Children's bill must heed lessons from SEN pilots, charities urge

The new year will herald long-anticipated legislation to funda­mentally redesign support for children with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities.

Alongside changes to the adoption system and the role of the children’s commissioner, the introduction of the Children and Families Bill in early 2013 will signal the introduction of single birth to 25 education, health and care plans, as well as a new duty on councils to publish a “local offer”, explaining how services in an area will work together to provide integrated support.

The reforms are already being tested out in 20 pathfinder areas covering 31 local authorities. These pilot schemes had been scheduled to come to an end in March 2013. But the government has decided to extend the projects until September 2014 – some 20 months after the bill’s publication.

Increased activities
A letter sent to the pathfinders by the Department for Education and Department of Health in November says the projects must use the extra time to “scale-up” their activities, test joint commissioning and extend their work to 16- to 19-year-olds, among other objectives.

But there are concerns that the bill could end up being passed before lessons from the pathfinder areas can be properly taken into account.

Julie Jennings, chair of the Special Educational Consortium, welcomes the fact that the pathfinders have been given more time to get things right. But she warns that this could mean little in practice if the legislation is set in stone before the trials come to an end.

“The main issue is how the extra learning from the pathfinders will be built into the development of the legislation to make maximum use of all the activity that is taking place,” she says.

Jennings, who is also manager of the children, young people and families team at the Royal National Institute of Blind People, adds that councils need to do more work to develop their “local offers”.

“We have concerns that the work on the local offer is at a very early stage in many areas, especially in how it will take into account the specialist services that should be available for children with a visual impairment and their families,” she explains.

“It will also be important to see how local authorities – particularly those that are not pathfinders – will be supported to scale up the work.”

Laura Courtney, campaign manager at Every Disabled Child Matters, is worried the bill will fall short on government promises, arguing that the draft proposals imply little more than cosmetic changes.

“The bill simply calls the process that we currently know as ‘statementing’ an ‘education, health and care plan’, and applies it only to children with SEN, using the same kinds of thresholds as in the current system,” she says.

“It does not increase rights to health or social care services. At the moment, the legislation does not even link to the current rights on health and social care, so it
re-establishes a sense of split in terms of legislation around SEN and legislation around disabled children.”

Jane McConnell, chief executive of the charity Independent Parental Special Educational Advice, is worried that councils that are not involved in the pathfinders will struggle to replicate their work. She adds that the councils involved in the pilots are likely to be those that are already predisposed to partnership working.

McConnell also warns that many of the pathfinders are testing the new system with families that are hand-picked, on a small scale, which will not translate realistically on a national scale.

“This lot are being paid and being given extra support,” she says. “How are local authorities that don’t want to engage in this process, who have very difficult parents, and who aren’t getting any extra money or time, going to do this?”

Lorraine Petersen, chief executive of the National Association for Special Educational Needs (Nasen), believes that schools will find it particularly difficult to cope with new SEN and disability support systems that vary drastically between local areas.

Uniform care plan
She would like local authorities to develop a uniform education, health and care plan “template” and national criteria for the proposed system of personal budgets.

“Because the pathfinders are doing their own thing, it seems disparate and regionalised,” she says. “Children who are mobile, or service children, might move to another area that does their SEN assessments differently, and then have to have the single plan rewritten.”

The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) is supporting pathfinders working with deaf children in two areas, and warns that anecdotal evidence coming from families is a cause for concern.

“Both families we work with have had problems with health specialist workers not attending meetings, even under a system that’s supposed to be designed especially for this,” says Jo Campion, deputy director of policy and campaigns at NDCS.

“We’ve been saying all along that if you want them to work better together, you need to put a legal responsibility on health services – and the bill isn’t doing that. The pathfinders are showing that without that, it’s not working.”

Campion wants to see the wording around joint commiss­ioning strengthened in the bill, but warns that even if the legislation is improved, public spending cuts could make it impossible for local services to deliver.

“We’ve heard from one of the families on a pathfinder that staff involved were worried about their own jobs and facing possible redundancies,” she says. “There is nothing in the bill addressing the now-critically low levels of service out there for young deaf people.”

John Shaw is head of operational governance for integrated children’s services at Devon County Council, one of the areas involved in the pathfinders.

He believes that the reforms are improving local approaches to SEN and disability.

Cultural change
“The major thing that’s come out of all the pathfinders is cultural change,” he says. “We’re telling the Department for Education that this cultural change needs to go all the way through the guidance and legislation.”

Shaw is convinced that the government is serious about joining up health, education and social care services, and suggests the first NHS mandate published in November is proof of this.

“It was very clearly talking about partnership working, parents having access to personal budgets and integration with schools,” Shaw says.

He adds that an integrated approach is the only way in which services will survive the current financial climate. “If people keep looking at commissioning in silos, we’re all going to run out of money,” he says.

A DfE spokesman says the SEN pathfinders will inform the legis­lation, despite being extended. He adds that the changes will put families “firmly in charge”.

“The current system does not work well enough for parents and children and young people who have SEN,” he says. “We are trialling our reforms in 20 areas to make sure we get this right.”


Findings of a pathfinder: Brighton & Hove

Brighton & Hove City Council’s special educational needs (SEN) and disability pathfinder is working with 45 families across 12 schools from a possible 72 in the area.

The council is part of a group of seven pathfinders in the South East led by East Sussex County Council.

Since September 2011, the authority has been working to make SEN assessments more personalised.

“We’ve allowed parents some considerable leeway in determining how they want things to be,” says Regan Delf, head of SEN at the council. “Parents say small changes are making a big difference.”

Parents have opted to write their own descriptions of their children in official statements of needs. “That’s made a real difference to them by making the system feel more human,” Delf says.

However, she admits there are potential problems with this approach. “You can allow people lots of choice,” she says. “But what about the families that are not in a position to choose?”

She suggests families with multiple disadvantages or poor literacy could lose out. “There’s a lot of idealistic thinking, which is great, but it also has to be grounded, realistic, fair and workable,” she says.

Another focus of the pathfinder has been personal budgets. Brighton has allowed parents to pilot budgets in relation to home-to-school transport. In some cases, this has involved paying parents to drive their own children.
 
“That’s giving money we would have spent anyway on standard transport and allowing parents to tailor that to their needs,” Delf says.

The pathfinder is testing ways to integrate education, health and social care, but only for school-age children. Following the extension of the pathfinder, the council hopes to trial this up to age 25 by expanding the project to include more families.

However, restrictions in existing laws may prove to be a barrier. “At the moment, legislation would need to be in place to do that because if you’re moving out of the school system at 16 or 18, you come under a different system,” she says.