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Written evidence from Mrs Kathleen Richardson

1. The principles underlying the current legislation and Code of Practice are sound, well intentioned and I support them fully. There are a number of positive changes for children and young people and for their parents and carers which have resulted. My comments below are based on a 30 years experience with the SEND system, as an educational psychologist. I have focused on points that I think may undermine the original aims and aspirations of the 2014 legislation, and which could still be addressed.

Assessment of and support for children and young people with SEND

2. In my experience there were problems with the timescales given to local authorities to implement changes in 2014; changes which were intended to be major cultural changes. Across three agencies.  Local authorities had to hit the ground running and I am not sure they have fully caught up. This meant that it was problematic to implement change which was fully thought through, based on the underlying principles and on a shared understanding understood across the three agencies of education, health and social care.

3. The Code of Practice is not a code that guides the practice of professionals in the way the previous Code and Tool Box did. Even with the previous Code and Tool Box not all professionals were familiar with them. Without detailed guidance, however, it is hard to find information that gives consistency and clarity to local decision making. The present Code appears to be written by different people/departments, is very repetitious and could be pruned. I read the first two versions carefully, the third less carefully and, given my workload, was unable to plough through other versions. The number of versions introduced was a huge waste of time and was confusing.

4. The current legislation was introduced at the same time as significant cuts to local authority funding and changes to school funding, followed by ongoing strains on local authority and school budgets. To introduce these kinds of tensions into a new system aimed at supporting children and young people with significant educational vulnerabilities was not helpful. In my own local authority, it quickly led to increasing demands for special school placements. The response to these demands from parents and schools, has been to require schools to keep children and meet their needs, meanwhile local authorities have fewer resources to support schools in meeting needs and the Ofsted bar for schools, rightly, gets higher and higher. Schools and teachers feel under increasing strain. When systems are under strain, it is the most vulnerable who suffer.  Resources and time to think, plan, do and review are necessary.

5. Expectations of the current system have been high, again rightly, from parents and from groups who support them. Although there has been transitional funding, it has been nowhere enough to upskill local authority SEND staff, school staffs, educational professionals or health and social care professionals, in order to implement the necessary changes and meet the increasing demands for assessments.

6. In my view an underlying concept of the EHCP plans is flawed. They are expected to be both very detailed (i.e. guide classroom practice) and overarching (strategic) at the same time – and include planning across education, health and social care. They can only be strategic and guide day to day practice if significant additional resources are allocated to assess, write and review the plans. (If changes are made to the system in this regard, please consult the experiences of people who are at the front line in assessing children and writing and reviewing plans. They must be workable.) In theory it does not sound like a hard thing to ask that professionals recommend detailed support for a given young person which is then written into a Plan, but this issue is complicated and additional resource needs are hard to address. 

7. What is needed for a young person depends as much on the expertise and support available from a school as the needs of the young people themselves, so that two young people with the same level and type of educational difficulty can have different, additional resource needs. If their needs are being met well by their school, they make progress, but if they are not well catered for and fail to make progress they then require additional funding. Young people’s needs can, and do, change as they experience the different approaches and skills of different teachers and school organisations over time. In practice, combining strategic and day to day planning in a single document that remains relevant for a reasonable period of time is very difficult to get right. The more detailed the plan, the more frequently it has to be changed as outcomes are met and changed. In addition, support and resourcing that is based solely on assessed difficulties tends to reward failure and penalise successes.

8. The intention to reduce bureaucracy has not been met, parents and carers are faced with less paperwork, but the amount of time and resource needed to process a Plan has increased in comparison with assessments for Statements and Learning Difficulty assessments. In times of diminishing resources, the time should be spent in providing support. In my experience as an educational paychologist, the funding and legislative changes over the last few years has reduced the support and advice function of the work and increased the resource that has gone into the bureaucracy of statutory assessment.

The transition from statements of special educational needs and Learning Disability Assessments to Education, Health and Care Plans

9. Considerable resources were allocated to the transition from Statements and Learning Disability Assessments to Plans. As far as I am aware timescales were met. I cannot comment on the quality of the Plans.

The level and distribution of funding for SEND provision

10. I have touched on this above and do not believe I have sufficient knowledge to comment further. However, the number of children coming into the education system with significant developmental delay, significant SEND and significant emotional and mental health concerns seems to continue to rise and rise. There is a limit to how much ‘more can be done with less”.

The roles of and co-operation between education, health and social care sectors

11. Encouraging more co-operation between education, health and care continues to be necessary. Major cultural change in a single organisation is a challenge, across three different ones the level of challenge increases hugely. There is a large research literature on cultural and organisational change which is likely to be helpful on guiding what could be done differently.

12. In my experience professionals in the three agencies have very different conceptualisations and understanding of each other’s roles with regard to SEND legislation and practices and this can lead to bad and confused advice given to parents and carers - which can be damaging to them and is not in the best interests of the young people.

13. The language used in the legislation and code makes it clear that education continues to have the major responsibility with health and social care being designated as ‘other agencies’.  It is interesting to me that the Secretaries of State for both Education and Health have signed it, but that both retain their own separate budgets. I cannot see true co-operation that really supports the underlying aspirations of the legislation ever being met if it requires a Secretary of State to give up budget, and power, to another. But without proper cooperation at this level, local agencies will always tend to bow to their own pressures.

14. Cooperation is not helped by the constant staff changes and re-organisations resulting from these times of austerity. People new into post tend to deal with the legislation, guidelines and requirements facing them at the time and I wonder how many current leaders in the three agencies are familiar with the legislation, Code and work that has been done locally to support the needs of children and young people.

Provision for 19-25-year olds including support for independent living; transition to adult services; and access to education, apprenticeships and work.

15. I cannot speak on this in any detail, but it was a privilege to assess and work with young people who had gone through school supported by funding arrangements introduced as an alternative to Statements, by a previous government, and who then needed the support of a plan to move on to Further Education. It is an area that requires multi-agency support at all levels of the system, from those involved in assessing and understanding needs to those responsible for provision of education and training, to those responsible for funding and resourcing decisions.

June 2018