There used to be community health councils who advocated / supported parents with health complaints and worked well - why not something similar for SEN. I don't agree with setting up a ragbag of individuals managed by different vol organisations, overseen by CDC. That is an accountability nightmare - diff workers could be getting vastly different training and support. I also suspect the supporters will be given only the training the councils / govt want them to have. Will they support parents using personal budgets for home programmes / private SLT etc? Wasn't the brokerage service already announced supposed to help parents with budgets?
PP training here consists of doing the old ACE online SEN course (once), little undating on law. They often confuse council policy for the law. Their knowledge is very poor.
We also have parent supporters in some (more deprived) local schools and children's centres here (employed by council) who are usually parents doing some part-time work helping more disadvantaged parents and just do signposting (debt, benefits, housing, behaviour problems etc).
You could buy a lot of top quality advice and support for £30 million.
Its not just about training in SEN and law. Advice workers also need to know how to deal with difficult clients, how to safeguard themselves when visiting the public (and have back up), how to manage people with mental health conditions, need to have a supervisor / senior person to go to with queries, know how to manage boundaries (often clients want you to do more and more e.g. write letters for them, go to meetings etc). Then theres the admin - submitting expenses and getting them paid, FOI, complaints etc etc. Then some of the 'clients' will be children with no parents e.g. in care - that requires special training.
What does CDC know about advice work?
The press does seem confused. Some people are saying the supporters are PP replacement, some say they are key workers, some just to support and signpost.
I can pretty much imagine I would be vetoed from a job as one as being an SEN militant!
The NAS got funding 2-3 years ago do run a family rights service - it had to recruit and train volunteers to give basic advice to parents around the country about benefits, social care, education etc. I know someone who became a volunteer. He only got asked to do about 2 sessions (after a long training period). Far fewer sessions were run than expected due to NAS staffing issues. The supervisor kept changing. Because NAS had to show DFE they had got enough bums on seats the NAS emailed its own volunteer advice workers to go to sessions (even though they were not in need of family rights training!). It was a dogs dinner. There have been a number of these gimmicks which haven't really led to any real impact.
It does seem to be stuffing the pockets of key charities (and now local ones) to keep them on board with govt policy. Because if you were going to set up a service of well trained indep supporters you would set up one organisation, with central training and admin (or use an existing one like CAB) not divvy the money up to lots of local groups.