The Local Offer: Finding Your Council's SEND Pages

The Local Offer is each local authority's published collection of information about SEND provision in its area: education, health and care services, support groups, leisure activities, preparing for adulthood services, and how the authority's own processes work locally. Every council in England publishes one, usually as a section of the council website, and is expected to keep it updated and gather feedback on it. For a parent, it is the official local directory: the place to find your SEND team's contact details, local forms and timescales, and the free local information and advice service. This guide explains how to find and use it in general terms. Your own council's pages are the authoritative version for your area.

Start from certainty about which council you live in, because school location and home address can sit in different authorities near borders. Search the council's full name together with the words Local Offer, or go to the council homepage and follow its children, families or education links. GOV.UK also links through to local services from its SEND pages, listed below. Once you land on the right section, bookmark the start page rather than a deep page, because councils reorganise their sites and start pages survive redesigns better. If the site has a search box, useful first searches are EHC needs assessment, annual review, and SEND information advice and support, which is the full name of the local advice service often shortened to SENDIASS.

Local Offers vary in design, and some are clearer than others, but most contain the same building blocks. There is usually an explanation of the authority's own processes, with local forms for requesting an EHC needs assessment and the team's contact details. There are directories of schools, settings and services, often with filters by age or type of need. There is usually information about travel to school, short breaks, childcare, and activities. And there is normally a page for the local SENDIASS, the free, impartial information and advice service every area must provide, which explains processes to parents and can often support them through paperwork and meetings.

Treat the Local Offer as a directory you return to, not a document you read once. Note the three or four pages you will actually use on the front page of your school folder: the SEND team contacts, the assessment pages, the advice service, and any local parent carer forum, which is the organised parent voice group most areas have. When a letter from the authority mentions a process, check the Local Offer version of that process the same week, because local pages carry the local forms and named contacts that national guides cannot. The record habits in keeping records through the review year include noting which Local Offer page you used and when, which helps if pages move later.

Authorities are expected to publish comments about the Local Offer and respond to them, and most sites include a feedback route. If a link is broken, a service has closed, or a process page does not match the letter you received, saying so through that route is a normal and useful act; you may not be the only family to hit the same gap. Where local information is missing, national sources still help for the framework: GOV.UK for the national steps, IPSEA for plain English explanations of the law in England, both listed below. But for names, dates, forms and contacts, local always wins, and the authority's own letters win over its website if the two ever differ.

A good rule for this whole corner is: framework from national sources, detail from local ones. The Local Offer is where the detail lives. Find it, bookmark it, note your three key pages, and check it whenever a new stage of the system begins. Ten minutes spent there at the start saves repeated searching every time a new letter arrives.

It is worth knowing that Local Offer sites are usually best found from a computer the first time, even if you later use a phone, because the directories are wide and the filters are easier to explore on a larger screen. Spend the first visit simply learning the shape of your local site: where education sits, where health sits, where the advice service lives. Later visits then take minutes, because you are returning to known pages rather than searching a whole council website again under time pressure on the day a letter lands.