Examples of co-production in Stockport
Young Inspectors
Young people told us they wanted more activities in the community to be accessible as well as opportunities to gain work experience and new skills. In response, we created a programme where young people with SEND are trained and supported to visit local services for young people and help improve their accessibility and inclusion.
Find out more about our Young Inspectors programme.
The local offer and the Local Offer Coordinator role
Families told us that the local offer webpages were not easy to use or informative. We worked with parent carers to understand their experiences and used their feedback to create a new, more accessible area of the website. Young people with SEND also helped review the changes.
We’re now running workshops for parent carers and professionals to keep improving the website and offering training on how to use it.
We created a flexible, temporary role for a parent carer to be employed by Stockport Council to work on the local offer directory. Their lived experience of accessing support and the needs of children helped improve our offer for families.
L!sten: Stockport’s Youth Alliance
L!sten is Stockport’s Youth Alliance, created and run by a group of young people who are passionate about making change. The group creates surveys for schools across Stockport and takes the findings to our leads within the council, health and education and asks questions. It's a diverse group of young people, including young people with special educational needs.
They run Youth Summits and are involved in co-production across the council.
Parent Carer Forum
Young people, community organisations and health and social care services have worked together to design a new way to amplify the voice and influence of young people in Stockport. Young people with additional needs helped to create the engagement model and chose a community organisation to run the project. Young people are now championing their priorities and have an active voice in the new One Stockport Plan.
Parents and Carers Together Stockport (PACTS) is the officially recognised parent carer forum for Stockport, run entirely by parents, carers, and family members who have children or young people (aged 0 to 25) with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
It’s an independent, voluntary group that works in partnership with education, health and social care services so that the voices of parent carers directly shape policies, services, and support in Stockport.
The work of PACTS involves:
- offering information and support through workshops, webinars, events, and signposting on SEND topics (for example, mental health, speech and language, preparing for adulthood)
- running surveys and consultations to collect family feedback for local decision making (for example, the Stockport SEND Survey 2024/25)
- acting as a voice for families, working with local decision-makers to make sure parent carers’ experiences influence and improve services
- offering free membership for any parent carer in Stockport, with hundreds already involved
In short:
PACTS empowers families, connects them with useful resources, and makes sure their experiences and needs are heard at the highest levels when shaping SEND services in the borough.