Staffordshire Parent Carer Forum (Staffs PCF) is an independent parent and carer led organisation.  It is run by volunteers who are all parents and carers of children and young people aged 0-25 years with special educational needs and disabilities.

How can you get involved?

You can become a member. We’ll reach out to you to share your experience and we’ll keep you up to speed on our activities.

You can apply to become a PCF Rep. Reps represent the PCF in our outreach. That could include help with parent groups and strategic meetings. Even two or three hours per month could make a difference.

You can apply to be part of parent community groups in schools. These groups help parents and carers of children that are coming through the school. You can help with the challenges we all go through along the way.

What are our aims?

We aim to: 

• Be the voice of families of Staffordshire children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
• Positively influence the policy and systems that affect their daily lives.

What we do

Staffs PCF is funded by the Department of Education.  We belong to a national network of Parent Carer Forums. 

We are totally independent from schools, the Local Authority and the NHS. But we work closely with them to make sure they: 

• understand the lived experience of families of children with SEND, and
• take it into account as they make policy and deliver services.

We are different from other specialist SEND parent groups, but we want to work with them. We’re not a support group, an advisory service or a champion for individual cases. By having a wide and diverse network of parents and carers, we can truly represent the reality of SEND families. We can make sure that the Staffordshire authorities understand them too. 

How can you help?

We want you to have the confidence to share your lived experience with us.  We can then understand where things are working and where improvements or changes are needed. We will feed that back into the system to influence the Staffordshire authorities.

We need members voices to give us strength in numbers. And we need to hear your lived experience. We collect information:

• from speaking to our members and
• carrying out surveys on specific issues

This data helps us have hard conversations with Staffordshire authorities. It helps us to do this in a factual and non-confrontational way.

Where can I find more information?

To find out more go to our website.

Useful links:

• SENDIASS and Staffordshire Parent Carer Forum working in partnership for our families
  
  
• SENDIASS and Staffordshire Parent Carer Forum ways of working