Reflections from Steve Crocker - 31 January 2024

Review, reset and rebuild

Hello and welcome to my second blog following January’s meeting of the Oxfordshire SEND Strategic Improvement and Assurance Board.

Let’s start with what you and others have been telling us.

Communications and engagement

This month, the parent carer forum (PCF) provided the board with feedback around communications and engagement. We heard that parents and carers gave some positive feedback on my blog (much appreciated!) but would be keen to see more detail from board meetings. 

As mentioned, we have committed as a partnership to keep parents and carers of SEND children, Councillors and partners up to date on progress through SEND improvement. Sharing key discussion points from board meetings, decisions made and action taken, and by who. 

We are keen to be as open and transparent as we can and had a healthy discussion about finding the right balance in our communications. At board meetings, we need to provide a trusted space where partners can share issues, escalate risks openly to drive the action needed to make improvements. 

We also want to deliver on our commitment to share as much as possible and in a way accessible to people using plain English. So, we agreed to use my blog to try and find this balance and review this over time as the work of the board progresses. 

It was also noted that a draft communications and engagement strategy would be shared with partners after the meeting to support the transformation programme and the work of the board. I will update you on this next time but do keep an eye out for engagement activities over the coming weeks. 

To the wider agenda. As chair, I started by sharing a few of my reflections for where we are at, based on visits and discussions I have had with partner agencies.

Chair’s remarks

Based upon my meetings with members of the board I am in no doubt that there is a willingness, without exception, to improve services and experiences for children and young people with SEND. 

There is an acceptance that services have not been good enough and there’s a shared desire to improve these. 

Crucially, there’s a strong belief we can do this and make the system work better with consistent and visible leadership.

We will need to focus carefully on the following:

• Co-production: We need to have meaningful engagement with families on a case-by-case basis. We need to work with families and children to gather meaningful feedback, working together to inform policies and plans.
• Collaboration with schools: There is no solution that does not involve close collaboration with schools, and we need to ensure we have better school-based support. Schools were keen to pick up on the work of the Oxfordshire Education Commission, particularly in relation to SEND.
• Partnership: There is an acceptance across the board that money is tight but that we can be innovative and spend money better if we collaborate. Partners agree that we need more focused relationships, for example, between health and the local authority around commissioning early help services. And between schools and the local authority.

I outlined how we might work moving forward:

• Know the purpose of our collective journey – we need to keep an open dialogue to understand the scale of the issues and learning.
• Keep working across sector boundaries – collaborate on moral dilemmas, for example, on funding, to do the right things for children.
• Rebuild trust in the partnership – build collaborative and participatory relationships and connect ideas and people.
• Get humanity back into services that may have become more systematic, desensitised and mechanistic.
• Search for solutions and what works well – be data and evidence-led, and outcome-focused. We're not there yet with visibility of data, so we need to build this into progress updates at the board, which we will aim to review at our April meeting.

There was agreement with my reflections and a consensus that we need to maintain expectations, although that will require working at pace and intensity for some time. We will need to review our progress carefully as we go along.

The rest of the agenda focused on knowing our collective journey's purpose. Next was an item on school places and support, what we like to call school sufficiency. This was an update led by the county council. 

School-age SEND places and support

The table below was shared regarding the number of education, health and care plans (EHCP) for school age children, including in independent non-maintained secondary schools (INMSS).

Points noted and discussed:

 Over the last three years, the number of EHCPs in school age children has grown from 1,683 in 2020/21 to 2,357 in 2023/24. Children get plans at all ages.

• When children move to secondary a greater proportion of children with EHCPs attend special schools.
• The primary need of a child specified with EHCPs does not fully describe their additional needs.  
• The county council showed maps of maintained special schools specialising in social, emotional and mental health difficulties (SEMH) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – a new one to be built in Didcot has just been announced – and maintained community special schools (specialising in needs other than SEMH/ASD). 
• With new school provisions, children will be able to go to schools closer to them, and additional places will reduce the demand for non-maintained independent school places. We know there are some children attending mainstream schools whose needs would be better met in a special school setting. 
• We are forecasting demand for specialist SEMH/ASD school places to grow from 1,110 in 2024 (starting from the current picture where all specialist places are full) to 1,507 by 2029. This replicates historical factors in demand and may not fully map demand where EHCPs are delayed. 

To note DBV stands for delivering better value and relates to the Department for Education’s delivering better value in SEND programme. 

We talked about the need to be brave in relation to the scale of our ambition around early intervention. There was also a discussion around staffing new schools with specialist trained professionals. 

The county council confirmed that a review of the workforce needed is underway alongside looking at governance structures. This needs to include health to understand therapeutic needs.

We agreed we need to work jointly with schools to map some of this, talk to experts, look at who would partner with who, and review funding. We want every school to be inclusive and need agreement and collaboration from the partnership to help with this. 

We need to pull the right people into a space to take this forward. We also need to work and engage on a joint and integrated position with non-maintained independents. 

Next on the agenda was a focus on schools and an education overview. Using the latest available data.

Education overview

The county council gave a data overview and shared some positive news:

• 6,335 children and young people with EHCPs as of 30 November 2023. 
• Of the 97 children who had an EHCP issued in November, 71 (73 per cent) were issued within 20 weeks, above the national average of 52 per cent. 
• 83 per cent (58) of educational psychology reports were on time in November. 
• 86 per cent (19) of children and adolescent mental health service reports were on time in November. 
• Since January 2023, all agencies have completed 83 percent or higher of their reports on time.

While the timeliness of EHCPs is above the national average, we know there is more work to do on the quality of plans and the work that goes around each plan. We want to make sure when an EHCP is implemented it is going to do the work it’s intended. 

We also acknowledged parental frustration as some parents think they are going to go through the EHCP process and get a plan, but some don’t as their children’s needs can be met in maintained schools. 

Managing expectations is key here. EHCPs are a specific focus in the priority action plan, which we will continue to report against. 

We also recognised that while we are meeting many educational psychology report time-frames, improvements must be made. 

For example, making sure the voice of the child is at the heart of assessments if assessed by a virtual educational psychologist. We want to do better, if even above the national average.

We discussed absence and attendance and that we don’t perform as well for disadvantaged children. We need to make links with schools, work with school nurses and health visitors – supporting them and giving them access to learning and training. 

We must be ambitious for all of our children. We also need to link with public health (0-19 plan) and review school readiness. The board endorsed the idea of bringing school representatives and colleagues together to map ideas and find solutions. 

The final agenda item was the transformation programme.

Transformation programme 

The county council updated that various work-streams were being developed (as described in my last blog) and, in line with my remarks at the beginning, there was a discussion about setting a clear ambition for the scale and scope of the programme, to look at what’s possible, not just hitting national levels of service. We reiterated that we would work with and through the PCF to co-design services where needed.

There was a specific agreement that we needed a strategic risk register.

The county council updated that it had talked to the Department for Education advisor and Ofsted, and they are both happy for us to revise the priority action plan developed after the inspection, reset the dates and prioritise the things that will make a big difference now. 

There will be no fundamental changes, but we will add to it and make it more digestible. As we gain momentum on delivery, it was acknowledged there will be more demands on time from partners.

So that’s it from me for now, and I hope this is useful. We next meet as a board on 28 February 2024, where we will revisit our improvement progress, look at post-16 outcomes and also alternative provisions and together agree on next steps. 

If you are a parent or carer and have any thoughts or comments, please share them with the PCF by emailing info@oxpcf.org.uk. If you are a partner, please give feedback through your organisation. 

Until next time. 

Steve Crocker 

Independent Chair, SEND Improvement Board