Harrow Parent Carer Forum

Harrow Parent Carer Forum (HPF) is a friendly, motivated, supportive and empowered community of parents with children/young people with special needs/disability, living in the borough of Harrow. The steering group represents families of any SEN/disabled child from birth to 25 years. We meet with professionals to help shape services for families of SEN/disabled children through feedback, and consultations with other parents in the forum. We are all parents, volunteering our own time, and work on behalf of all families. We ensure your voices are heard and help make change happen.

The group is run by volunteers who are all parents with children or young people that are living with special educational needs, a disability or a medical condition that affects their everyday life. Together with local families, we help to shape local services by working with professionals from the departments of Education, Social Care and Health. We represent the parents of children and young people from age 0-25 with any form of special educational need, disability or health need, whatever part of the journey they're on, including those in mainstream schools and those who don’t yet have a diagnosis.

Our families benefit from advice, training, and events as well as opportunities to share experiences with other carers and ask questions of professionals. We send out a weekly news bulletin that keeps our members updated on upcoming events and things that are going on in Harrow that may benefit them. Many of our parent carer members also say the benefit of the Forum is to have easy access to friendly, local people who understand what it’s like to have a child with additional needs and are willing to help.

Over the last year we’ve delivered discussions and workshops on the following subjects in collaboration with professionals and partner organisations:

• Speech and Language Services
• Educational Psychology
• Social Care
• SEND Transport Consultation
• Special School Consultation
• DLA workshops
• Carers Strategy
• LD and Autism Strategy

We also represent the voices of Parent Carers across various strategy boards including:

• LD and Autism
• Carers
• Children and Young People Integrated Partnership Board
• SENCO forum
• ESAB Advisory Board
• Oral Health Steering Group
• NCFH SEND CoP
• Strategic Managers and Parent Carers Network Meeting (along with DfE and Ofsted)
• NNPCF
• Healthy Start Steering Group
• SEND Partnership Board
• MHST SEND/Additional Needs