Agenda item

1.10

Report by the Deputy Director for Children’s Services (ESC5).

The Education Scrutiny Committee has requested an update on the analysis of SEND and provision in Oxfordshire, together with the emerging strategy for implementing a transformative approach to supporting our children and young people with SEND.

The Education Scrutiny Committee is RECOMMENDED to note developments to date since September 2020, in order to transform the provision of education, health and care services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

The Education Scrutiny Committee had requested an update on the analysis of SEND and provision in Oxfordshire, together with the emerging strategy for implementing a transformative approach to supporting our children and young people with SEND.

The Deputy Director for Education, Hayley Good introduced the report which updated members on progress of the actions undertaken since it had last been to Committee in September.  The report recognised that they could not achieve the improvements required without engaging a wider range of other stakeholders in the work they were doing, including early years providers, schools, colleges and parents.

She reported that Oxfordshire County Council SEND services were facing financial challenges as were many Local Authorities across the country, with growing expectations on essential services and increasing demand and complexity of needs of some of the most vulnerable residents.  The current financial challenges however, provided opportunities to fundamentally rethink and transform the way that services were delivered, which would focus on developing a more inclusive approach to supporting children and young people with SEND.

The local area SEND inspection revisit in October 2019 had identified that there was still work to do as a partnership and stated that “Leaders had an aspirational vision for the work they were doing to improve outcomes for children and young people with SEND in Oxfordshire. However, parents did not yet feel part of this vision and did not fully understand what work was being done to achieve it”.

There was a significant amount of work ongoing with the co-production Board and at an individual officer level with zoom meetings with the parent carer forum representatives, with over 60 parents having signed up, giving them an opportunity to raise questions.

They were also seeking to second an Oxfordshire Headteacher for an agreed period in order to lead the consultation and finalisation of the new SEND strategy with schools and settings.  It was essential to use the opportunity to capture the realities of the schools setting and develop insight that could help them work with schools on supporting children with SEND.

In relation to engagement, Mrs Good reported that they were looking to improve communications by ensuring that the final Strategy sent out for consultation made clear the shared vision for the future and identified the major changes required, both in the short to medium term and over the next five years to bring about improved services for children and young people with SEND in Oxfordshire. The insight provided by the SEND Joint Strategic Needs Assessment was extremely helpful in order to ensure that the new SEND Strategy was aligned with the SEND sufficiency strategy and future joint commissioning arrangements.  The next stage for the SEND Strategy would be an update which included input from schools.  The draft would then be made available for public consultation early in 2021.

In relation to the wider SEND Transformation, they were developing a high need deficit recovery plan in order to achieve costs savings and the report highlighted some of the work being undertaken to achieve it.  They now had a SEND Transformation Board, working in partnership to identify the solutions to the challenges and recognise the successes.

Looking at the number of out of County placements, there was a need to identify more locally available high-quality provision in the county, there was also a need to reduce the demand on placements.  Currently, there were around 370 placements out of County at a cost of £19m per year.  They also needed to look at their resource bases and what needed to be done to enhance or compliment that provision to add to the capacity in the provision.

Since September, they had submitted an Accelerated Progress Plan to the Department for Education.  The plan set out the actions which would be taken in order to address the identified areas of concern including communication with parents and careers and the timeliness of Education Health Care Plans.  DfE specialist SEND advisers were in regular communication with officers and parent/carer representatives and were satisfied with the progress we have made to date.  The DfE will formally monitor progress of the APP in February.

The Performance Board was co-chaired by the OCC Director of Children’s Services and OCCG Director of Quality and Lead Nurse.

She highlighted the Transformation Priorities set out in paragraph 17 of the report.

In order to meet the growing deficit, the strategy focused on supporting learners closer to home.  It was essential that they ensured that there was a sufficient supply of local, high quality mainstream, special school and resource bases which delivered good outcomes for children. This relied on revenue and capital investment to increase the amount and type of local special school provision and revenue funding for an increase in resource base places.  If the additional funding resulted in fewer children/young people moving to more costly placements in out-of-county independent specialist provision, the investment would payback over time.

Additional leadership capacity had been implemented with a newly appointed permanent SEND Quality Assurance and Improvement Manager who took up post in September and a full-time finance officer to support the monitoring of cost of provision.   A new permanent Head of SEND will be recruited at the earliest opportunity.

The Chairman queried how long the Council could carry the deficit on the high needs block.  In response, Kevin Gordon explained that there was a national debate around how the deficit was accounted for; whether they were accounted for against the local authority budget, or against another budget.  The last information received suggested that they were accounted for in neither of those places.

The Government had not given hard and fast guidance about when the deficit should be recovered but had put in place a rigorous reporting mechanism and an expectation that they had to submit a viable debt recovery programme to demonstrate how they were going to achieve it.

Councillor Matelot queried if there were children coming out of County into Oxfordshire.  In response, Mrs Good explained that in theory they could but, they didn’t in terms of their special schools as they were all full to capacity with Oxfordshire children.  There were a couple of children near the border who attended Oxfordshire special schools, but this was because it was their nearest available school.  There would be Independent specialist providers that would take children of County.

Councillor Matelot further queried why an officer from OCC had not attended an EHCP Annual Review Meeting even though they had been invited.  Mrs Good explained that there was presently an issue with capacity of officers to attend all the Annual Review meetings, but that this was being addressed with additional resource within this area.  They were aware that it was an issue and were working hard to address it.

Carole Thomson reported that she was aware of one case with the Secretary of State where the Council were fighting against a child coming from out of County to one of the special schools from across the border and welcomed the officers supporting the special schools for children in the County.

Councillor John Howson asked whether it would be possible to know what the extra cost was of EHCP to the central services in terms of preparation and ongoing cost of the annual review and monitoring.  In relation to the presentation, he queried whether any work had been carried out in relation to the CPD needs to ensure that there was an adequately prepared workforce and whether some investment in CPD might reduce the number of EHCP required.

In response, Mrs Good reported that both areas were tied into two of the strands of the task and finish groups.  The SEND sufficiency group were looking at the need for places and what the exact nature of those places were, and the need they had to meet, the SEND continuum group were looking at the CPD element and what support they needed to make available for them to better meet the needs of children and young people and to keep them in mainstream.  The finance group were looking at whether it would be possible to make an additional payment to those mainstream schools so that they could keep some of the children going out of County.

Councillor Gill Sanders queried why there was a need to get a Headteacher in for a couple of days a week when there was a great deal of expertise within the Council that could take on that roll.  She was shocked to hear that in the 1980’s there was a campaign to get children out of county to in county queried why it was this taking so long.

Kevin Gordon agreed that it was sad that this was being discussed 40 year’s ago.  He believed that people had wanted to resolve the issue and knew the general direction of travel, but that it had lacked rigour and ownership and that had led into why they had taken on the Headteacher with local knowledge and experience.  This would require fundamental change at every tier of the system.

The Chairman thanked Mrs Good for the report and welcomed the approach.  The Chairman queried when the Scrutiny Committee could input into the process, but undertook to look at it under the work programme item.

The Education Scrutiny Committee AGREED to note developments to date since September 2020, in order to transform the provision of education, health and care services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.