Ombudsman ruling highlights speech therapy concerns

The warning from Local Government Ombudsman (LGO), Dr Jane Martin follows the publication today of two investigations into failures by Warrington Borough Council to meet its legal duties to provide therapy to children as required by their statement of special educational needs.

The joint LGO and Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman launched the investigations after being contacted by the parents of an autistic teenager to complain that their son had not been receiving the specialist therapy since 2009, despite the council having a legal duty to ensure the support was provided.

Up until then, the boy had been receiving therapy three times a year, with teachers at the specialist unit at his mainstream school using the therapist’s report to inform how they met his education needs.

The council had commissioned NHS Warrington to provide the therapy to 15 children, but this ceased in 2009 without the council or families being notified.

It wasn’t until September 2010, when the council was contacted by the boy’s family, that it realised the service had ceased. It then wrote to the family wrongly telling them that speech and language therapy was a health service provision.

The ombudsman said the situation in Warrington was not an isolated case, and that she was aware of similar problems across the country.

“This failure to provide what is written in a child’s statement – in particular speech and language therapy – is all too common a cause for complaint to me.

“Councils need to understand that they are ultimately responsible for ensuring that a child receives the educational provision set out in their statement. If they need to procure a service to meet that need, they are still responsible for that provision.”

The council and Warrington Clinical Commissioning Group, which took over from NHS Warrington in April, have accepted the joint investigation’s findings. The council has reinstated therapy for autistic children with that statemented need, and agreed to pay £5,000 compensation to the family who brought the case for failing to provide the therapy for three years.

In a linked investigation, carried out independently by the LGO, another teenage autistic boy from Warrington whose parents paid for speech and language therapy themselves after being denied it for three years has been offered £5,000 by the council as compensation.

Kamini Gadhok, chief executive of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, welcomed the investigation findings.

She added: “The general lessons to learn are, first, that across the country hard financial decisions are having real impacts on the lives of real people; and second, that there is no substitute for effective joint working and planning between health services and local government.”

Sarah Lambert, head of policy at the National Autistic Society, said: “Local authorities are ultimately responsible for ensuring children receive the support promised in their statement of special educational needs.
 
“But the volume of calls to our Education Rights Service highlights that too many families are having to fight for the right support, with many councils failing to fulfil their obligations."