SEND Local Offer annual report

Here you will find the Nottinghamshire SEND Local Offer annual report.

On this page

• Introduction
• 2024 to 2025 Projects and developments
• You said, we did
• Statistics
• Updates on priorities
• Future priorities
• Contact us

The SEND Local Offer annual report is also available to print as a PDF, download SEND Local Offer 2025 annual report [PDF]

Introduction

From September 2014 it became a legal requirement for all local authorities in England to publish information about the services and provision that are available to children and young people aged 0 to 25 years with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their families. This is known as the “Local Offer.”

The SEND Local Offer is currently part of the wider Notts Help Yourself website, which also includes information from other service areas, including the Families Information Service, Adult Social Care, Communities, and the Local Offer for care leavers. Notts Help Yourself will cease on 31^st March 2025 and a new community directory website, which will include the Nottinghamshire SEND Local Offer, will be launched on 1^st April 2026 with a new name to be determined.

One of the key aspects of the SEND Local Offer is that it should be responsive to feedback from the people who are using the site, and we respond to individual comments, feedback, and queries throughout the year.

On an annual basis, we report back to you about progress on the projects and developments that we proposed in the previous year. We also pull together a summary of the feedback that we have received over the last twelve months and the action that we have taken in response to that feedback. We provide statistics on visits to the site, and finally we outline our priorities for the next twelve months.

This is the tenth annual report and review of Nottinghamshire’s SEND Local Offer. We begin by reflecting on the changes and work that has taken place between 1st September 2024 to 31^st August 2025.

2024 to 2025 Projects and developments

The core focus of development for the SEND Local Offer over the past twelve months has been on making the site more accessible, easier to navigate, information easier to find, ensuring that information is reviewed and kept up to date, and promotion of the site to target audiences. We have continued to work with the Projects Team around the development and procurement of the new community directory for Nottinghamshire and ensuring the information on the SEND Local Offer is ready to be migrated to the new directory.

New community directory

Representatives of the Nottinghamshire Help Yourself website, including the SEND Local Offer, have been involved in the procurement and development of the new community directory, which will replace the existing website on 1^st April 2026.

The overall aim is the development and implementation of a solution that meets the needs of all partners:

• Communities, people, and staff: Want relevant, up to date, local information, co-designed with communities in mind with safe and responsible signposting to services, accessible information which is available digitally and off-line. The information should be available on search engines and apps and be easy to find and use.
• Providers: Want a single source of information with easy listing of their services which is up-to-date and provides information on whom the service is suitable for to avoid unwanted referrals to their service. The information should be inclusive of all services, with no costs to voluntary sector organisations to list their services.
• Stakeholders and systems: Want an affordable, sustainable, and accurate system with hyper-local or specialised solutions including interoperability of tools and the ability to embed into existing sites, apps, or resources.

Key activities:

• A procurement exercise was completed to identify a new supplier who will be responsible for provision of the new community directory platform. Suppliers were invited to submit tender applications, with twenty responses received, which were shortlisted to five providers. Following a further evaluation, including presentations, the contract has been awarded to Zengenti who are a software company based in Ludlow, Shropshire and have extensive experience of working with local authorities. They utilise the Contensis content management system, with integration with the accessibility tool Insytful, which supports the creation of accessible content on digital platforms.
• The contract was signed between Nottinghamshire County Council, Nottingham City Council, and Zengenti. Alongside this, an interagency legal agreement between Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council has been signed in respect of the ongoing management and development of the new website.
• The project plan has been developed, and implementation elements are to be agreed with Zengenti. This will be multi-faceted and will include stakeholder engagement, review of service directory listings and content, platform design and configuration, migration of data, user acceptance testing, and training for administrators on maintenance of the new website and creating content.
• There are various workstreams underway around the governance, communications, branding and marketing, and the technical aspects of the website.
• The Corporate Communications Team have a comms plan for communicating the progress of the development of the new community directory to the public, providers, workforce and councillors.
• The website is being co-designed with key stakeholders, including residents, which has included co-design workshops delivered by the Community Engagement Project Officer. One hundred and thirty people attended the first set of workshops, with more workshops to follow. There has also been engagement with multiple community groups and organisations. The analysis from this engagement will help inform the customer journey and categorisation of information on the new website.

Timelines for the new community directory website:

• Contract signed July 2025
• Implementation – July 25 to March 26
• New community directory website live 1^st April 26

Notts Help Yourself accessibility improvements

SEND Local Offer staff worked with the council’s Digital Accessibility Officer to ensure that all information, advice, and guidance pages were reviewed and presented in line with legal requirements and guidance for digital accessibility, which includes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This was alongside agreed Notts Help Yourself design principles to improve content accessibility and usability for users and to optimise the content for transfer to the new community directory platform.

This process included the following steps:

• Reviewing all the existing pages on the SEND Local Offer to ensure the content met the requirements of the SEND Code of Practice and there was no duplication of information or pages that were no longer required.
• Creating draft new pages in an accessible format based on mobile device use.
• Identifying content owners (specific service area experts) and asking them to check the existing content and update and revise this information, as necessary.
• Updating the draft page and carrying out accessibility checks before the page was made live on the website. This included using tools such as screen readers, headings checker, alt text viewer (for description of images), and checking all hyperlinks were working and labelled correctly. The pages were also reviewed by the Digital Accessibility Officer in terms of sentence structure and plain English requirements.
• Making the page live on the website and post live checks, including pages being linked to other relevant pages on the SEND Local Offer to support the customer journey whilst navigating through the site.

In total, seventy-nine pages were reviewed and updated. The pages are now ready to be migrated to the new website, although a further review and update prior to the move to the website will be undertaken if possible.

This shows an example of the new layout and structure of the pages on the SEND Local Offer.

This includes the removal of the drop-downs, which have been replaced with anchor links at the top of each page. These links outline the information on the page and enable the user to go directly to the information they need without having to scroll down the whole page.

Young People’s Zone

Futures, who host the Young People’s Zone, moved their platform to another provider and with this was an opportunity to make the Zone more accessible and the navigation easier, whilst retaining the look and feel of the existing site as much as possible in line with what young people had requested from previous co-production work. The website was also enhanced with additional useful information in line with the service offer from Futures for young people.

Meetings were held with the young people from the Young Pioneers Youth Forum and the student forum at Portland College to review the new website. Futures and SEND Local Offer staff held meetings to review the feedback and changes that could be made to the website.

Feedback from the young people has generally been positive and statistically the Young People’s Zone is being well-used, featuring high on the most visited pages to the ASK US Nottinghamshire website.

The plan moving forward will be to revisit the Young Pioneers Youth Forum and Portland College to update them on the changes that have been made to the website based on their feedback and to ask for further views on the website.

You said, We did

The next part of the report gathers some of the specific feedback and requests that were received over the course of 2024 to 2025, including email enquiries and comments, the ongoing survey on the website, the SEND Local Offer development group, other professionals outside of the group, and outlines the action that has been taken in response to these.

You said

Can you add information to your website on support offered through the Positive Behaviour Support Consultancy for children and young people with learning disability and associated challenging behaviours

We did

We liaised with health colleagues to enquire about their knowledge of PBS Consultancy in the commissioning of support for families in Nottinghamshire. They advised that PBS Consultancy (now known as PSG – Positive Support Group) provide the Behaviour Intensive Community Support (BICS) service in Nottinghamshire. PSG has a link on the new Nottinghamshire health website called All Kinds of Minds. We therefore created a new tile in the health and social care section of the SEND Local Offer to link directly to this website. We also contacted the Positive Support Group and provided details on how they can add a directory listing on the SEND Local Offer for families searching for this support, which they have completed.

You said

The information on disabled facilities grants is confusing and needs to be updated.

We did

Reviewed the disabled facilities grant service listing and updated this to be clearer to users.

You said

Can you add a podcast on supported internships in Nottinghamshire for young people to the preparing for adulthood section.

We did

Added the podcast in the preparing for adulthood routes to work section.

You said

It can be difficult to find the newly created SEND map (guide to local support for children and young people with SEND in Nottinghamshire) pages through the search function as it is not visible from the home page.

We did

Held discussions with the Project Team who were responsible for producing the SEND Map and moving forward it was agreed that the SEND map would be incorporated into the discussions for the new community directory and can therefore be built into the new home page for the SEND Local Offer if this is felt to be the best place for it in terms of the navigation. We also added additional keywords to support searches for these pages in the interim.

You said

The Neurodevelopmental Support Team’s Autism & ADHD Parent/Carer support groups information is out of date.

We did

We contacted the service who updated their information on support groups.

You said

There are multiple listings for the individual link clubs across the county, it would be useful to have one central place, which explains what the link clubs are and can link through to the individual listings.

We did

Created a new directory listing for the link clubs with general information, which has links to all the individual clubs. A member of the Youth Service has been assigned to update this listing as required.

Statistics

These are statistics for visits to the SEND Local Offer section of the Notts Help Yourself (NHY) website during the period 01st September 2024 to 31st August 2025.
The SEND Local Offer section has received 45,384 visits in this time i.e., visits to the NHY site which included a view of at least one page related to the SEND Local Offer. This is an increase of 5.84% from 42,880 during the same period last year, and accounts for 10.51% of all 431,701 visits to the NHY site in this time.

The average number of pages viewed for these ‘SEND Local Offer visits’ was 4.13 and average duration was 2 minutes 53 seconds – this does not necessarily mean the whole visit was spent in the SEND Local Offer pages, just at least one page, as described above. This compares to an overall NHY average pages/visit of 2.35 and duration of 1 minutes and 21 seconds, suggesting there is more engagement from visits which had some interaction with the SEND Local Offer section than NHY visits as a whole.

There was a total number of 187,632 SEND Local Offer page views. This was an increase from 176,448 during the preceding period, a total increase of 6.34%.

The top ten most visited pages were:

1. Name of page: SEND Local Offer - Home Page. Views in 2024: 21,026. Views in 2025: 20,684. Percentage of change: -1.63
2. Name of page: SEND Local Offer - Short Breaks. Views in 2024: 9,860. Views in 2025: 10,381. Percentage of change: +5.28
3. Name of page: SEND Local Offer - Education. Views in 2024: 5,721. Views in 2025: 6,204. Percentage of change: +8.44.
4. Name of page: SEND Local Offer - Things to do. Views in 2024: 3,872. Views in 2025: 5,14. Percentage of change: +32.85
5. Name of page: Short Breaks Online Assessment. Views in 2024: 1,613. Views in 2025: 3,079. Percentage of change: +90.88%
6. Name of page: Short Breaks Eligibility Criteria. Views in 2024: 1,866. Views in 2025: 2,943. Percentage of change: +57.72
7. Name of page: Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Support. Views in 2024: 3,086. Views in 2025: 2,774. Percentage of change: -10.11
8. Name of page: Short Breaks - Providers and direct payments. Views in 2024: n/a. Views in 2025:2,009. Percentage of change: n/a
9. Name of page: What is a Short Break? Views in 2024: 1,361. Views in 2025:1,964. Percentage of change: +44.30
10. Name of page: Listings in Special Schools – Local Authority. Views in 2024: 2,257. Views in 2025: 1,872. Percentage of change: -17.05

The top five traffic sources for the 45, 384 visits were:

1. Google with 15,911 visit. A percentage of 35.05%
2. Direct to the website using the URL with 13,746 visits. A percentage of 30.29%
3. Nottinghamshire County Council website with 5,337 visits. A percentage of 11.76%
4. Bing with 3,274 visits. A percentage of 7.21%
5. Facebook with 2,292 visits. A percentage of 5.05%

Updates on priorities referred to in the 2023 to 2024 SEND Local Offer annual report.

To continue to work with the Partnership Project Team to develop the new community directory platform.

As stated above, work to develop a new community directory is ongoing and representatives from Notts Help Yourself, including the SEND Local Offer, have been an integral part of this and will continue to be involved throughout the implementation phase with the new provider and Projects Team until the go live date in April 2026.

To ensure that all information, advice, and guidance pages are reviewed and presented in line with legal requirements and guidance for digital accessibility. This will be alongside agreed Notts Help Yourself design principles to improve content accessibility and usability for users and to optimise the content for transfer to the new community directory platform.

As stated above, all pages on the SEND Local Offer have been reviewed and updated so the content is presented in line with legal requirements and guidance. This has not only improved the accessibility for users on the current site, including those who use assistive technology to access digital information, but has ensured the information is ready to be migrated to the new community directory platform.

To ensure that all the service directory listings on the site are maintained by the assigned record editors, through agreed work processes, following the data cleanse exercise.

Maintaining a large directory of services and groups, involves us regularly checking and updating details to ensure that we are holding quality information. This data cleansing exercise involved us contacting all providers with a listing on the community directory, asking them to confirm their information was up to date, and if not to update their details on their listing. From this work, we were able to identify those listings which were out of date and remove them, therefore ensuring that all the services listed on the directory have been updated within the last twelve months. Our process is to contact the provider via email with a request to check and update the listing within a month, a second and final reminder is sent after a month, following which listings that have not been updated are removed from the directory.

Another task we have undertaken as part of maintaining the directory was to ensure each service or group listed had an assigned a record editor. The record editor is the person or provider, responsible for updating the listing annually. This requires the email address of the provider to be registered on the website and assigned to the listing. By doing this it means providers can sign in and see their listing whenever they want to and update it. The directory works best when all the services and groups take responsibility for making sure their information is as accurate and as up to date as it can be, therefore offering the best support to the residents of Nottinghamshire.

Schools process

We have an additional process in place for contacting schools as the county council has statutory duties on providing information to parents and carers about support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, the availability of early years childcare and wraparound provision.

All the schools in Nottinghamshire have up to three listings on the directory:

• A main listing, which includes the SEN information report.
• A wraparound listing, if they have a breakfast and or after school club run by the school.
• An early years’ provision listing, which includes details of the funded childcare places within the Nursery or Foundation stage.

In January this year, all the school were contacted by email and through the virtual inbox within the school portal, requesting that the school reviews their listing(s) and updates their details. Our procedure is to contact school twice a year to notify them that it is their responsibility to have this information as up to date as possible, so parents and carers can make the best-informed choices when choosing schools and childcare settings.

To continue to work with Futures and young people in reviewing the content on the Young People’s Zone.

As stated above, we have continued to work with Futures and young people to review the website and content and made changes in response to this.

To develop a revised communications plan for the SEND Local Offer to ensure momentum with the ongoing promotion of the site to target groups within Nottinghamshire.

A new Communications Plan has been developed with Corporate Communications, which includes a social media plan. The activities contained within the plan have been rolling out and include the following:

• Posts on NCC Facebook and partner Facebook Groups including the Families Information Service, Family Hubs, and District Councils.
• Social media posts to coincide with specific disability awareness days and weeks.
• Posts in NCC newsletters including Family Life, Schools, Health and wellbeing, Family Hubs Services, and SEND newsletter.
• Adverts in local Nottinghamshire publications, including My Mansfield and NG Magazines.
• Posts on the NCC intranet, Team Talk and Schools Portal.
• Health partners newsletters and comms, including contacting Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) comms for inclusion in their weekly newsletters to all GP surgeries.
• You Tube adverts.
• Digital ads on Nottinghamshire Live.

Future priorities

SEND Local Offer priorities for 2025 to 2026

Over the course of the next twelve months from 2025 to 2026, our priorities will be:

• To work with the Projects Team and new platform provider through the implementation phase of the new community directory project, which will include design and build of the new platform, migration of data and training on using the new system, ready for the go live date in April 2026. Ensuring that the SEND Local Offer is designed to meet the needs of its users from the co-design exercises and feedback.

• To ensure that all information, advice, and guidance pages are reviewed and presented in line with legal requirements and guidance for digital accessibility. This will include identifying content owners where needed from specific teams or service areas and ensuring they take responsibility and accountability for keeping the information on the website accurate and up to date.

• Promotion of the SEND Local Offer to target audiences. This will include being part of the communication workstream for the new community directory and working with the Corporate Communications Team to develop an updated communications plan for the SEND Local Offer.

• To continue to work with Futures and young people in reviewing the content on the Young People’s Zone.

Contact us

For Further information contact:

Phil Smith
Children, Families and Cultural Services.
County Hall, West Bridgford, Nottingham, NG2 7QP
Telephone: 0115 804 0944
Email: local.offer@nottscc.gov.uk
Website: nottinghamshire.sendlocaloffer.org.uk

With thanks:

I would like to thank the groups and individuals who have worked with us and given so generously of their time to help develop the SEND Local Offer. This includes the Nottinghamshire Parent Carer Forum; students from Portland College, the Young Pioneers Youth Forum; the many practitioners within Nottinghamshire County Council and partner agencies; and all the individuals who have provided feedback on the site.

Phil Smith
SEND Local Offer Development Lead
Nottinghamshire County Council
September 2025