In Shropshire, we recognise how important the role of parents and carers is, and how difficult that role can be without the knowledge of appropriate strategies that can be used to deal with everyday parenting challenges. The Parenting Team offers a variety of services to parent carers with children with SEND.

• Understanding Your Child with additional needs online course
• Five week 'Sleep Tight' workshops
• Parent's Support Helpline

The Understanding Your Child SEND courses

The Understanding Your Child SEND courses and groups are based on the Solihull Approach. This offers a highly practical way of working with families within a robust theoretical structure.

The parenting group aims to:

• Promote understanding of children’s behaviour within the context of developmental issues
• Promote the development of parent/child relationship
• Increase confidence and self-esteem in both parents and children
• Give parents a strategy for repair when things go wrong
• Promote reflective, sensitive and effective parenting

The group has been designed to offer parenting support for families who want to learn more, and who may or may not be experiencing some difficulties with their children.

The online course Understanding Your Child SEND is free to Shropshire parents or carers. It's available on the 'In our place' website and the code parents need is DARWIN18. This course can be accessed at any time convenient to the parent/carer as a standalone course, or it might compliment the attendance of a group.

For information on the location and times of the groups and to book a place, please visit the Family Information Service website. All bookings should be made via the Parenting Team: parenting.team@shropshire.gov.uk or phone 01743 250950.

Sleep

The Parenting Team is delivering five-week ‘Sleep Tight’ workshops. These have been developed by The Sleep Charity, and our parenting practitioners have been trained to deliver these to parents and carers. If you'd like to meet other parents/carers and explore how you can support your children and your family to have quality sleep or to address specific challenges you're experiencing, these workshops are for you.

At the end of this course parents/carers will be able to:

• Recognise the role of sleep hygiene to improve sleep
• Identify causes of sleep issues and appropriate practical strategies to try
• Interpret sleep diaries to identify potential sleep issues

Parenting Helpline

The Shropshire Council Parenting Team offers a parent's support helpline where parent or carers of children with SEND will be able to speak with a parenting practitioner to discuss any difficulties they might be experiencing in understanding and managing their children’s behaviours.

Parent carer needs assessment

If you are a parent carer of a child with a disability and have parental responsibility, you have the right to request a parent carer needs assessment. Find out how to request a parent carer needs assessment