Hello all
Thanks very much for all your input on this.
While the balance of votes was in favour of our joining the Disabled Children's Partnership, it's also really clear from the discussion that we at MNHQ don't have the sort of wholehearted support we'd like for signing up and that there were many strong objections - so for now we will not (and if we consider doing so in the future we will of course ask your opinion again).
We're sad and sorry that so many of you feel let down by some of the decision we've taken about reported posts and threads. We are committed to deleting disablist posts once they are reported to us, but obviously some of you disagree strongly with decisions that we've taken. We can only say that we will keep working towards a happier consensus all round, and that your input and views on that will always be hugely important to us.
Meanwhile, the Disabled Children's Partnership have come back with answers to some of the questions raised earlier on the thread: apologies for the delay in this (as you'll see, they don't have huge staff resources) but hopefully the info in there is useful to those of you who are interested, especially if you'd like to sign up as individuals or become involved as a representative.
Thanks
MNHQ
ANSWERS FROM THE DISABLED CHILDREN'S PARTNERSHIP
'It sounds wonderful but what will they actually do?'
The Disabled Children’s Partnership is the coming together of over 25 children and disability charities, who are working together to launch a new campaign for disabled children. With the support of disabled young people and their families we will be launching a campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the challenges that disabled children, young people and families face, as well as fighting to change policy at the top. We will be working with both the grassroots and the policy makers to help ensure that disabled children and young people are given the health and social care that they need. The campaign is in its early stages, and is yet to be developed – our broad goals give us direction, but the actions and strategy is going to be defined over the next few months.
'Will be just about children, or will it include adults?'
This campaign will be focused on children’s services, including transition, in terms of health and social care this usually means up to 18, although the framework of the children and families act applies up until 25. We haven’t agreed a strict age cut off, but there’s another campaigning alliance called Care and Support Alliance which campaigns on adult social care. A lot of DCP organisations are members of this too, so we will work with Care and Support Alliance, rather than try and duplicate what they do.
'Do you have a link to anything online, so that we could read up about it?'
Because we are in our very early stages (we don’t even have a campaign name yet) at this point there is nothing online beyond the mission statement. We are, however, currently in the process of setting up a ‘Reference Information Form’, so that anyone interested can sign up for newsletters and updates on the development of the campaign.
'Does anyone know of campaigns looking at the needs of dependant disabled adults and their parent carers?'
Try the Care and Support Alliance
'It would be great for focus to be placed on education as well.'
The Children and Family’s Act (2014) is very much focused on education. With this in mind, and also because there are a number of campaigns and lobby groups (e.g the Special Education Consortium) who are working on education, the DCP feels that the most pressing issue at the moment is filling the void of health and social care for disabled children.
'What about the rest of Britain? I'm in Scotland so this is nothing to do with me.'
Because of the different systems that operate in each country across the UK, we don’t have enough resource to properly plan a campaign in all four nations at this point. However, we will revisit this and may be able to extend in due course. We will share any work developed with teams/organisations in the nations if it would help them take forward campaigning there.
'I'm slightly concerned that there's a whole admin layer here, possibly being rather well paid, sitting having meetings in lovely venues when the grassroots on-the-ground support services are stretched to the absolute limits.'
We have one person employed to work directly for the DCP, who works part-time and is on an assistant’s wage. This comes from a small pool of money contributed by the member organisations, which is being used to pay for the set-up of the campaign. As far as possible, we are going to be using the charities’ staff’s expertise, and are doing so on a low budget.
We are in process of setting up a Campaign Development Group, which will be made up entirely of family member/carers. They will be helping to shape the campaign up until launch, and possibly beyond. We are also going to be working with existing groups of disabled young people, who will advise on some of our decisions. There will also be the ‘Reference Information Group’ for those who are interested in the campaign’s development but less able to commit time to shaping it.