How do we run a parent SEND coffee morning?

Start with a regular slot and a clear purpose

Pick a regular monthly or termly slot, offer in-person and online sessions at varied times so working parents can attend, and build each around refreshments, a themed topic or guest, and peer-support time. The single thing that makes a SEND coffee morning work is that it repeats and that parents can plan around it. Put the dates in the school calendar at the start of the year, not week by week. Name the purpose in the invite, so it reads as a way for the school to listen to parents of children with SEN, not as a vague social.

Make it possible for working parents to come

A 9am Tuesday in the staffroom only ever reaches the parents who can already get into school. Run some sessions face-to-face and some online, and vary the time. Alternate a morning slot with an after-work or lunchtime one across the term. A short online session over a video call often pulls in the working parents and the anxious first-timers who would never walk through the front door, so treat the two formats as serving different families rather than as the same event twice.

Keep the structure simple and repeatable

A format that one busy person can run on a quiet budget is the format that survives. Each session breaks into three parts:

• Settle and refreshments — ten minutes of tea, coffee and a warm welcome so the room relaxes before anything else.
• One themed topic or guest — a single focus such as sleep, sensory needs, the EHCP route, or a guest from your local authority, an educational psychologist or your SENDIASS service.
• Open peer-support time — unstructured space for parents to talk to each other. For many families this is the part that matters most, so protect it.

Co-produce the themes with the parents who come. Ask at the end of each session what they want next, and let that shape your calendar rather than deciding the year's topics yourself.

Make it count toward your statutory duties

A coffee morning is more than hospitality. Capturing what parents say feeds two duties the school already carries. Your SEN Information Report must set out your arrangements for consulting parents of children with SEN and involving them in their child's education, and a recorded coffee morning is a concrete way to deliver and evidence that consultation (SEND Regulations 2014; SEND Code of Practice paragraph 6.79). It also strengthens the conversations the SEND Code of Practice expects you to have with parents of pupils on SEN support at least three times a year (paragraph 6.65).

The qualifier the generic “be welcoming” advice leaves out: it does not replace those pupil-specific SEN support meetings, and it only counts as genuine co-production — working with families rather than at them — if you feed parents' feedback back into provision instead of treating it as a tick-box. With the February 2026 Schools White Paper and the Education for All Bill leaning harder on working with families, embedding structured parent input now is direction-of-travel-proof.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.

This page is general information, not clinical or legal advice.