CHH0010

Written evidence submitted by Katy Hudson

Education Committee Inquiry

Children in Care Homes

Personal Reflection from a former Virtual School Officer

Topic point:

The quality of, and access to, support for children and young people in children’s homes, including support for those with special education needs, and the support available at transition points

Background:

I currently worked for a charity that supports children in care and care leavers in a training and development role. Prior to this, from 2013 – 2020, I was employed in Virtual Schools in two different Local Authorities. My experiences of attempting to support the education of young people, particularly those with EHCPs, who were placed in residential homes often left me feeling disheartened and frustrated. It was generally extremely challenging to source school places for those young people who moved to out of county children’s homes and needed to change schools. My observation was that the system that should be designed to enhance a young person’s educational experience, in reality was detrimental and damaging. Even with experienced professionals with a good knowledge and understanding of the education system working hard for the child in care, the multiple barriers often resulted the child being out of school for months.

Experience/Observations:

Whilst the home local authority remains the corporate parent to a looked after young person and social workers, virtual schools etc, maintain responsibility, SEND teams exert the ‘belonging’ rule and give administrative responsibility for the EHCP to the local authority that is ordinarily resident.
The above creates a bureaucratic and lengthy process which almost always results in significant gaps in education when a young person moves to an out of county placement and needs to change schools.
The complicated nature of the system resulted in a great deal of confusion about which local authority should be approached in relation to consultations about school placements, particularly when multiple local authorities were involved i.e. a child lived in one county/borough, attended a school in a different LA and was looked after by a third LA.
The majority of residential staff I liaised with had little or no understanding of how school applications worked for young people with EHCPs and so were not proactive in addressing getting the young person into education provision and were heavily reliant on other professionals.
Residential staff often didn’t know much about their local schools if the young person was able to access mainstream provision and didn’t have good links with local authority SEN teams, Virtual Schools or admissions teams.
File transfers to the new LA SEND team would need to be arranged which often took several weeks to co-ordinate because of difficulties getting hold of SEN officers. The new local authority often then took several weeks and numerous prompts to pick up the young person’s case. Schools would then need to be identified and sent consultations. The official timescales for schools to respond to consultations were rarely met and schools had to be chased several times. Appeals regularly had to be made as schools did not feel they could meet need.
If Specialist provision was required, SEND teams generally have a policy of approaching maintained special schools in their own county/borough first, then neighbouring counties/boroughs and then independent provisions, regardless of the needs of the child – this is based on cost of provision. The 3 rounds of sending out consultations adds further delays.
Once a school is identified the administering LA would need to seek approval from the ‘home’ LA for funding.
Transport was a further issue. Some residential homes would transport the young people to school but others would not so taxis would need to be arranged. Schools/homes often were confused about which LA to arrange this with if multiple boroughs were involved resulting in more delays. Once the correct LA was identified and the transport sourced and costed, they would then need to get approval from the ‘home’ LA for payment – even more delays!
The young person was significantly impacted by these lengthy delays and found themselves with little structure and no school routine, having recently moved to a new area where they knew no one and were in the very early stages of developing relationships with residential staff.
On several occasions, the residential placement broke down before of during the consultation for school places had begun and the young person was moved again to a new local authority where the process of moving files had to begin again.
‘Home’ SEND teams were not generally receptive to maintaining administrative responsibility of children’s files if they lived out of county.
Alternative provision whilst the young person is waiting for a school place is very hard to come by and highly expensive, particularly if this spans several months. SEN teams rarely offer interim provision without several requests and then they have to go back to the ‘home’ LA to seek approval to fund it.
Pupil premium is often used to provide education provision rather than being allocated to enhance learning and raise achievement.
Education was provided by some children’s homes for an additional fee – the quality of this was generally poor in my experience and often took place in kitchens or rooms opposite the young person’s bedroom so they found it hard to get a clear boundary between ‘school’ and home life.
Some children’s homes told children that they had to be in education for them to stay with them as they didn’t have staff to offer support within school hours – when a child was out of school for long periods of time this was problematic
Some children’s homes didn’t have IT access if the young person didn’t have their own laptop initially so it wasn’t possible to set up online tuition