Supporting SEND Families: An insight with Charlotte Moroney from Amaze
This month we’re meeting Charlotte Moroney, Communications Manager at Amaze. Amaze provides information, advice and support to families with children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in Brighton and Hove and East Sussex.
Tell me about your role
I’m the communications manager and have been part of Amaze for almost 20 years. The main focus of my work is to produce advice and resources around SEND for parents, carers and young people. This means I oversee our website, fact sheets, advice videos and in-depth guides. I also help to manage our social media presences, sharing information, advice and our overall offer.
What is Amaze’s offer?
One of the unique things about Amaze is that you do not need a diagnosis to contact our advice line or to access most of our services; you can simply be concerned that your child has additional need.
Our work has three main strands:
- Information and advice to empower parent carers and young people to understand what they are entitled to and how to get the best for themselves or their family. This information is provided via our website, downloadable resources, videos and regular free workshops. Parents and young people can get individual advice from our SENDIASS advice line, benefits advice service and careers advice service for young people.
- Emotional and social support through groups and one-to-one befriending so that parent carers can connect with one another and get peer support. These are run at locations across Brighton & Hove and East Sussex.
- Representing the voice of SEND families. We work closely with local parent and carer forums and our young people’s groups to ensure that the voices of parent and carers and young people with SEND are heard by the people who make decisions about their lives.
We also run the Compass Card which is a leisure discount card for young people in Brighton & Hove whose disability has a significant impact on their daily life, generally Compass Card holders will have an EHCP or be in receipt of Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payment.
Finally, our ND (neurodevelopmental) Family Support Service encompasses all three strands of our work but is specifically for families where the child or young person is pre or post-assessment for a neurodevelopmental difference such as autism, ADHD or tics/Tourette syndrome. The ND Family Support Service can offer individual support and training for families as they navigate their way from initial concerns to assessment and beyond.
Who can use Amaze’s services?
Anyone can use our website and resources but to access our other services you need to either be living in Brighton & Hove or East Sussex or your child or young person needs to be at school or college in Brighton & Hove or East Sussex. This is because our statutory services are funded by these two Local Authorities.
What kind of resources can people access?
Our website is full of specialised advice for parents and carers, young people and professionals. You can access this detailed online advice on education, benefits, diagnosis and more directly from the home page. Or visit the Resources area of the site for facts sheets, videos, in-depth guides, literature and a searchable jargon buster explaining common acronyms and terminology used around SEND.
How can Amaze’s work help local schools and colleges
Any school can access our online resources. The site has a huge amount of up-to-date information about all the main areas around SEND and education including SEN support, EHCPs, home education, transition and more. Staff can direct parents to this information to help them understand key processes. Our downloadable fact sheets are short introductions key SEND issues which also signpost to services which can help for families in Brighton & Hove and East Sussex. The fact sheets can be sent to parents as links or, for those that prefer to read offline, downloaded and printed by the school or college to hand out at meetings. We also have a range of videos for those who prefer to see and hear advice this way.
There is a section on our website called ‘Conditions and Concerns’ which can be shared with families and staff who want to find out more about Autism, ADHD, Sensory processing, Executive function, Behaviour and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). We’ll be adding more sections to this area soon too.
Staff can also encourage parent carers to sign up to attend our workshops or groups which are all free. Workshops include topics such as getting an EHCP, SEN support, claiming DLA and PIP and we also run one off sessions on a range of things so look at our events section. Visit https://amazesussex.org.uk/events/. For those that can’t make the sessions, or prefer to watch online, our workshops can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
What about families with English as an additional language?
Amaze is committed to supporting families whose first language is not English. Our website has a translate button that converts our online information into a huge range of languages. We also produce our service leaflet in seven key languages. If a parent can’t speak to us in English, they can contact Sussex Interpreting Services for help with getting in touch here.
How can schools and college staff get in touch with you?
Through our website. They can also sign up to our newsletter to get regular updates and see all our latest advice and events via any of our social media channels