Agenda item

Purpose of the Report: Scrutiny of Services and Budgets

The Committee will review the findings from the recent consultation on SEND Transformation and understand the Council’s future strategy.

Witnesses:

Julie Iles, Cabinet Member for All-Age Learning

Liz Mills, Director of Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture

Zarah Lowe, SEND Programme Manager

Key points raised in the discussion:

Tim Evans briefly left the room during this item

1.    The Director advised the Committee that the council would co-produce a new Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) service based on the principles in the consultation. Improvements have been made based SEN inspections but this was not transformative and confidence in the council is still low. A Systems Leaders Partnership Board had been established to take improvement work forward.

2.    The Vice-Chairman queried how the service would restore trust and confidence in the council. The Director explained that they wanted to have clear and open lines of communication with families and that complaints were now responded to within 24 hours. Detailed work had also been done with SEN Coordinators in schools involving other partners.

3.    The Committee asked how this transformation work would align with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) recommissioning work and were told this was integral to transformation and would align through single pathways, shared definition of need and from a single front door that offered guidance and advice.

4.    The Committee commented that it was hearing lots of strategic language - what was the frontline impact? The Director told the Committee that they had created information packages using families' own language to create case studies and young people would be making audio and video diaries too.

5.    The experience of many families was that it was hard to see professionals and many Members confirmed this from personal experience. The Director reassured the Committee that this is where investment was being targeted but admitted that it was difficult to recruit and retain in certain professions such as Occupational Therapy. The council would lobby for funding to invest in training people in these professions.

6.    The topic of exclusions was raised. The service was working to reduce the number of children affected as last year there 14 permanent exclusions in primary schools and 63 in secondary school with many more fixed term exclusions. Officers undertook a study of what happened in each exclusion and found that problems would arise over a period of just one or two terms. The Inclusion Team's role was to pick up early signs of trouble and was having some effect.

7.    A Member asked how Surrey compared with the rest of the country in terms of SEN and the Director advised the county was an outlier in the number of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and this situation was the basis for transformation. The Director went on to describe how funding was locked in the statutory services which prompted parents to seek EHCPs for their children. If funding could be redirected to other services it could reduce the need for these plans and reduce costs.

8.    The Chairman pointed out that communication and trust were issues for the council and that the consultation showed that parents don't think they will get the right services without an EHCP. The Director agreed these were important areas of focus. The Programme Manager stated that the service were committed to having a joint plan by the end of April for service re-provision.

9.    The Cabinet Member made it clear to the Committee that the transformation work was not about reducing services but about re-provision and that the council needed its partners to help make families' experience better. Transformation work would include upskilling staff in schools and universal setting as well parents to support children with additional needs. The council would aim to develop integrated teams of therapists and had completed a restructure to change to locality teams.

RESOLVED

That the service's indicators for measuring performance form part of the information reviewed by the new Performance Sub-Group.