SEN0550

Written evidence submitted by Kelvin Grove Primary School

 

Kelvin Grove Primary School is a three-form entry primary school in Lewisham. We are successfully developing a community focussed mainstream school in which a high number of children with SEND thrive.

The school serves a diverse community typically found in any London Borough.

40% FSM 45% EAL.

 

The school currently has a Resource Base provision for 24 children (ASD and similar social communication). In addition, there are 29 children in the mainstream with EHCPs and a further 20 children going through the assessment process ECHNA.

20 of the children on roll would be considered SLD. Of these 9 children in the school are between 8 and 20 months in cognition and learning, with a further 8 children working between 22 and 36 months.

 

30% children overall within the school have SEND support or have an EHCP (2x national).

Around 15% of children have or will have an EHCP (5x national).

 

There is a flexible approach from entry, allowing all children to access an inclusive, ambitious curriculum in an appropriate environment, at the point of need and not limited or constrained by delayed assessments, panel meetings or paper.

 

Some children access highly resourced provision without an ECHP. This is usually because that is what they need initially or at that point in time to feel safe, happy and begin to make progress relative to their needs.

 

By the end of KS2 pupils who are non-SEND achieve at or up to 5% above the same group nationally. Pupils who are SEND achieve at or above comparative groups; published league tables with data which is not contextualised will never show this.

 

Whilst non - contextualised, crudely drawn up league tables continue to be the driving force behind inspection, parental choice and headlines in newspapers that advertise “the top 50 schools in the borough”- schools like Kelvin Grove will continue to be few and far between.

 

SEND children have often made great gains academically and socially relative to their needs but if they do not meet expected standard their achievements are not valued by published data. Previously measured and published progress data was never the answer for inclusive schools who are often managing a high percentage of children who benefit from a mainstream inclusive setting, but remain pre-key stage in aspects of their learning profile.

 

Those schools that are welcoming to all, have an inclusive ethos and work tirelessly to create the conditions for SEND pupils to achieve, often have a disproportionate percentage of children with SEND on their roll and this inevitably impacts on achievement data.

Schools ambitious to be top of performance tables are less likely to have a high percentage of SEND pupils, especially those with EHCPs. It has been our experience that some of these schools actively discourage parents of SEND pupils from applying in the first place. In the worse cases, where children start school and there is a cause for concern, schools fail to build any basic provision for a child and create an environment in which a child begins to be dysregulated. The child then begins to fail. Schools often limit access to the school day or aspects of the curriculum, exclude and/or encourage parents of SEND children to move school.

 

As a school’s reputation for inclusive practice grows, parents of SEND pupils will move children in-year, this is certainly the case here at Kelvin Grove. It has become a criteria for parents making school selection into EYFS with our current Reception likely to be 20% EHCP by July 2025.

 

Despite our school being fairly unique in terms of its efforts to include pupils with SEND, in our opinion we are only doing what is expected of all schools.

 

SEND Code of Practice January 2015

 

6.2 Every school is required to identify and address the SEN of the pupils that they support. Mainstream schools, which in this chapter includes maintained schools and academies that are not special schools, maintained nursery schools, 16 to19 academies, alternative provision academies and Pupil Referral Units (PRUs), must:

 

• use their best endeavours to make sure that a child with SEN gets the support they need – this means doing everything they can to meet children and young people’s SEN

 

This is achievable in any school if there is a willingness of leadership to:

 

 

 

Whilst accountability for increasing percentages of greater depth at KS2 remains a higher priority, at national and local authority level, than providing the very basic SEND provision, the problem of solving the SEND crisis will continue.

 

Currently school leaders in mainstream inclusive settings, providing for a high number of SEND pupils, aren’t even working under an inspection framework that recognises, accounts for, or values the work we do.

 

We are left with the hope, on every inspection, that at least one person in the Ofsted team “gets it”.

 

Kelvin Grove Ofsted June 23

 

Leaders, including those in the early years, are skilled in identifying the additional needs of pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). They work well with other professionals to make sure that thorough assessments are carried out. Leaders ensure that pupils with SEND access the curriculum, through adaptations to teaching and suitable resources. For those pupils with more complex SEND, leaders have established a curriculum in which pupils learning is tailored to their needs and develops necessary contextual life skills.

 

Accountability of school leadership for “best endeavours” needs to be a much higher focus. It needs to be the at the heart of local authority accountability. This should include looking at why pupils move from one school to another, without changing address.

Along with this should come the requirement and authority for LAs to hold to account those schools with high attainment data and a lower than average number of pupils with EHCPs. Leadership, including governors, should be challenged to improve SEND provision and where appropriate provided with support (school to school), monitored and change imposed on school inclusive practice if necessary. 

 

Although we feel there is much in the Code of Practice that remains fundamental in solving the SEND crisis, the actual EHCP process and funding needs change.

The principle of the first £6000 of an EHCP being met from the schools SEND notional funding was always flawed. It financially punishes those schools that have a higher percentage of children with EHCPs. The effect of this is to reduce the finances available for the school to spend at QFT and SEND Support, which in turn means that intervention to narrow learning gaps are not as timely as they should be for pupils and these gaps can widen rather than diminish.

 

For us, early intervention is the key. For many SEND children it takes far too long to access the provision that they need. The way the current system works means that some children eventually end up requiring EHCPs when early adjustments to environment and provision, with a focus on developing key skills in learning and regulation, could have avoided this. In our opinion, a wider and longer assessment process in EYFS and into KS1, where high needs funding is available without an EHCP, would allow schools to build provision that reduces the long-term need. Instead the current system means “top up” funding is dribbled through with most children requiring an increase in banding and funding as they move through the system, not a decreasing amount, as it should be, if children were developing the skills required for independence in learning.

 

Nationally there is a growing incidence of pupils requiring provision to meet autism and social communication needs. Neurodiversity is on the increase. Kelvin Grove has around 100 pupils whose primary need would be classed as this or similar. During the pandemic we, like other schools, remained open to vulnerable pupils. Class sizes were reduced to a maximum of 16. These “bubble classes” were mixed ability and many of our pupils, ASD or similar, began to thrive not just academically but socially too and in terms of their self-regulation and reduced anxiety. Discussions with our older pupils revealed that for many they just felt safer and more included.

This led to the Hub model which is currently part of our school offer. A Hub classroom for some children is the room in which they register and spend most of the day learning. For other children it is the class they begin the day in, then go to their mainstream class for learning but know they can return to the Hub if they feel they need to. Children from the Resource Base who are increasing their time in mainstream provision access the Hubs too.

There is no requirement to have an EHCP just for the child to have the need for that provision in the short, medium or long term. In many cases now most of our Year 5/6 pupils with EHCPs access mainstream classes 50-100% of the time.

 

Some of our pupils transition to secondary special schools, but for those who transition to mainstream secondary the outcomes are mixed. Generally, where the receiving school has a similar Hub class, a nurture group and a willingness to make adjustments to the curriculum, there is a successful journey through KS3 and 4. In some cases, however, pupils do not get the transition support and adjustments they need especially in Year 7. We have experienced secondary schools refusing access to children because they have been in a hub, despite the fact that this has been successful and the children are mainstream secondary ready. This leads to many pupils with social-communication/ ASD eventually disengaging with the system.

 

Inclusion in mainstream should be about creating the right conditions for learning which are different for different people. Resourcing endlessly to “fit the round peg in the square hole” builds dependence rather than independence and is more often than not costly and unsuccessful.

 

Changes we feel will make a difference to solving the SEND crisis and help to alleviate the current challenges faced by inclusive mainstream schools;

 

 

 

January 2025