Prospect ECSG agree response to SEND and AP Improvement Plan

Prospect’s Education and Children’s Services Group Executive Council have agreed their response, on behalf of our members, to the Department for Education’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and alternative provision system (AP) Improvement Plan, which was published in March.

Although it was recognised that there was very little change expected to the current arrangements in the short term, which will be disappointing to some, it does mean that some of the more contentious plans are given a longer timeframe to develop and/or change.

Most disappointing is the absence of new funding over what had been previously announced. Insufficient funding remains the core reason for the failure of the system.

Our members are also concerned that cuts to Local Authority general funds will continue to have a negative impact in terms of SEN transport and SEN staff making the SEN functions of the LA even harder to achieve.

These cuts mean there are often inadequate staffing levels to oversee and administer statutory functions, high caseloads (no mention of a national caseload recommendation), and failures to meet timescales for new Educational, Health, Care Needs Assessments (the issue of new or the review of existing EHCPs).

This leads to anxiety and frustration for parents and additional workload and stress for our LA members.

Some proposed changes that we are very concerned about are:

• the mandatory mediation (which will increase costs, whereas informal disagreement resolution would be quicker and more cost effective),
• bands and tariffs (absence of detail here) and;
• the tailored lists (which could water down parental choice, increase conflict and increase our members’ workload), which as well as departing from the letter of the CFA 2014 legislation will involve a significant workload pressure to our members working in local authorities, without any indication that any new burdens assessment has been undertaken.

These developments will be trialed in up to nine areas and we are also concerned that if our members engage in these trials, and make their decisions on the basis of those trials, rather than the current legislation, their decision making could be challenged through the tribunal route or the Local Government Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) route (which we expect will be making their decisions against the current legislation).

This will add more pressure to Prospect members’ workload, and influence decisions to leave the sector, which will have a negative impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the SEND system.

We are also concerned about the introduction of the digital EHCPs. It would have made a lot of sense to make this proposal in 2014, but to introduce it now, with every LA having developed their own systems will add cost to LA budgets and training and workload pressures to our members as they convert all existing plans to the new format.

Another major concern for Prospect members who work in LAs is that there is far too little mention of the need to strengthen the ‘ordinarily available provision’ in mainstream school.

We recognise that other partners in the SEN ecosystem (Education, Health and Social Care) have all experienced budget reductions over recent years and much of that has been translated into fewer specialist teachers, speech and language/occupational therapist and Educational Psychologists to support schools at an earlier stage of SEN concerns.

Without that essential external support schools (who also find their budgets reduced leading to staff cuts) cannot put into practice the interventions the pupils need, often because the detail and complexity of the provision becomes too challenging to implement within the context of the ‘normal’ school day. Hence the increased demand for EHC needs assessments, more EHC plans and higher cost for the LA.

This has led to a number of LAs going into deficit. The DfE response to this is to impose the safety valve or delivering better value programmes on those LAs, which only addresses the education component of the problem and does not draw in the other partners (health and social care). This seems perverse as the Local Area SEND inspections covers all the strategic partners.

Prospect was pleased to be a signatory to the #SENDinthespecialists campaign as many of our members are employed in roles that support educational settings, and we welcome the Improvement plan development to train more Educational Psychologists and Speech and Language therapists (although they will not be available for deployment for a number of years) but we note that there is no budget allocation to LAs to employ them when they are trained.

Similarly, the proposal to increase capital funding for special schools, although welcome, does not have an equivalent uplift in the High Needs Block to enable LAs to provide the revenue funding to staff and run them.