Breaking down barriers: Wirral Council Launches Accessible Child Protection Guides
Families across Wirral can now benefit from accessible and easy to understand documents explaining the child protection processes in the borough and the support available for them.
Sometimes, the processes that families go through are difficult and people often feel powerless and uncertain of what is going to happen. We wanted our information about the child protection process in Wirral to be accessible to all residents, including those with learning disabilities.
The council teamed up with Wirral Mencap to coproduce a set of Easy Read documents to give parents going through the child protection process all the information they need in an inclusive format. As well as supporting Wirral residents with learning disabilities, with easy-to-understand text and accompanying images, the Easy Reads are also helpful for people whose first language is not English. The documents are now available on our Family Toolbox website for families and practitioners.
The work was funded by Wirral’s Families First for Children (FFC) Pathfinder programme. Launched in 2024, the programme aims to transform children’s services in the borough to better support families and ultimately reduce the number of children that need to be taken into care by the local authority.
Working with Mencap to produce Easy Read documents meant that we could benefit from the lived experience of people with a learning disability. Their perspective was invaluable to making sure the Easy Read documents helped families understand the process of child protection.
The co-production work also contributed to the development of Wirral Mencap’s new EAT – Empower, Advocate, Transform project. Over the next four years, EAT will see Wirral Mencap work with organisations or services that want to benefit from the lived expertise of people with a learning disability, their families, friends, and supporters to improve how they work with people with learning disabilities to make Wirral a more inclusive place. The charity’s lived experience team can audit businesses and services, provide training and advice on being inclusive, and co-produce resources to make them more accessible.
You can access the Child Protection Easy Read documents on the Family Toolbox website: Children's Social Care Easy Reads - Family Toolbox.
To find out more about Wirral Mencap visit: Wirral Mencap | Wirral Mencap
If you are a local business and would like to get involved with Wirral Mencap’s EAT project, contact: info@mencapwirral.org.uk.
