Beyond appointments. Beyond waiting lists. Rochdale Borough Council is making communication support part of everyday learning.
In partnership with Rochdale Borough Council and the Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, Titus Learning was selected as the programme’s digital learning and video production partner. Funded through the Department for Education’s Alternative Provision Change Programme, the project explores how digital learning, coaching, and shared specialist knowledge can help turn national ambitions into practical, everyday support for schools, families, and children.
NATIONAL RECOGNITION
Rochdale recognised nationally for its shared vision for SEND
Rochdale Borough Council was recently recognised at the national Council for Disabled Children SEND Awards, winning the award for ‘Shared Vision for SEND’.
The award recognised Rochdale’s clear, inclusive, and co-produced vision for improving support across the SEND system.
“This was a clear memorable vision that reshaped the vision of life for children and families in Rochdale.”
WHY THIS MATTERS
A different approach to SEND support
One of the greatest challenges facing the SEND system is that specialist knowledge is often concentrated within a relatively small number of professionals, making it difficult to provide timely support at scale.
In partnership with Rochdale Borough Council and its wider system partners, this programme explores a different approach: transforming specialist expertise into practical, accessible guidance that can be used confidently in classrooms, homes, and communities.
The ambition is to equip the adults around every child with the knowledge, confidence, and tools to support speech, language, and communication development as part of everyday interactions, reducing reliance on specialist intervention alone.
Supported by the Government’s investment in Experts at Hand, the programme tests how expertise can be moved closer to where children live and learn, helping to intervene earlier, build workforce confidence, and reduce the escalation of increasingly complex educational need.
Together with Rochdale, we have turned that ambition into a practical, scalable model that can be adopted across local areas.
Earlier
Support that reaches children sooner
Inclusive
Mainstream settings feel more confident.
Connected
Education, health and families working together
Practical
Strategies schools can use immediately
SEND REFORM
Aligning with the direction of national reform
Across England, local areas are being asked to strengthen earlier support, improve inclusion within mainstream settings, and make better use of specialist expertise across the wider workforce.
This project reflects that wider direction of travel by exploring how digital learning, coaching, practical guidance, and shared specialist knowledge can help create more confident, connected systems of support.
Importantly, this is not a programme designed to replace specialist services or reduce the role of experts. Instead, it is intended to enhance the impact those experts can have by extending their knowledge, strategies, and guidance beyond one-to-one interactions, enabling more practitioners and families to benefit from their expertise.
Rather than replacing existing services, the programme strengthens the support already available. In doing so, specialists are able to focus more of their time where it is needed most, while the wider workforce becomes increasingly confident in supporting children within their everyday environments.
How the programme supports reform priorities
Earlier Support
Helping schools access practical strategies before needs escalate.
Inclusive Mainstream Practice
Building workforce confidence across classrooms, settings, and services.
Family Partnership
Creating clearer, more consistent support between school and home.
Extending Specialist Expertise
Making evidence-informed guidance easier to access across the wider system.
What we have built together
Introducing the Help at Hand Platform for Rochdale
A practical digital support environment
The Help at Hand platform has been designed to feel approachable, practical, and easy to navigate for busy professionals, schools, and families.
Rather than overwhelming users with theory, the experience focuses on short-form learning, visual guidance, communication strategies, coaching support, and resources that can be applied immediately in everyday environments.
The ambition is to make specialist knowledge easier to access beyond traditional appointment-based models.
We’ve included a help-in-the-moment inclusion AI chatbot
We know that lengthy guidance documents aren’t practical when you’re in the middle of a lesson or supporting a child.
That’s why Rochdale has invested in an AI-powered inclusion chatbot within its digital learning platform, giving professionals immediate, trusted guidance when they need it most.
Trained exclusively on Rochdale’s Inclusion Toolkit, not the wider internet, it coaches staff through real inclusion scenarios with consistent, evidence-based advice, while anonymised interaction data helps identify common themes and informs future support and service improvement.
Video-Led Learning
Examples of video-led content
Continuous Professional Development Modules
Demonstration-led content
Bite-sized learning
Collaboration
Built through co-production and partnership
This programme has brought together local authority leaders, speech and language specialists, school partners, parents and carers, and the wider Titus Learning team with a shared aim: making support easier to access, more consistent, and available earlier for children who need it.
The broader success already happening in Rochdale is also due to the successful rollout and embedding of The Home of Can-Do® and the Balanced System® Framework and Delivery Model, providing the foundations on which this programme has been built.
Francesca Soan
Designated Clinical Officer SEND, Greater Manchester NHS
Francesca Soan is an experienced speech and language therapist and Designated Clinical Officer for SEND within NHS Greater Manchester. Francesca developed the original vision for the Rochdale co-production and partnership and approached Titus with the idea of the Help At Hand platform, driven by a passion to improve outcomes for children in Rochdale and beyond. She believes the combination of The Home of Can-Do, The Balanced System®, and the Help at Hand digital learning platform can help strengthen support for mainstream schools, families, and children.
Rachel Holden
SEND & Inclusion Leadership
Rachel Holden is an experienced speech and language therapist who has played an important role in supporting the development of the project’s learning content and creative direction. Rachel has contributed extensively to content planning, script reviewing, and quality assurance, helping ensure the resources remain practical, accessible, and grounded in real-world speech and language practice. She has also featured within several pieces of project content, bringing professional insight and frontline experience into the learning experience for schools and families.
Sharon Hubber
Director of Children Services
Sharon Hubber is the Director of Children’s Services at Rochdale Borough Council and in her statutory leadership position she is responsible for the borough’s children’s services, including schools and inclusion, children’s social care, early years, early help and neighbourhoods, safeguarding, youth services, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and quality assurance. Sharon has years of experience leading services that support the best outcomes for children and young people, including across Greater Manchester and Lancashire, and is passionate advocate of the borough’s Raising Rochdale ethos and in making the borough a great place for young people to grow up, get on and live well.
Charlotte Mitchell
Assistant Director Schools and Inclusion
Charlotte Mitchell is the Assistant Director for Schools and Inclusion within Children’s Services at Rochdale Borough Council. With a previous Leadership in the NHS, she leads solutions to improvement across system, which places the child at the centre of strategic improvement methodology. Through her leadership across SEND, inclusion, and school partnerships, she has led Rochdale’s vision for inclusion and innovation, supporting the workforce to implement innovative approaches that strengthen mainstream provision, reduce waiting times, and improve outcomes for families across the borough
Joanne Jones
Founder of The Home of Can-do
Joanne Jones is a highly experienced consultant speech and language therapist and the founder of The Home of Can-Do®. Through the Can-Do Parent Path in Rochdale, she supports families and practitioners with practical, accessible and strengths-based communication guidance that builds confidence, strengthens connection and helps adults make meaningful changes in everyday life for children and young people.
Marie Gascoigne
Researcher and the Founder of The Balanced System®
Marie Gascoigne is a highly respected speech and language therapist, author, and expert in systems transformation. She is the creator of The Balanced System® and has more than 30 years’ experience leading service redesign, workforce development, and strategic change across education, health and care. Through her practice, publications, research, and consultancy, she has influenced policy, practice and service development relating to speech, language, communication, and inclusive SEND support systems for children and young people.
Looking Ahead
Could this model work in other local areas?
We believe the answer is yes.
While this programme has been shaped through the Rochdale partnership, the wider challenges it responds to are being experienced across many local authorities and SEND systems nationally.
The approach has been designed to feel practical, scalable, and adaptable — helping local areas strengthen workforce confidence, improve access to support, and extend specialist expertise in ways that work for their own communities.
Our ambition is not simply to build something locally, but to contribute to a wider national conversation around what earlier, more connected, and more inclusive support could look like in practice.
Learn More
Explore the wider vision for inclusive support
Download the booklet to explore the Rochdale partnership in more detail, including reflections on SEND reform, communication support, workforce confidence, and practical digital approaches.
Rochdale SEND & Inclusion Programme
Exploring how digital learning, coaching, and shared specialist knowledge can help make communication support part of everyday learning.
