Devon SEND Network for Change

If you are a young person living in or going to school in totnes, have your say about a youth strategy for the town here!

🎤🌟 Calling all young voices aged 10-25! 📣 We want to hear from YOU! Share your thoughts in our questionnaire—your input matters!
Link available here: https://forms.gle/hqSDoC1wRCnoWCEb9 throughout February and March.

Your responses will shape our Youth Strategy for our town. Let’s make a difference together!

Proud Youth Action Group partners with Caring Town Totnes, Totnes Rural Area Youth Engagement Project, Pizza Pirates UK/Resilient Lives, and more awesome organizations.

One of our Echoes groups created a newsletter about what they have been doing in the last month. We are looking forward to seeing what they find out about accessibility at the local cinemas! If you have a primary aged child who would be interested in being involved in an Echoes group contact us for more information

Did you know we have a club specifically for students with SEND? Echoes is run by two participation workers from the council who help the children celebrate neurodiversity and disability. Please see the attached poster created by the children themselves.

Our young people created decorations for the SEND strategic partnership to remind them of some of the things they needed to be working on to improve their experiences.

The message the young people delivered was:
‘All year in our participation groups we have talked about our hopes and wishes for ourselves and our friends and other young people with SEND in Devon. This week at Impacts we made decorations with some of those wishes on, we wished for more inclusive spaces, for better support and for our schools to be places that made us feel safe and happy. We would like to offer you all a decoration to take away with you, and we hope that it will remind you of us and our voices when you make decisions in the coming year.’

We had a great day today with our Champions for Change, welcoming some new faces and new schools to the group. The Champions talked about the issues that were important to them, how they can take part in a national vote called Make your Mark and how they could join our Devon Youth Council. We also played some games and didn’t have time to make Christmas decorations..but Amy said it’s TOO EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS anyway! 😉

We were proud to have representatives from Champions for Change and Impacts at our Participation team Youth Voice Saturday for the first time last weekend!

Youth Voice Saturdays bring service leads and young people together to discuss a theme chosen by young people in our participation groups. The focus this time was post 16 transitions, and our young people talked about their experiences of education, health services and transition into adult social care and heard from services what changes they were making in response.

To launch our new page the young people in the Network are going to introduce you to our groups, so look out for their posts over the next week!
Just to let you know, the content creation on this page is shared by young people and the Participation team, when young people are writing the posts they will use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’.

Image description: a drawing by one of our Champions for Change members, of the planet Earth, with writing around it saying; ‘we listen to each other, work together to make the world a better place, hear our voices, we’ve all got a voice, we all work together’