Agenda item

The Committee scrutinised a report of the Assistant Director, SEND & Inclusion, which provided an update for members on support and provision for children and young people who have special education needs and/or disabilities (SEND) and inclusion in the local area. The report also provided performance headlines related to SEND and inclusion, showing how the local area compared to national, regional and statistical neighbours for performance related to statutory processes.

The Committee was advised that statutory performance related to the timeliness of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP) remained significantly higher than the national average. The challenge now is to sustain this in the context of increasing demand. Capacity of the SEND Team was being monitored and would need to be addressed to maintain performance. There had been a reduction in high cost independent and non-maintained special schools (INMSS), which meant that more children and young people were educated within their local community.

There were a higher-than-average number of children and young people in the local area who had an EHCP (Oldham: 4.7% and national: 4.0%), whilst the percentage at SEN support level is lower than average (Oldham: 11.5% and national: 12.6%). This indicated that there were issues around early identification and intervention and the graduated response being implemented consistently. At 55%, there was a higher number of statutory school aged children and young people who had an EHCP educated in specialist settings in Oldham (the average for all metropolitan boroughs was 9.9% and the national average was 34%). The reasons for this needed to be more fully understood. Recommendations could be made to address this, under the sufficiency aspect of the next phase of SEND strategy 2023- 2027, which will also align with the council’s strategy, and which was detailed at appendix I to the report.

The latest national data, published in June 2022, by the Department for Education, showed that the most common type of need for children and young people who had an EHCP was autism and for those who are identified as requiring SEN support was speech, language and communication needs – which was reflected in Oldham Despite the identified number of children and young people in Oldham schools who had an EHCP with a primary need of speech, language and communication (SLCN), this may not account for the true level of need. This was because many children and young people will have been identified as having needs related to social, emotional and mental health (SEMH), when they move from primary to secondary school. This indicates that their SLCN has been under identified or mis-categorised.

Following the Ofsted/CQC local area SEND inspection in 2017, which resulted

in a written statement of action (WSoA) and the subsequent revisit in 2019,

which resulted in an accelerated progress plan (APP), significant

improvements have been made to the quality and timeliness of EHC needs

assessments and EHCPs, as well as system improvements, including:

·         Quality of EHCP’s continues to improve: October 2022 audit

indicates 95.5% good.

·         Timeliness is consistently and significantly above the national

average: 95% for 2022.

·         Annual Review Recovery Plan: 95% of all EHCPs needing to be

rewritten are complete.

·         Workforce development: all staff have completed IPSEA legal

training and are progressing to the NASEN Case Worker Award.

·         All schools participated in Whole School SEND training and SEND in

a Nutshell. Work continues to ensure SEND and inclusion is high on

the primary and secondary heads agenda.

·         Inclusion Frameworks have been developed and implemented.

·         The Graduated Response Toolkit is in place and accessible online.

·         The Autism in Schools and Early Identification of Need Projects have

been implemented and work is being done to continue with the good

practice that these have enabled.

Since the implementation of the WSoA and subsequent APP, practice in SEND has improved significantly and systems and processes remain more robust. There is also good partnership working across education health and care, 0-25.

Members welcomed the report and asked how the service would keep improving. It was reported that monitoring with Key Performance Indicators, challenge, support and benchmarking would continue to take place.

Resolved:

That the Committee notes the report and request that a further update be submitted to a future meeting in approximately 12 months.