Pinpoint’s Strategic Plan

Strategic Plan 2023 – 2028

Chairs’ introduction

“Pinpoint has come a long way since it was set up in 2008 ‘for parents, by parents of children with additional needs, and is now well established and well respected for being able to make a real difference to services and to outcomes by providing strong parent carer voices. With parents, we have been instrumental in improving a wide range of services and strategies from Child and Adolescent Mental Health services, to the coproduction of a new Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) Strategy for Cambridgeshire.

At Pinpoint, we focus on engaging and empowering parents, embedding coproduction, and ensuring strong parent voices can influence the shape of services so all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Over the last year, we have looked at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for Pinpoint’s work and reviewed our Vision, Mission and Values. We have set out in this Strategic Plan the ambitious developmental Goals for the next 5 years in order to deliver the best possible outcomes for all children and young people with additional needs in Cambridgeshire.”

Fay Dutton and Janet Dullaghan, CoChairs of the Trustee Board

What Pinpoint Stands For: our vision, mission, and values.

 Vision

Our Vision is for all children and young people in Cambridgeshire to be valued and thrive whatever their needs.

Mission

Pinpoint works with parents and carers of children and young people with additional needs, Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities, to celebrate their differences and empower their families.

We are committed to working alongside families and services to represent parent carers in co-producing service improvements so that children and young people have the support they need.

Values

Children, young people and families with additional needs are at the heart of what we do.

  • We listen and value the experience of parents/carers, standing in their shoes.
  • We expect high aspirations to be the norm for children and young people with additional needs.
  • We take a positive, “can-do” approach to problems.
  • We focus on people’s abilities- what they can do, not just their disabilities and what they can’t do.
  • We treat everyone with respect, we value differences, and we are not judgmental.

 

Developmental goals over the next five years

 Goal 1 Extending our reach, engagement and participation and empowering parents

Pinpoint wants to reach all communities, including those who may be heard less often. and parent carers at the start of their journeys. Schools are an essential link in raising awareness of Pinpoint, and we will review other ways to reach parents through schools including having link parent-carers for every school and considering new ways of introducing the Champions programme to schools working in coproduction with Pinpoint.

We need to ensure that parents can access the information they need but also feel able and confident to work together with teachers, health workers and other professionals to have their children’s needs met. Pinpoint will continue to offer opportunities to parents through webinars, training, and peer support to build parents’ confidence and resilience, empowering them to work with all those involved with their child.

Goal 2 Continue to Promote a Culture of Coproduction

Pinpoint will continue to facilitate and promote meetings, events and forums where parents work in equal partnership with service providers to assess, design/redesign, deliver, monitor and evaluate the services their children, and others like them, receive. While at the strategic level, there are good working relationships and a commitment to coproduction, this doesn’t always filter down to managers and front-line staff, and parents can be disadvantaged if they are not given equal access to the information and support required to be able to make informed decisions.

Goal 3 Influencing policy and practice within Cambridgeshire and beyond

Pinpoint influences policy and practice for better outcomes by building and maintaining stakeholder relationships and presence at policy-making forums in Cambridgeshire. Pinpoint coproduced the CAmbridgshire and Peterborough SEND strategy with the Local Authority and other partners.

Goal 4 Ensuring Pinpoint is fit for the future while remaining financially sustainable. 

Pinpoint has improved the financial monitoring processes to enable the Trustees Board to have a clear view of the finances and regularly monitor income and expenditure for existing contracts, grants and other funds. Additional funds have been raised successfully for discrete projects such as developing parent champions.

Our ‘core funding’ comes from Cambridgeshire County Council, the Department for Education and the NHS to facilitate parent participation but we also need to raise our own funds from other sources as well as additional funding from our core funders to carry out specific work such as developing webinars or training packages.

You can read the full Strategic Plan here.