The national system of support for children with Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is in crisis.
There is no other word for it.
A child with additional needs deserves exactly the same opportunities and quality of education that every other child in the country deserves. Parents and carers of children with SEND expect this. And so should all of us.
But the impact of the 2014 reforms – far greater responsibilities with no additional funding – has meant local areas are running just to be able to stay on top of assessments and reviews, creating extra provision, and slowing down ever increasing cumulative DSG deficits (with council reserves increasingly unlikely to cover these deficits).
So what is needed and what can help?
ADCS, the CCN, and others have led the calls for additional and fairer funding for local authority High Needs Block budgets. This is undoubtedly essential but money alone is not the answer.
The – now previous – government published a national SEND and AP Improvement Plan. Whilst it runs to 101 pages, it does not provide the fundamental, paradigm shift that is needed for local systems that support children with SEND. Rather, it is a combination of pockets of good practice from local areas, re-stating existing duties, and tweaks to an already creaking system. It may help a little but won’t represent the step-change in outcomes or reduction in spend that is required.
The former government also introduced two major programmes to help councils tackle their High Needs Block deficits: Delivering Better Value (DBV) and Safety Valve. At Peopletoo, we were pleased to contribute to the early development of the national DBV programme, and we are proud to partner with a number of councils on delivery of their Safety Valve programmes.
Safety Valve is controversial in some corners due to a perception that it drives the wrong behaviours – focusing on cost reduction at the expense of providing the right support at the right time. But this doesn’t need to be the case. Whilst councils do need more High Needs funding, it is also true that improving the effectiveness of a local system should reduce expenditure. High quality, improved outcomes, and low cost are goals that do not need to be in conflict with one another.
The Safety Valve programme does not provide councils with funding that they can invest; it simply provides cash that can pay off a reduced cumulative deficit (there are opportunities to use the profile of payments to invest upfront to deliver a ROI but that is not its intent). What Safety Valve does do, however, is provide an impetus for councils (with partners, including Parent Carer Forums) to do really intensive analysis, design, scoping, modelling, and planning – resulting in an extremely detailed – and finely balanced – plan to reduce cost.
That is not to say that councils and partners not part of Safety Valve are not thinking about these things but the reality of a multi-million pound carrot in the form of a Safety Valve agreement does tend to focus the mind.
That being said, at Peopletoo we would strongly advocate that councils ought to be approaching their High Needs Block deficit reduction efforts as if they are in the programme. This means in-depth interrogation of need and demand data, medium-term projections for the next 5 years, detailed design and scoping work, modelling of likely impact, extensive engagement with partners and stakeholders, and detailed implementation planning. It requires a lot of time and focus – we have lots of tools, approaches, and expertise that can assist – but it is what’s needed, and quickly.
The crucial element is adopting a whole-system approach. The SEND system is complex and interconnected. One change in one part of the system can have a knock-on effect in another. And, only by understanding how the system operates from early years through to adulthood, can local areas ensure they are providing the right support at the right time, and reducing expenditure along the way.
For that reason, plans to reduce expenditure cannot operate in isolation from the overarching local SEND partnership strategy, from quality and improvement planning, and from operational delivery and management. Our team has vast experience of working with councils and partnerships to align all the different components and design a single strategy and programme to improve quality and outcomes whilst reducing spend. Our advice is: start with desired outcomes, keep it simple and streamlined, get the governance and accountabilities right, and focus on delivery and impact.
So, we now have a new government. The new Education Secretary has made a positive first step to move responsibility for SEND and Alternative Provision from the Children and Families Group to the Schools Group, seeing a focus on inclusivity and relationships with schools as central to delivering much-needed reform. However, it’s still much too early to get a sense of practical policy or changes to funding, arising from the election of a new government. And councils can’t afford to wait. They need to devise their own plan now. It’s what every child and parent deserves.