Agenda item

To receive the findings and recommendations of the Additional Needs and Disabilities: Parent/Carer Experience Task Group, tasked with considering what changes could improve the Council’s support of parents and carers of Children and Young People with Additional Needs and Disabilities.

Witnesses:

 

• Councillor Jeremy Webster, Chairman of Task Group
• Councillor Jonathan Essex, Task Group Member
• Clare Curran, Cabinet Member for Children, Families and Lifelong
  ?Learning
• Rachael Wardell, Executive Director for Children, Families and
  ?Lifelong Learning
• Julia Katherine, Director for Education and Lifelong Learning
• Liz Bone, SEND County Service Planning & Performance Leader

 

Key points made in the discussion:

 

1. The Chair thanked the Task Group for an insightful and sobering report. While recognising that Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP) were an issue nationally, she said the Task Group’s recommendations addressed long-standing local issues that were within the Council’s control.

 

2. The Task Group Chairman said they had been moved by meeting parents, carers and staff, but despite this they had kept the report proportionate. He stressed the need for better support and tools for frontline staff to improve customer engagement and expressed frustration with slow progress in improving staff career paths. He praised good practice observed at the Learners’ Single Point of Access (L-SPA) and was very hopeful about the Partnerships for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools (PINS) programme.

 

3. The Scrutiny Officer thanked the parents and carers who took part, having to relive difficult experiences. She also gave thanks to the case officers who contributed.

 

4. A Member questioned why response times could not be monitored. The SEND County Service Planning & Performance Leader explained that currently there was no way of monitoring communications to and from the case officers’ individual email addresses and mobile phones. A new phone system using Microsoft Teams would enable monitoring, but the technology had to be set up first. To enable oversight of emails, they were looking at a group email option and, more long-term, building a parent portal. The Chair voiced her frustration that improving communication had not been made a higher priority.

 

5. A Member commended a powerful report and asked if the team agreed with its substance. The Cabinet Member said she was concerned that there were many families across Surrey that were not getting the support and the service that their children need, and she apologised for that. She mentioned Surrey County Council had invested £15 million over three years to both address the backlog of overdue EHCPs and ensure children were getting some support in school while waiting. The Cabinet Member was glad the report acknowledged there were pockets of good practice but affirmed that there was more work to be urgently done.

 

6. The Executive Director for Children, Families and Lifelong Learning said the report’s findings could be used to strengthen work already underway. The Service had made progress but, because demand continued to increase, proportionately, problems remained. She said the recommended increase in case officers had not been fully costed but would probably mean a £3.5 million pressure. They would take the suggestion seriously, but it would need to be balanced against other requirements in budget planning. The Chair commented that improvement to date was not of the scale necessary to meet need.

 

7. A Task Group Member appealed to decision-makers to keep the parents’ quotes in mind and consider recommendations in the round. He asked the Service looking at the EHCP process to also consider parts outside the Council’s control but within its purview of influence, such as the time taken for diagnosis by MindWorks.

 

8. A Member said after speaking to teachers that she worried about the lack of emphasis placed on special educational needs (SEN) by some teacher training providers. The Chair suggested councillors lobby Government for more training through the County Council Network (CCN) and Local Government Association (LGA). The Executive Director suggested they could support the recommendations of the July 2024 report commissioned by the CCN and LGA. She added that a previous education bill under the last Government had included a dedicated SEN stream for the professional development of teachers but it was not enacted.

 

9. The headteacher of Redhill’s Carrington School said teacher training in SEN was sporadic and not universal. It relied on schools to see it as an important focus; however, this was a challenge because Early Career Teachers’ time was very limited. She spoke about the difficulty in recruiting special educational needs co-ordinators (SENCO) and that the cost of their professional qualification would now have to be borne by the school. A Member said some teacher training programmes had started to include special needs education, though more so in primary than secondary.

 

Resolved:

 

It is intended that, should Cabinet agree them, all the recommendations that follow are implemented over the next 12 months.

 

The Children, Families, Lifelong Learning and Culture Select Committee recommends that:

 

1. Staffing and training

 

The AND workforce must be appropriately sized to meet demand and better equipped to cope with the challenges of the role:

 

(a) All officers in the Inclusion and Additional Needs teams should have compulsory (i) training in SEND legal obligations from IPSEA and (ii) training in neurodiversity and needs of families from a charity with lived experience, such as National Autistic Society.

 

(b) Increase the number of permanent, customer-facing case officers by 50% to 120, to help ensure EHCPs are both child-centric and timely.

 

(c) Revise the case officer job description so that it reflects the need for difficult and complex interaction with customers, to ensure recruitment is geared towards the needs of the role.

 

(d) Given that case officers are recruited from a diverse range of backgrounds, a more thorough induction in the first month of employment should include: (i) clear guidance in how staff are expected to deliver and what is held to be important, (ii) the Code of Practice, (iii) the self-presented real-life experiences of parents and carers to foster empathy and (iv) how to de-escalate aggression stemming from personal trauma.

 

(e) Make a level 3 qualification in SEND casework compulsory for all case officers to be completed in their first 12 months, and provide them with appropriate study time to achieve this.

 

(f) Provide therapeutic supervision for case officers, a supported space in which they can reflect on the impact of the work on them.

 

(g) Award a new senior practitioner role to experienced and resilient case officers who display excellence in customer focus, who will move around Surrey quadrants and not be tied to a particular school-based area.

 

2.    Communication

 

Support for families must be more personal and easier to access:

 

(a) SEND case managers must improve the attention they give to parental experience. They should be trained in a person-centred approach to support, develop and spread good practice, and relieve pressure on the front line to afford case officers the time to consider how to communicate with parents and carers in a way that avoids conflict, and for example,

 

(i) Communicate through face-to-face conversations at every stage possible;

 

(ii) Individualise communication plans based on parental preference e.g. some prefer to hear from the case officer regardless of progress, while others do not want regular contact reporting no news;

 

(iii) Add a more personal and empathetic narrative to the automated holding response that emails will be responded to within 5 working days.

 

(b) The guide for parents and carers of children with AND should:

 

(i) Include a jargon-free explanation of the statutory EHCP process, making clear what roles different officers do at each step of the way;

 

(ii) Be distributed by schools termly with their newsletter (SEND Support Advisors to request);

 

(iii) Be digitally distributed by Member Services to all Surrey county councillors to assist them in their casework and help in their role facilitating communication.

 

(c) Produce an easy-read version of the EHCP Governance Board (EGB) Terms of Reference, simplifying language wherever possible to aide understanding, and automatically make available to parents and carers in good time before a Panel decision is due.

 

3.    Timeliness monitoring

 

System used by Inclusion and Additional Needs teams needs to enable full monitoring of Key Performance Indicators:

 

(a) Develop a way SEND case managers can monitor the response times of parent and carer communications with case officers, and review performance monthly at Director level.

 

(b) Such monitoring may require a reduction of the multiple and varied means of contact to leave only those which can be sent to a centralised database. This would enable communications to be distributed between colleagues to cover when the recipient is not at work.

 

4.    Quality assurance

 

To mitigate a decline in quality during the clearance of the backlog, annual reviews due in the next 12 months are brought forward to the earliest possible opportunity.

 

5.    Process

 

The excessively complicated EHCP procedure needs to be improved, for example:

 

(a) Create more opportunities for co-production with families, including checking with parents before the EHCP Governance Board makes a decision, that it is privy to all information they were expecting.

 

(b) The Task Group supports the exploration of AI technology to support with internal admin and free up case officers to focus on relational work, but stresses this should be non-customer facing. It recommends a comparison of performance before and after its introduction.

 

6.    Dispute resolution

 

When only 2% of Local Authority decisions are being fully upheld at tribunal, there is a need to reduce the number reaching that stage. For example,

 

(a) A Tribunal Officer should be assigned to familiarise themselves with case law and reflect on common causes of tribunals, in order to ascertain swiftly following a case being registered if it is worth pursuing.

 

(b) A business plan should be prepared to evidence the merits of expanding the mediation and dispute resolutions pilot and extending it beyond 12 months.

 

7.    Training for schools

 

SCC should lobby the Government to continue the Partnership for Inclusion of Neurodiversity in Schools (PINS) in the future, and should encourage more schools to take up the offer. SEN and building relationships with families should not be the sole responsibility of one person in a school. To achieve this:

 

(a) When the PINS programme ends, neurodiversity advisors in conjunction with Family Voice Surrey facilitated parent groups should continue to work with schools to upskill ALL teaching staff (not just the SENCo, and including senior leadership) and help them to instil (i) a strong understanding of neurodiversity and inclusive education principles and mental health and (ii) the importance of engaging with parents and carers of CYP to incorporate their perspectives into classroom activities.

 

(b) Training should reflect that the primary needs of CYP aged 2-25 with SEN are autism and speech, language and communication, closely followed by social, emotional and mental health needs for six to 25-year-olds. Training should be varied in order to reflect the autistic spectrum, include Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), and be followed up by checking that knowledge taught has been acquired.

 

(c) Data on key indicators and outcomes of the PINS pilot needs to be collected and analysed to make an evidence-based plea to extend the DfE’s programme funding beyond March 2025.

 

(d) The pilot’s achievements need to be vigorously promoted amongst education settings, involving families in its promotion.