September 2008

DOUGLAS SILAS SOLICITORS CELEBRATES ITS THIRD ANNIVERSARY (BELATEDLY)!

I hope that you are well and have had a great summer. If you are involved in the education process in some way (either professionally or personally through your own children) I hope that you have a great academic year ahead of you. 

If you have previously read my twice yearly ‘Our Latest News’ updates you will realise that this third ‘anniversary’ issue is being written a few months later than it normally is.  Although we actually celebrated our third anniversary on 3 May 2008 and I meant to write something in either June or July, unfortunately, we were so busy with casework and other projects that by the time it got to mid-July we realised that the summer holidays were upon us. I therefore decided that the best thing to do would be to write something at the beginning of September, which I have now done.

I apologise in advance for the length of this issue but it contains a great deal of information about: ‘Changes in the Nature of Our Work’; ‘Changes to SENDIST’; our ‘Future Plans for Helping Parents’; ‘Changes to Our Website’; Video/Audio About SEN’; ‘Future Website Developments’; our ‘New Member of Staff’ and details about a new 'Vacancy’ that we are currently advertising for and ‘Work Experience’ that we have been providing.

Feel free to click on any of these links to skip to the sections that interest you although it is probably easier and will make more sense to read the page in full.

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CHANGES IN THE NATURE OF OUR WORK
Firstly, I am delighted to say that we are enjoying continuing success and maintaining our track record of successfully winning or settling around 85% of our cases. These cases now predominately involve advising and assisting parents through the ‘statementing’ process and with appeals to the SENDIST (Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal).  However, we have also been involved in the last year with a few other cases concerning statutory appeals to the High Court against SENDIST decisions and Judicial Reviews of Local Authorities.

I have noticed some changes in the nature of our work during these past couple of years as we seem to now be approached far earlier in cases by parents of children with SEN.  For example, I was previously mainly instructed by parents when they had a current or potential SENDIST appeal to pursue whereas recently parents are coming to see me soon after their child starts having difficulty or has been diagnosed with a particular condition. 

I think that this is because rather than facing a potential two or three SENDIST appeals - e.g by having an LEA refuse their own (or their child’s nursery’s/school’s) request for a statutory assessment, then an LEA refusal to make a statement and finally a challenge to the contents of any final statement produced -  parents now seem to be approaching me at the start of the process and asking me to help them draft their initial request and then help them negotiate with the LEA or navigate their way through everything. 

By doing this I am often able to help people avoid a first refusal and even sometimes can get them the provision that they are seeking without the need to go all the way to a hearing. (i.e. sufficient learning support/therapy provision or having their preferred school named in a  final statement.) In fact, I now have to attend far fewer SENDIST hearings to represent clients than I used to because we can often pull off a satisfactory settlement before the need for a hearing.

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CHANGES TO SENDIST
But SENDIST appeals have become far more complicated and ‘legalistic’ in the past few years.  In fact, every time I do another appeal hearing I wonder to myself how on earth parents are expected to manage on their own without experienced and expert legal advice/assistance.

You may have heard by now that the SENDIST is also due to undergo significant changes on 3 November 2008 when it is incorporated into the Unified Tribunals Service.  There has been a lot of concern expressed about some of these changes.  As many people have been asking me about what is happening, I thought it would be useful for me to write a page about what I currently know and put it on our website. 

You can read it for yourself by looking at our new page entitled 'Changes to SENDIST' .  If you are involved in the SEN/SENDIST process in any way, either personally or professionally, I encourage you to read the page in full and then access the links that I have put on it to make sure that you keep fully up to date with what is going on.

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FUTURE PLANS FOR HELPING PARENTS
As you may know, I dropped out of doing legal aid work in April 2007 for both personal and commercial reasons.  If you did not see my statement as to why this was the case at that time you may wish to read it by clicking here. 

It saddened me greatly to have to make this decision because although conducting legal aid cases only then made up about 20-30% of my practice, I have consistently endeavoured to provide help to all sections of society and have always been against having a ‘two tier’ form of justice (i.e. those who can pay get appropriate legal advice whereas those who cannot pay do not).  As you know, SEN affects all sections of society and does not discriminate on grounds of class, race, sex or religion, etc. 

Realising that, although dropping out of doing legal aid work, I still needed to do something to help people who could not afford to instruct me privately,  I chose to put as much free information as possible on my website. This included writing free 7-day email courses on ‘How To Conduct A SENDIST appeal’ and ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About The Law On SEN But Were Too Afraid To Ask!’ and producing 10 Free Factsheets on Education/SEN issues and a guide to ‘Appealing For A Special School’.

Providing this information has been a great success as ‘traffic’ to our website has steadily increased during the past year and it currently receives between 10,000 to 11,000 unique visitors a month on average. We also get emails and telephone calls regularly from people thanking us for providing assistance to them in this way. 

In fact, from reading my monthly website reports, it seems that many people return on a number of occasions and are accessing pages such as ‘Types of SEN/Disability’ and our ’List of LEAs’ and ‘List of Special Schools’.  We also appear to have a number of people returning to our ‘Education News Online’ page, if they have not already signed up to receive our daily emails containing the latest news stories on education issues.

It also seems that my decision at the end of 2005 to try and make our website as accessible as possible by ‘speech-enabling’ every page and allowing people to ‘Listen to This Website’ or ‘Download Pages as MP3 Files’ has proved extremely popular.

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CHANGES TO OUR WEBSITE
But being someone who always likes to give people more of what they may be looking for and trying to empower people with knowledge wherever possible, I have recently updated the website again to include a number of new pages under ‘Types of SEN/Disability’, such as ‘Agenesis of the Corpus Collusum’, ‘Cerebellar Ataxia’, ‘Dysarthria’ and ‘Non-Verbal Learning Difficulties’.  I have also now split the page on ’Autism’ and ‘Aspergers Syndrome’ into two distinct pages.

I have also split the original page on ‘Types of SEN/Disability’ and provided a new and separate page called ‘SEN/Education Info’ which provides information about different types of SEN/Education issues, approaches and processes. 

Although there were already a number of pages about this topic before, there is now a lot more information, including on things like ‘Annual Review’, ‘Education Psychologists’, ‘IEP’, ‘LSA/TA’ (learning support/teaching assistants), ‘Makaton’, ‘Note In Lieu’, ‘Occupational Therapy’, ‘Parent Partnership’, ‘Pastoral Support Plan’, ‘Physiotherapy’, ‘P-Scales’, ‘SATS’, ‘School Action and School Action Plus’, ‘SEN’, ‘SEN Code Of Practice, ‘SENCO’, Speech& Language Therapy' and ‘Statement of SEN’.

And people also seem to not only be using our site to find out more about ‘Types of SEN/Disability’ and ‘SEN/Education Info', but are using it to find out where they should go for ‘Further Information’ which is a page that contains links to other websites which we think will provide support or more useful information about the issues we have referred to on our site. Please have a look and if your or your organisation’s website is not there and you think should be then please let me know as soon as possible. 

Of course, I would also appreciate if you or your organisation’s website could also then link back to our site. I have tried to make this as easy (and fun) to do as possible by providing a page called ‘Link To/From This Website’.  In particular, you should enjoy looking at the page called ‘Choose a Banner or Logo’ which allows you to use our logo as a link to us or to use one of our speaking ‘avatar’ characters that we ourselves use on our ‘Welcome’ page.

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VIDEO/AUDIO ABOUT SEN
I have noticed in the past couple of years that internet video and podcasting are having a great impact on our society and the way in which people are keeping up to date with information.  I have therefore decided to set up a separate section/page on our website entitled ‘Video/Audio About SEN’ where we have tirelessly searched the internet for video and audio programmes to do with SEN issues and collated them in an easy to use fashion. This should be of help to people coming using our website. Watch out Google!

The links cover content from 2005 onwards and I have organised the material into two sections called ‘SEN Documentaries’ and ‘SEN News Reports’.  I should warn you that there are many hours (if not days) worth of content that we have linked to. I encourage you to have a look it this if it may be of interest to you.

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FUTURE WEBSITE DEVELOPMENTS
You will probably be unsurprised to learn that I am already working on some future website developments which I hope to be able to launch in January 2009 and then May 2009 (our fourth anniversary). This will include more information pages, updated e-mail courses and a very innovative and exciting project which is still being designed and developed by me. Once again, I do not think you will have ever seen something like this before.  All I can say is ‘watch this space’!

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NEW MEMBER OF STAFF
We have now successfully recruited a new member of our team, Laxmi Patel (pronounced ‘Luck-sh-me’) who has been working with us as a paralegal since July 2008.  Laxmi previously worked in education as a science technician for over 20 years in an inner city secondary school. In recent years she has gone back to study part-time and obtained a 1st class degree in law through the Open University. She then successfully completed the Legal Practice Course at the College of Law.  No mean feat for a working mum!

Laxmi has now taken the brave decision to change her career. We saw a lot of potential in her application and interview and are now using her skills and experience in both education and the law to help us help more clients with our ever growing caseload as well as me personally. 

In her spare time Laxmi remains a voluntary education law advisor with the National Autistic Society and has been, until very recently, a voluntary legal advisor in a Legal Advice Centre.  You can find out a bit more about her on our ‘Our People ’ page.

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VACANCY
As things seem to be getting increasingly busy for us, we also now need someone to help me with our many website and other projects. We have therefore just started advertising for a Legal/IT Assistant. If this is something which is of interest to either you or someone you know then please look/get them to look at our ‘Vacancies’ page for more information and then download and complete our standard ‘Job Application Form’ there. 

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WORK EXPERIENCE
I am also a firm believer in giving people a work experience opportunity wherever possible.  I am of the view that work experience should not just be answering phones and making cups of tea or standing by the photocopier, but a realistic and practical experience of what it may be like to work in a law firm.  I like to think that we offer a ‘different’ type of work experience here.

Since setting up in May 2005, we have had many students (or other people looking to change career) come to work for us for one or two weeks and sometimes longer, not only during the summer holidays but also during other times of the year.   In fact, I am indebted to these people as they have helped me develop our website and, as such, I have listed them on our ‘Credits’ page.  It has got to the stage where we are now receiving more applications for work experience than we can accommodate, although many of the people who have done work experience often ask to return to us at a later time. 

Again, if this is something which is of interest to either you or someone you know then please look/get them to look at our ‘Vacancies’ page for more information and complete our standard ‘Job Application Form’ there.  It may also be worth looking at some of the comments that previous work experience students have said about their time here by visiting our ‘Work Experience’ page.

CONCLUSION
Before I sign off may I just express my thanks again to those of you who either continue to instruct us personally, who refer work our way or who just say nice things about us. It is very much appreciated.

I have always said that the most important thing in life is to have a ‘good name’ and I am extremely grateful for the continued compliments that we receive from fellow education and legal professionals, from the media, from members of the public and from previous and current clients. 

If you would like to see what they have said about us please visit our ‘What People Say’ page.  I only hope that we can continue to be worthy of what has been said about us.

Thanks for your time in reading this.

With my very best wishes.

Douglas

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