, from 9:30 am to 11:30 am, at the Gillingham Children and Family Hub, Woodlands Road, Gillingham ME7 2BX. We can only accommodate 50 delegates so it will be strictly 1 person per setting. Please book with Tina Newman at tina.newman@medway.gov.uk to confirm your place.

Department for Education:

Level 3 SENCO award

If you are currently completing the Best Practice Level 3 SENCO award, please can you kindly email me at carrie.white@medway.gov.uk as I will set up some groups to allow you to meet and discuss the programme.  If you are not currently signed up, please look up Early Years SEN Coordination Level 3 for more information and how to sign up.

Child Development training

The DfE have released free to all child development training. It is in the form of online resources which are in small manageable chunks, there are places to reflect on your practice and videos to watch. You need to sign up and then you can work your way through the training at your own pace. Certificates are awarded at various parts for completion of modules. Please look at Early Years Child Development Training for further information.

MCH Speech and Language Resources

Please visit Speech and Language Therapy Resources to access to a wide range of Speech and Language documents and video presentations from Medway Community Healthcare that you are able to share with parents.

EHCPs

If you have recently submitted an EHCP needs assessment request, please kindly contact the SEN Admin Team on 01634 331123 to check the status of your application. Once you submit, you should get an automated response message and then, within 3 days, another email to say who the SEN officer is. We’ve had feedback from settings who did not receive the automated reply, this may be down to the inbox being full, so we encourage you to contact the team and ask to ensure they have received your request.

Medway Parent and Carer Forum

The Medway Parent and Carer Forum is a fantastic support network for our families. They can offer advice, attend appointments and are a great source of support. Please feel free to share their contact details with your families. Families can look at Medway Parent and Carer Forum website, and contact them at info@medwaypcf.org.uk or 07813 123984 between the hours of 9 am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

Medway SENDIAS

SENDIAS offer confidential, impartial SEND information, advice, and support for Medway. You can contact them on 01634 566303 (answerphone messages will be responded to within 4 working days) or medwaysendias@family-action.org.uk or you can find them on their Facebook page.  They also work from 9 am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

Medway Small Steps Service

This is a support and advice service for families whose children are either pre or post diagnosis of Autism and/or ADHD. For more information, please visit the Medway Small Steps Service website. Contact details for the service are medwaysmallsteps@family-action.org.uk and 01634 913219. Working hours are also Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm.

Home Start Medway

Home Start volunteers work alongside families to offer compassionate and confidential support. For information on how they can support your families, please visit Home Start Medway. Please contact them during their office hours which is from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday to Friday on 01634 570717 or manager@home-startmedway.org.uk.

Transition

It is coming to that time of the year when we need to consider our transition documents for our SEN children. We've sent the SEND transition ‘All about Me’ document via email to all settings along with the March 2023 bulletin – this document is also available to download from the elearningatlast website. Once parents find out what the schools their children have been allocated, you are able to start the transition process for your children. If you require additional support for transition, please contact me via carrie.white@medway.gov.uk.

EY Parental Consent Form

We have updated our parental permission form to include the GP’s name and address. This is because we are seeing a significant increase in children with out of area GPs. This causes us an issue as we are then unable to recommend or make forwarding referrals to our services here in Medway. The new form was also sent via email with this bulletin and is available to download from the elearningatlast website.

Please Note: Only for the purpose of this post, we had to combine the SEND Transition booklet and the EY Parental Consent form but they are two separate, stand alone documents. You do not have to complete an EY Parental Consent form every time you fill out a SEND Transition booklet for your children and vice versa.

EY SEND Forms

All SENCo Surgery and funding forms are available to download from the elearningatlast website. From the homepage https://www.e-learningatlast.org.uk/, click on Early Years Information and Guidance, click on Referral forms for Practitioners. It will ask you to log in but if you don’t have log in details, you can just click on ‘Log in as Guest’ and you should be able to access all the forms there.