The main goal of this toolkit is to help your child to stay in the classroom and get the same out of their school experience as their classmates. The school will use the toolkit with your child to help them reach small, achievable goals. But we also want to make sure you are involved and understand what is happening with your child.
The 5 items below are the main areas where you can get involved. Some of them are to do with the delivery of the toolkit, others are to help us evaluate it. In total we do not expect you to spend more than 15 hours on this over the course of 1 school term.
To thank you for your contribution to our research we will provide £20 to your family for participating.
We will also ask you to consent to the research and provide consent for your child. You will be provided with more information on this once you have decided to take part in the study.
This training will also include more detail on how the toolkit works.
Click here or here to see some examples of the training videos we may provide.
These 2 meetings should take around 30 minutes each. Your child is welcome to join if you are both comfortable with it, and you can choose between having the meeting at school, or online so you can join from home, or another convenient location.
The digital "school-home notebook” will be used for regular positive communication between yourself and school staff – this will include reports of your child's goals and progress, rather than reporting problems. You will agree with the teacher and the SENDCo about how often this notebook should be used (e.g., every day or twice a week).
The use of the toolkit is all part of a research project to find out how well the toolkit works and how acceptable it is to others like you. So there may be a number of activities we ask you to complete to evaluate the use of the toolkit including:
- Completing questionnaires about the healthcare, education and social services you use to support your child, and your child’s wellbeing and quality of life (once before and once after the toolkit is used).
- Two or three interview conversations with research staff. It is up to you where these take place – they could be over the phone or zoom, at your home or in another location that is convenient to you such as a café or in school.
- A brief chat with the research team over the phone about any good and bad things you are experiencing using the toolkit so we can make changes if need be.
A breakdown of the time you can expect to dedicate to each stage of the process is shown here. You could also use this as a checklist if you wish to.
