Warrington Parents & Carers Forum is a voluntary group of enthusiastic, dedicated and experienced parents, carers, grandparents and family members of children and young people aged of 0-25 years with disabilities and additional needs.

Our main objective is to listen to families and young people in Warrington to find out what is really important to them. By finding out what is really important to families and the support they need, we can see what is working well and what needs improving and we can then work with the organisations that plan and provide services in Warrington to make the best use of the resources available to improve your lives.

As parents and carers you bring your own experiences, knowledge and understanding of the challenges confronting families with disabilities and/or additional needs. We find that families have many issues in common even though their individual circumstances may differ and their children and young people may have a variety of needs and difficulties.
Warrington Parents & Carers Forum provides a range of options to enable parent carers to come together to learn from and support each other including informal coffee mornings, drop in sessions, information events, training workshops, focus groups, website and use of social media, newsletters and our AGM/conference.

We are independent of the Local Authority and Health Services but we work closely with them to ensure that they are informed of parents and carers opinions and the issues that they face. Our parent carer representatives sit on key planning and commissioning groups to represent parent carers’ views and assist in the development of education, social care and health services that are designed to meet your needs. We also have opportunities to be on interview panels for important appointments within Children’s Services.

We currently have representatives from the group sitting on panels that are involved with planning and reviewing in the following areas: Coproduction Steering Group. SEND Partnership Board Meeting. Multi-Agency EHCP Audit Group. Early Years Strategy Group. Early Identification for Early Years. Early Years Transition to Primary. CYP Emotional, Mental Health and Wellbeing Group. Post-19 Project Board. Children with Disabilities Steering Group. Integrated Early Help implementation action plan. Early Help Partnership board. Carers Partnership Board. SEND Newsletter for Parent Carer Group. Autism in schools. North-West PCF Virtual Catch-up / cluster meetings. SEND Inspection Improvement Plan. EHCP redesign task and finish group. Annual Review working group .

Warrington Parents & Carers Forum is recognised by the Department for Education as the Parent Forum for Warrington Borough. Our main source of funding comes from the DfE via a grant which is administered by Contact. We also receive funding from Warrington Borough Council under a Service Level Agreement to pay towards the Development Officer  role, which is our only paid post.  The Forum is a member of the NNPCF (National Network of Parent Carer Forums) and Contact a Family (CAF) which both feed into national policies and strategies.