Parent Power - councils' support for children and young people with SEND  Too often parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are not being given a choice in how their children are supported because local councils do not fully understand the personal budget process. Designed to give choice and control to parents, personal budgets can be allocated to children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) for their parents to arrange the support they need, instead of their local authorities arranging this directly. But we're finding common problems in how councils administer these budgets, and our latest focus report details how councils can learn from the mistakes of others and improve their own services. | Equality & Human Rights Commission Inquiry  Earlier this month we took part in a round-table discussion hosted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission about its inquiry into challenging decisions about adult social care. We presented our ambitions for extending our powers in dealing with adult social care complaints set out in our Triennial Review and discussed our work investigating complaints about equality and human rights issues in the sector. The event was attended by other UK ombudsman schemes as well as senior local authority officers and gave us an opportunity to share insight into the difficulties adult social care service users face when raising concerns and challenging decisions. | Joint Code Consultation  Our consultation on our Joint Complaint Code with the Housing Ombudsman closed on Thursday 23 November. We are now considering the responses with the Housing Ombudsman and will provide a further update in early 2024. In the meantime you can still find information about our plans for the Code on our website but please be aware these are subject to change once we have considered the consultation responses. | Universities mine our information for new insights Higher education institutions and research bodies are increasingly interested in our insights on social care and local government services. Academics have long approached us to understand more about what the complaints we receive say about public services and how they can be improved, but that number is increasing. Recently published research from The University of Manchester Law School found that we play an increasingly important role in identifying systemic failures and making recommendations to improve them, and that the councils and social care providers we oversee have a high rate of compliance with the recommendations we make. The Blavatnik School of Government at The University of Oxford is carrying out initial research on social care complaints which will be released early next year, and approaches have recently been made by the Universities of York and Kent. We welcome these partnerships which not only help with understanding more about our service but also contribute to improving public services for people across England. Office for Local Government looks to expand its data collection The Office for Local Government, also known as Oflog, has been set up by the Government to provide data and analysis about the performance of councils and support their improvement. In late October, Oflog wrote to the Chief Executives of all English councils about new data that it proposed to include in its online local authority data explorer. Our figures are included in the proposals – Oflog intends to mirror our 'percentage of complaints upheld' and forthcoming 'number of upheld complaints per 100,000 people' data. Oflog is currently discussing its proposals with the local government sector and is expected to publish its new suite of data just before Christmas. Stories you may have missed | 
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