The National Association for Independent Schools and Non-Maintained Special Schools (NASS) is a national membership body for special schools outside local authority control. We have 430 member schools and organisations across England and Wales. We work to represent the sector on the national stage and support the sector through advice, guidance, training and commissioning of research.
This response to the Public Accounts Committee provides evidence to support the consideration of the three themes set out in the call for evidence. These are:
We welcome the opportunity to submit written evidence to the Public Accounts Committee inquiry but are disappointed a) the short two-week window provided for organisations and individuals to submit evidence and b) the lack of promotion of the call for evidence to the SEND community.
Introduction
Children and young people’s rights and entitlements are clearly enshrined in the existing SEND legal framework, set out in the Children and Families Act 2014. Unfortunately, for many years, policy decisions and actions have resulted in too many children and young people with SEND not receiving the special educational provision and wider support they need and are entitled to by law.
Numerous stakeholders and educational commentators have confirmed that 2014 reforms were right legally but not implemented/enforced successfully. Indeed, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Children and Families Act 2014 reported in December 2022 that the 2014 reforms in terms of SEND were fundamentally the right ones, but little thought was given to their implementation. The report advised that a clear implementation plan for the proposed next set of reforms was needed.
Since publication of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan (SENDIP) in March 2023, we have witnessed a lack of a clear and shared implementation plan underpinned by evidence, co-production and clearly defined measures of success. We have also witnessed a concerning shift in priorities away from whole system reform, with the focus being on improving systems and processes from the perspective of local government (local authorities), through the Change Programme Partnerships pilots.
This focus on how to best reduce costs, reduce administrative burden, and reduce demand has unfortunately come at the expense of enabling the best possible outcomes for CYP with SEND. This downplay of ambition for this cohort of students is reflected through a change of wording from seeking ‘best’ possible outcomes (Children and Families Act) to ‘good’ outcomes (SENDIP). We also believe that it has come at the expense of local authority compliance with the law.
The need for high quality evidence
We believe that policy should be grounded in high quality evidence about what works, for whom and at what cost.
Despite the commissioning of the SEND Futures work, there is little evidence that this approach currently drives SEND policy. We need better research on which interventions work for which children and at which time. In practice, the approach taken is almost always to start at lowest possible level of intervention for a child, even when there is good evidence that this will not meet the needs of some children and will have higher social and economic costs in long term.
We lack good quality research on which interventions achieve best outcomes and impact – especially for children with social, emotional and mental health needs. In 2023, NASS commissioned ‘Reaching My Potential’, a study of cost, value and impact in SEND settings, from Sonnet Impact: This evidenced that meeting SEND needs effectively makes significant economic and social returns across a person with SEND’s lifetime. We would like to see more of this type of approach informing Government policy so that the focus shifts from cost to value. There is little concept of ‘invest to save’ within education.
The ‘Reaching my Potential’ report highlighted that the biggest gains made by children and young people with SEND come about as a result of having their social and emotional needs met. Pedagogy is, of course, important but it does not appear to be where the ‘value added’ comes from within the SEND system. This finding supports the need to better understand which mental health interventions are most effective for children with SEND and how these might differ from mainstream children. Special schools are doing a great job of supporting children’s mental health needs but generally without a strong evidence base of whether the interventions they are using are the most effective available. In the absence of a cohesive CAMHS offer for children with SEND, special schools are developing and delivering their own in-house mental health support. Whilst this is great for children attending the school, this knowledge then gets locked within individual settings when the evidence generated could be used to replicate and scale interventions across the wider sector.
SEND and AP Improvement Plan
It should be noted that the SEND and AP Improvement Plan (SAPIP) came about as a result of the SEND Review, which was triggered by the Treasury, in response to concerns about high and growing spending levels on SEND. Consequently, at its heart, the SAPIP is driven by a wish to reduce costs and spend and not, we would argue, on a wish to improve the system for children, young people, families and providers. There has been too much focus on local authority processes and insufficient focus on how the system works as a whole for the children and families who use it.
Whilst the increased numbers of children with SEND and the subsequent expenditure on their support should be of interest to Government, we do not feel that enough analysis of what is driving growth and dissatisfaction within the SEND system was undertaken before ‘solutions’ were put forward in the SAPIP. We are concerned that the new government is taking a similar approach that will inevitably fail to 'fix' the SEND system.
There are a growing number of children being placed in specialist provision, but we believe that the narrative that mainstream providers are unwilling to support children with SEND and a growing narrative of ‘pushy parents’ who ask for more provision than they really need for their children doesn't really reflect reality. Non-Government research suggests that mainstream schools feel they lack the skills and support to effectively educate children with SEND and parents consistently report frustration with current law not being followed, resulting in the need to escalate concerns. The SAPIP interpretation results in a ‘more stick, less carrot’ approach to push towards national standards and reducing parental demand for services, without the understanding of what drives current behaviours and what support would be required to effect the major cultural change needed in the SEND system.
One key response in the SAPIP has been to promote the creation of additional school places via the Free Schools programme. We have seen no analysis of the programme that supports that this is an effective and value for money method of increasing specialist provision in the sector. There is evidence that the choice of site for new Free Schools is often unsuitable and that there have been occasions where above market value has been paid. There are special free schools which were ‘green lit’ over 6 years ago and are still not open. During this time there will have been significant investment in land and staff, with ongoing costs, despite no service being delivered to children and young people. The Free Schools programme is frequently touted by Government as a means of reducing placements in ‘high cost’ independent schools but we have seen no analysis of the comparative costs of setting up and running a new Free School versus purchasing placements in an independent school where the state has offered no support for set-up costs. There is an implicit assumption that the Free Schools programme is a better option with absolutely no evidence provided of cost and value.
There are similar examples across the SAPIP where viewing problems primarily through the lens of ‘cost’ distorts the solutions offered and, we would argue, diminish their likely effectiveness. There is very little understanding of value, both in the SEND Review and the subsequent SAPIP. Whilst the SEND and AP Green Paper was encouragingly titled ‘Right Support, Right Place, Right Time’, there is little that suggests DfE has answers to these questions, nor is continuing to seek them as part of its ongoing work. Outcomes data are crude and limited, there are no data on the social return on investment generated by different interventions and services and we do not know the consequences of the timing of interventions, even though we know that unaddressed needs can lead to very high support costs.
Analysis and support for workforce and skills shortages is almost entirely absent in the SAPIP and yet drives confidence and competence in mainstream schools and expertise in specialist settings. SAPIP is limited in its ambition for workforce, focusing on numbers of new Educational Psychologists and a training model for mainstream schools. There is no focus on teacher, support staff and clinical staff shortages which impact heavily on special schools and weaken their ability to offer specialist services.
Although it is very difficult to highlight systemic successes. There are pockets of good practice scattered across the country, but these are generally providers and/or local authorities working in isolation with little capacity to replicate or scale. For future success, government needs to invest in supporting and empowering schools and practitioners to be innovative and to learn from each other. Government needs to respect the experience and knowledge that is already within the system and enable opportunities for innovation.
We currently have a programme of cost control and process reform when a major programme of cultural change is needed. The majority of LAs are now in one of the two DfE in financial intervention programmes – Safety Valve and Delivering Better Value in SEND - which constrain both spending and thinking. Local authorities have been put under huge pressure to reduce spend on SEND and this has resulted in an emphasis, in practice, on control, not collaboration. LAs are not supported to be creative or to consider ‘invest to save’ interventions which may not return to the public purse for several years – the short-termism of funding intervention agreements undermines this.
Financial constraints unhelpfully alter local authority behaviours regarding SEND. Despite there being no ‘official’ targets, Safety Valve agreements generally focus on reducing the number of EHCPs assessed and issued and, frequently, on reducing placements in the independent sector. This has resulted in some local authorities behaving illegally, e.g. amending the setting named on a child’s EHCP to end a placement in an independent school without first consulting with the parents.
The choice and stakeholders engaged and the level of engagement for the SAPIP is noticeably different from the 2014 reforms. This programme has much poorer engagement mechanisms than 2014 reforms with a far narrower group of stakeholders engaged, focusing around local authorities.
There is a level of opacity for the SAPIP not seen in previous Government programmes. For example, a key driver of the plan has been the 9 Change Partnerships. These partnerships have been set up to test out various aspects of the SAIP but their plans are not published and they have not been required to engage with the full range of stakeholders in their area. Similarly, for local authorities which are in financial intervention programmes, there is no requirement to update stakeholders on actions and progress.
Having taken a cost-cutting approach, DfE needed the SAPIP to successfully engage all stakeholders to secure buy-in. The ‘arms-length’ approach taken has increased external suspicion of the programme and, in many cases, generated significant antipathy from parents and groups of providers that feel they are excluded, not just from decision-making but from information about what is happening. This markedly reduces the chances of the SAPIP delivering successful outcomes.
A time for change
Our evidence suggests that families and schools are generally not supportive of the SAPIP and view it as a cost-cutting exercise. We believe that local authority financial intervention programmes must be paused whilst we are seeking to change the wider SEND system.
We would like to see a much-revised SAPIP – we do not believe that the current plan can achieve positive change for children, and we believe it is likely to exacerbate existing tensions between families, schools and local authorities.
We would like to see greater investment is bridging knowledge and skills gaps between special schools and mainstream schools. There is huge expertise locked in special schools with no sustainable mechanism for that to be shared with their mainstream colleagues. We would like to see a national SEND Innovation programme to make better use of expertise being developed in isolated pockets within the system.
We would like Government to accept that spending on SEND may need to increase in the short-term to effect changes which bring about longer-term savings. We need to start thinking in terms of value, not cost. As part of this, we need to allow for a more granular view of the SEND system and interventions which can be nuanced depending on differing needs of children. We should have a solid evidence base for which interventions work best with which children and then give schools the freedom to apply these in their settings, using their knowledge of the children that they work with.
Finally, we need to have a full and open discussion of what inclusion means for all children and young people, focusing on needs rather than place. We are concerned that the government may focus on inclusion through the lens of reducing costs rather than enabling children and young people with SEND to reach their full potential in education, wellbeing and life chances.
November 2024