Archived decisions

Hampshire County Council Item 9

Children and Young People Select Committee

8 October, 2008

Special Educational Needs - Update to the Children's Special Needs Task and Finish Group

Report of the Director of Children's Services

Contact: Felicity Dickinson; e-mail [email protected]

    1. How have the issues identified in the October 2007 report to the CYPSC been addressed? In particular, how are resourcing issues being tackled?

    a) Special Educational Needs Service data-base:

      i) following agreement for an additional post of IT Systems Support Officer (SEN) an appointment has been made and the post holder began work in August 2008. A recruitment process is also underway to appoint to the original additional post for SEN database support. An appointment to this post will result in two full-time staff dedicated to SEN database support.

      ii) the database continues to require a high level of maintenance in relation to software upgrades, to data imports from schools to the core system (which have the effect of superseding data maintained by the SEN service) and to the provision of knowledge and skills for new staff.

      iii) the Children's Services Department is currently embarking on a project to implement new reporting software and this will include improved reporting facilities for SEN. It should be noted, however, that, ultimately, the quality of output will depend upon data maintained by the SEN Service not being superseded by data imported from schools. There is continuing work by the software supplier to try to resolve this issue.

    b) Parent Partnership Service:

      i) demand for the work of the Parent Partnership Service (PPS) continues to be high and is likely to increase following the adoption, by Hampshire County Council, of the Every Disabled Child Matters Charter, Point 3 of which states that, " Our Parent Partnership Service is sufficiently resourced to provide information and support to parents of disabled children and young people who have been excluded from school".

      ii) funding to support the work of the PPS, at the level of £40,000 per annum, has been secured from the Care Matters grant for the financial years 2008/09, 2009/10 and 2010/2011 and is being focussed on the recruitment and training of Independent Parental Supporters (IPS). IPS are all volunteers who work within the PPS, supporting the work of Parent Partnership Officers (PPO). It is likely that, once trained, they will undertake some of the less complex work of the PPS such as helping parents/carers to complete paperwork associated with the statementing process, attendance at annual reviews, etc, freeing up PPO to concentrate on more complex work.

      iii) in order to strengthen links with Voluntary Organisations, the tender process for the contract for recruiting and training IPS will be restricted to the voluntary and community sector. The procurement process is fairly involved and lengthy so the funding for the first 8 months of the 2008/09 financial year has been used to buy in additional PPO support (2 days per week, on a consultancy basis), additional PPO time (17 days in total) to address special projects and additional support for the PPS admin support officer to clear a backlog of work. With advice and guidance from the Corporate Procurement Team the procurement process is, however, now well under way and from 1 April 2009 the target will be for 12 IPS to be recruited and trained, each year, for the following two years. Taking into account the 10-12 IPS already working within the PPS, this should, by April 2011, result in some 30-35 IPS supporting the work of the service.

    c) Inclusion Partnership Agreements:

      i) there has been a significant increase in the use of Inclusion Partnership Agreements (IPA) over the past 12 months. Precise figures are difficult to come by as IPA can be initiated and/or completed by a variety of services (eg schools, Educational Psychologists, Parent Partnership Officers, Portage Service, etc) and information and data on IPAs are not, yet, collected in a regular and systematic way. What is clear, however, is in the period September 2007 - September 2008 more than 200 IPAs were completed.

      ii) of this figure, approximately 60% were related to transition at various stages (Year R, Year 3 and Year 7) and a further 25% were issued as positive alternatives to statutory assessment. The remainder addressed a number of issues such as children entering resourced SpLD provision or to support planning for children with identified special educational needs.

      iii) it seems clear that requests for IPA are increasing as understanding grows amongst school staff and parents/carers about their use and that IPA are establishing themselves as especially valuable alternatives to requests for statutory assessment, especially at key transitional phases. This view is further reflected in the fact that the Parent Partnership Service is becoming increasingly involved in supporting parents at IPA meetings and this is seen as another positive sign that parents/carers are seeing IPA as a constructive approach to planning for their children.

    d) Number of appeals to SENDIST and their outcomes:

      i) the pressures for SENDIST appeals have continued with the figures for the period 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008 showing a total of 120 submissions. The same period for 2006/07 had given rise to 107 appeals.

      ii) the number of appeals related to assessment and statementing

        decreased from 50 in 2006/07 to 43 in 2007/08. The majority of these cases were resolved without recourse to a hearing through local resolution, including use of the IPA.

      iii) appeals about the content of a statement - Part 2 (special educational needs), Part 3 (special educational provision) and Part 4 (placement) have increased from the previous period from 57 to 77. However, of these 49 were withdrawn and resolved locally with the actual number going to hearing being 25 compared to the previous year's 23.

      iv) as previously reported the reasons for appeals are varied and complex. In Hampshire the year on year increase in appeals submitted is within the context of the County Council's commitment to increasing capacity within its own maintained provision and the comparatively high level of specialist provision.

      v) officers in the SEN Service continue to implement a range of measures to proactively address the pressures involved in this area.

84R210908