Save the Date for 28th November - Our Voice Parents' Conference

We are pleased to announce that our next Parents' Conference will take place on 28th November 2019 at the Dugdale Centre in Enfield, registration from 9.30. 

Following a successful third conference in February, we continue to listen to your feedback. You told us you would rather have a longer Q&A session and no presentations, and we have arranged the agenda accordingly. Additionally, we will have a choice of workshops, and the opportunity to book one-to-one appointments with key professionals from across different service areas. If you would like to have your say on our workshop topics, please complete our survey. 

See the Save the Date flyer for more details. 

Booking for the conference will open late September (initially for members only). 

Wondering what to do over the summer holidays? 

Have a look at our 'What's on this Summer?' Guide for lots of information on local activities this summer. 

You might find it helpful to look at Contact's Guide to Holidays Play and Leisure 

If you are planning to get out and about you might find it useful to look at the AccessAble website or mobile app. The website provides information about accessibility for more than 200 venues in the Enfield area and thousands of other venues across the UK and Ireland, including shops, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, railway stations, hotels, colleges, universities, hospitals and more. Use AccessAble to find everything from wheelchair access to information about lighting and noise levels.

A few activities this summer: 

Trampolining at Jump In

Jump in are running relaxed sessions each Sunday morning (including during the holidays) from 9 am to 10 am - for details see our trampolining flyer.

Inclusive football

The Tottenham Hotspur Foundation is running inclusive football sessions for children and young people aged 5 to 11 and 12 to 16, this summer. The sessions will take place at the New River Sports Centre, on Tuesdays 30^th July, and 6^th, 13^th, 20^th and 27^th August. For more details including booking information, please see here. 

Autism-friendly cinema

See here for information about the adjustments made in Autism-friendly cinema sessions.

Enfield Cineworld

Enfield Cineworld has an autism-friendly screening of The Lion King at 11 am on Sunday 4^th August. Full details here. 

Odeon Luxe Lee Valley

One Sunday a month, ODEON host a sensory-friendly screening designed to be an inclusive and welcoming environment for people with sensory sensitivities and their loved ones. Their next session will be a screening of The Lion King on Sunday 28th July at 10:15 am. Tickets will be on sale from Tuesday 23^rd July here.

Our Summer party this afternoon is now fully booked. 

If you have already booked a place, we look forward to seeing you there! 

If you can no longer attend, please could you let us know so that we can release your places to a family on our waiting list? 

If you have not yet booked please do not just turn up - we do not want to have to turn anyone away but we do have a limit on numbers for health and safety reasons (as well as catering arrangements). You can book a place on our waiting list via Eventbrite, but we already have several people on the list so we are unlikely to be able to accommodate many more people. 

Thank you 

Bookings are now open for the Our Voice Summer party which will take place on Sunday 23rd June 2.30 pm to 4.30 pm at Russet House School. Places are free but must be pre-booked. 

Please book via Eventbrite here

More details are on our flyer. 

At our Parents' Conference, we were pleased to welcome the Leader of Enfield Council, Councillor Nesil Caliskan, who gave us an update on the proposed budget for Enfield including funding for services relating to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. You can see her presentation here. Parents and carers told Cllr Caliskan about their experiences, some of the challenges they faced and the impact of cuts to funding.

Following these discussions, Our Voice continued the conversation by sending an open letter to Councillor Nesil Caliskan, the Leader of Enfield Council, giving our views (and those of our members) on the critical importance of avoiding any further cuts to SEND funding. This open letter was referred to at the Council budget meeting (where two members of the Our Voice team were in attendance to hear the discussions). We are pleased that Cllr Caliskan has now publicly stated her commitment to avoiding any further cuts to children’s services or adult social care. You can read the letter: Here 

The third annual Our Voice 'Meet the Service Head's Parents' Conference took place on 5th and 6th February 2019. 

The presentations from the event are attached below: 

Service Heads updates

Presentation from Positive Behaviour Support Workshop

Presentation from Speech and Language workshop

Presentation on budget and SEND funding from Cllr Nesil Caliskan 

We are taking the last few bookings for the Our Voice Parents' Conference which takes place this coming Tuesday and Wednesday (5th and 6th February). Make sure you have booked to secure your place: 

Day 1 booking and Day 2 booking. 

We have a busy and exciting agenda planned for each of the two days - see full details here: 

5th February agenda and 6th February agenda. 

Booking has just opened for the Our Voice Parents' Conference. 

We have an exciting programme of events planned, with updates from key figures at the Enfield Local Authority, a Q&A session, workshops, and one-to-one appointments with LA professionals, and a discussion about SEND Funding with the leader of Enfield Council. 

For more information including the full agenda and details of workshops and one-to-one sessions, please see our information brochure. Please book day 1 (5th February) here and day 2 (6th February) here. 

We are busy planning our third annual Parents' Conference, which will be taking place on 5th and 6th February 2019, and booking will be opening soon.

The conference includes an opportunity to hear from the Heads of the different services supporting SEND issues and join a Q&A session, a chance to book 1:1 sessions to discuss specific issues and concerns relating to your child and a choice of different workshops.

For the workshop sessions, we are planning to run four different workshops (two choices for each of the two time-slots) each of which will last an hour (including time for discussion). We want to make sure that these workshops are useful for as many of our members as possible, and we would therefore like your input. Please go to our survey here and select any of the workshop sessions that you think would be useful for you, and add any topics that we have not included but which you would like to see.

For more information about the Parents' Conference see our Events page and our flyer.

We are busy planning our next for 5th and 6th February 2019 - make sure you save the date for this important event. For more information see our flyer.

More details to follow soon