A few weeks ago, this space made an argument about parent communication in SEND: that a parent who does not read English fluently cannot meaningfully engage with a plan written in English, cannot contribute to a review conducted in English, and cannot advocate effectively for their child in a system that communicates exclusively in a language they do not fully understand.
That argument was not meant as a description of a problem with no answer. It was meant as a description of the gap the Parent Portal was built to close.
The SEND Code of Practice uses the word partnership. A partnership conducted entirely in one party's second language is not really a partnership. It is a translation problem wearing a policy word.
What 24 languages actually means in practice
Every plan a parent sees in the OMNIA Parent Portal comes with plain-language explanations of the terms in it, not textbook definitions copied from a glossary, but a version of what the term actually means for their specific child, written in their own language.
That currently covers 24 languages, including Arabic and Urdu rendered properly right to left, not just machine-translated and hoped for the best. This distinction sounds small until you have seen what happens when it is skipped: text that reads backwards in places, formatting that breaks around numbers and dates, a document that technically contains the right words but visibly was not built for the reader it was sent to.
Why raw machine translation is not good enough here
SEND documentation is not casual text. A term like twice exceptional, co-regulation, or progress criterion carries specific professional meaning, and a plan that shapes a child's support for a year is not the place to discover that a literal translation lost the meaning along the way.
The Parent Portal's plain-language layer is built to explain the underlying concept in the target language, not just swap the English words for equivalent ones. A parent reading the Arabic version of their child's plan should come away understanding the same thing as a parent reading the English version, not a slightly garbled approximation of it.
What this looks like for a parent day to day
None of this replaces the relationship between a SENDCo and a family. It means the parent walks into that relationship already understanding the words being used.
The trust dimension
Many parents of children with SEND, and particularly parents navigating a second or third language, arrive at a school relationship already carrying difficult previous experiences: documents that were sent but never followed up, meetings where they nodded along without fully following what was said, a sense that their input was heard but not really acted on.
A portal that genuinely speaks a parent's own language is not just a convenience feature. It is one of the more direct ways a school can demonstrate, in practice rather than in policy language, that a family's full participation was designed for from the start rather than accommodated as an afterthought.
A final thought
The argument in the earlier piece still holds: a parent communication system that only works for English-speaking parents is not a parent communication system, it is a document delivery service for the families who happen to already speak the school's language.
Building the alternative took longer than building the English-only version would have. It is also the version worth having.
The OMNIA Parent Portal supports plain-language explanations, secure messaging, and pre-review contribution in 24 languages including right-to-left scripts. Get in touch to see it in action