Written evidence submitted by Suffolk County Council [ACS 029]

Please note this is an officer response and may not reflect the formally agreed views of the Council

Q1:              Is the funding for local authorities’ children’s services sufficient to enable local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties?

Q2: What are the financial challenges for local authorities’ in providing non-statutory services?

Suffolk County Council Response

1. In Suffolk, the demand pressures in Children and Young People’s (CYP) Services reflect those nationally and relate to:

• Demand for services for Children in Care (CiC)
• Demand for services for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)
• Costs of transporting children to school

Children in Care

2. Even though Suffolk has always been a comparatively low-cost CiC service, the last five years have seen overspends both in this budget and that for children with SEND. In November 2018, the Council’s CYP services reported an overspend of £4.9m. However, additional corporate resources of £3.0m are funding the Home to School Transport service, without which the overspend would be £7.9m.
3. Despite the best efforts of the Council, cumulative budget cuts have made investment in prevention more difficult, and made it harder to mitigate against deprivation, which is a key underlying factor in demand pressures. The burden this creates is a systemic one, felt not just by local authorities but across wider public services, including the NHS, Police and Criminal Justice.
4. A similar systemic impact is true of children with SEND, where reductions in mainstream school support create additional pressures in the rest of the system.
5. Demand pressures for CiC are due to a combination of the steep rise in the number of children in care (with those in Suffolk increasing by 21% since March 2015) and the increased complexities of needs, which has resulted in a corresponding spending increase of 42%.
6. The most significant factors in the spending increase relate to the number of children over the age of 16 requiring semi-independent accommodation, and the small number of young people who are either directed to secure accommodation, or whose complexities mean they cannot live with a family or in a residential home. For these most difficult to place young people, it can cost up to £9,000 a week to ensure that they are safe.

Children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

7. There has also been an unprecedented rise in demand for services to support pupils with SEND, and the significant SEND reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014 have been widely recognised as underfunded. The rise in demand is being driven by:

• The increasing number of children with complex and highly complex needs that require a specialist placement.
• The requirement to purchase more placements from the independent special school sector due to a lack of local provision.
• The extension of statutory duties to provide education placements for 16 to 25 year-olds.

Costs of Transporting Children to School

8. There is growing demand pressure too over the cost of Home to School Transport provision. The Council has sought to mitigate this by tightening eligibility criteria and working with Community Transport providers; but in reality there is little local ability to exert meaningful downward pressure on costs. The current funding formula does not take account of local circumstances, such as, in Suffolk’s case, a large rural geography that acts to increase the costs of provision. Much of the underlying legislation stems from the 1944 Education Act and does not reflect the significant changes that have taken place in society since then.

9. Overall, in spite of the actions that Suffolk County Council has taken, challenges that impact on the ability of the Council to deliver the changes required remain:

• For CiC, there are challenges recruiting foster carers, and children’s care sector workers.
• A lack of maturity in the market and absence of a national commissioning framework means insufficient specialist provision for the increasingly complex needs of CiC and young people with SEND. This increases cost and often means CiC are placed inappropriately far from their home.
• Funding pressures across the system impact on children’s services. For example, for SEND, reduced support in schools makes it harder to engage them in providing suitable provision for those where a five-day academic timetable is not suitable.
• The Home-to-School Transport cost of children with SEND is increasing as a result of demand and represents a significant budget pressure for CYP.
• Continuing increases in deprivation and the complexity of children and young people’s needs. Reductions in funding mean that investment in prevention is increasingly squeezed, with less available to mitigate deprivation and young people falling into crisis.
• For SEND, demand is increasing at a rate that can only be supported through additional provision.  While new school places are being established, the extra demand results in purchasing from the independent sector at much higher cost.

10. It is important to note that there are a number of factors largely beyond local authorities’ control that account for around half of all variations in spend between councils’ children’s services departments:
• Deprivation (which is the most important factor);
• Size of the 0 to 25 population;
• Disposable household income;
• Levels of unemployment, and;
• Levels of crime.
11. In recent years, Suffolk’s rates of overall relative deprivation have risen, adding demand pressures. The Council’s Raising the Bar initiative has seen academic attainment improve; but levels of crime, access to health and care, and barriers to housing remain challenging.
12. In addition to these significant pressures, there is the added complexity of issues facing some young people such as county lines, gangs and youth violence, and child sexual exploitation. The complexity of these issues means that multi-agency responses are needed. Thus, funding pressures in any part of the public sector (e.g., Care and Policing) hinder the ability to respond effectively. 

Q3:              How can funding for children’s services be made more sustainable in the short and long term?

Suffolk County Council Response

13. The additional funding for children and young people announced in the Autumn Budget is welcome, along with the government’s recognition that demand for services is increasingly complex and costly.  But longer-term funding settlements would improve the ability to plan effective use of resources both directly and across the public sector.
14. In Suffolk, around 45% of funding for Children and Young People’s services is covered by the County Council’s base budget. Much of the remainder is funded through the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG), which supports 38% of CYP non-school spend.
15. As it stands, Suffolk does not benefit from the full effect of the new DSG National Funding Formula (NFF) due to the transitional protection applied by DfE. This has the biggest impact on the High Needs Block, which funds education placements for children with SEND. For Suffolk, there continues to be £1.8m less in the funding system than expected once the NFF is fully implemented.
16. More generally, development of a national commissioning strategy, including on pricing, would help deliver better value-for-money and secure the right capacity in the right places. Currently, market provision does not fit need, and this is true both for CiC and children with SEND.

a.    As mentioned earlier, insufficient specialist provision for the increasingly complex needs of CiC increases costs and often means CiC are placed inappropriately far from home, and;

b.    SEND local authorities are prevented from influencing the market by creating provision as they are prohibited from directly establishing new schools.

Q4:              How can innovative approaches to the design and delivery of children’s services support financial sustainability? 

Suffolk County Council Response

17. In spite of the pressures it is under, Suffolk County Council’s Children and Young People’s Services are already successfully innovating. For example, for CiC:

a.    The number of young people in residential care has been reduced. This has been achieved through a number of initiatives as part of the Council’s Children in Care Transformation Programme, including: Using predictive modelling and Signs of Safety practice to target early intervention resources at those identified as being at risk of entering care; and a new outcomes-based contract, delivered through a social impact bond, to work intensively with young people identified as on a trajectory into care.

b.    Also as part of the Children in Care Transformation Programme, the Council is recruiting and training new and existing in-house foster carers to increase the number of placements available and reduce reliance on the more expensive external market. This can also help mitigate escalation of needs and costs once a child is in care.

c.    The Suffolk Learning and Improvement Network (SLIN) has been designed by Suffolk headteachers, local authority officers and the School to School Support Partnership working in collaboration. It was established following recognition that a self-improving school system is important to address key educational challenges, particularly in raising attainment. SLIN’s purpose is to promote collective responsibility for the educational outcomes of children and young people in the county’s schools. It does this through three core activities: head-teacher led peer-to-peer reviews; the Suffolk Performance Challenge to provide a framework of expectations for pupil outcomes; and joint practice development delivered by teaching schools to address areas of priority. 90 schools (primary and secondary academies and maintained schools) participated in Wave 1.

d.    Inclusion Surgeries: We are developing our specialist support model with the aim of identifying need and intervening earlier.  To achieve this, we have strengthened our outreach service that supports teachers to meet the needs of children with SEND in school. This service has formal referral routes and is for children with significant needs that go beyond quality first teaching. As a pre-step to this service, we have introduced the offer of five Inclusion Surgeries a year to each school.  This is an opportunity for schools to raise any child that they have a concern about for a discussion and some additional advice from our team of specialists without the need to make a formal referral. Schools are finding this a really helpful early step in supporting children to maintain a mainstream place.

e.    In partnership with other local authorities in the East of England, Suffolk is a signatory to a Memorandum of Understanding on East of England Inter-Agency Workers.

f.      Also in partnership with other local authorities in the East of England, Suffolk has adopted a regional approach to recruitment. This has improved the Council’s ability to recruit skilled staff, although the region still faces competition from other areas, particularly London.

g.    As a region, the East of England has also agreed funding for foster care. However, this is not supported nationally.

18. Specific service improvements within this Transformation Programme are anticipated to deliver cost savings of £1.0m in 2019-20. However, this still needs to be set against the total reported overspend for 2018-19 of £4.9m set out at earlier.
19. As regards children with SEND, the Council’s SEND Transformation Programme is less about generating savings and more about delivering better outcomes and addressing the inequalities of choice and availability of provision that are the legacy of an historically underfunded budget.

a.    The SEND Sufficiency Plan will provide clarity regarding the supply of and demand for specialist services. In doing so, it will guide commissioners by making future requirements clear, help providers prepare to meet future demand, and give families a clear picture of current provision and planned actions to address gaps in that provision.

b.    A Policy Development Panel will help develop the Council’s response to an already-identified need for 300 to 400 new specialist education places in Suffolk for school age children by 2020, and similar for 16 to 25 year olds.

c.    An Assessment Centre Programme will be set up for SEND children who need an early multi-agency assessment, to enable the right offer to be made before their needs escalate.

d.    The Council will improve the local PRU offer and ensure the right children can access this at the right time, including reducing the number of children with EHC plans attending PRUs.

e.    The Council will also work to develop a dynamic purchasing system to strengthen buying power in the independent specialist market.

December 2018