Category Archives: health

Think Tank weighs in on SEND

Posted on by
Reply

Policy Exchange, the Think Tank that describes itself as ‘the UK’s leading think tank’, and ‘an independent, non-partisan educational charity whose mission is to develop and promote new policy ideas that will deliver better public services, a stronger society and a more dynamic economy.’ Has published a new report on SEND, with a foreword by a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The report contains a great deal of interesting evidence, much of which will already be know to anyone that has been involved with the emerging crisis in SEND that was already apparent from well before the covid crisis hit in 2020. Policy Exchange – Out of Control

A telling paragraph in the report lays bare the need for action

The SEND system established by the Children and Families Act 2014 and the 2015 SEND Code of Practice is inefficient, ineffective and has failed to deliver improved outcomes for children with SEND. Fundamental flaws have created perverse incentives for actors in the system. The current SEND regime was designed to support a much smaller number of acute cases. It has failed to adapt to changing social definitions of SEND that have widened demand. Instead, the concentration of resources and bespoke support at the top end of the spectrum has prompted an escalation of needs which has overwhelmed the system and undermined its long term sustainability. (Page 66).

The paragraph leaves one wondering why the Conservative government that was responsible for the 2014 Act didn’t take action to deal with the problem when in office?

In December 2018, I wrote a blog SEND on the agenda again | John Howson drawing attention to a report from the Local Government Association. There was already concern in local government circles about what was happening in SEND. It is worth repeating the key points from the LGA report.

Addressing the points raised in paragraph 17 of the Report would go a long way to creating a sustainable and successful system for young people with SEND.

  1. To create a more sustainable funding settlement going forward there may be merit in considering some key questions around how incentives in the system might be better aligned to support inclusion, meet needs within the local community of schools, and corral partners to use the high needs block to support all young people with SEND as a collective endeavour. These might include
  2. setting much clearer national expectations for mainstream schools;
  3. rethinking how high stakes accountability measures reflect the achievements of schools which make good progress with children and young people with SEND or at risk of exclusion;
  4. correcting the perverse funding incentives that mean that it can be cheaper to pass the cost of an EHCP or a permanent exclusion onto the high needs block than making good quality preventative support available in-school;
  5. looking again at the focus and content of EHCPs to afford greater flexibility to schools in how they arrange and deliver the support needed;
  6. providing ring-fenced investment from government designed explicitly to support new and evidence-based approaches to early intervention and prevention at scale;
  7. providing additional capital investment and flexibility about how that can be deployed by local government;
  8. issuing a national call for evidence in what works for educating children and young people with these needs, backed up by sufficient funding to then take successful approaches to scale and a new focus for teacher training and ongoing professional development;
  9. more specific advice for Tribunals, parents and local authorities on how the test on efficient use of resources can be applied fairly when comparing state and non-state special school placements; and
  10. reaffirming the principle around the equitable sharing of costs between health and education where these are driven by the health needs of the child or young person.   

https://www.local.gov.uk/have-we-reached-tipping-point-trends-spending-children-and-young-people-send-england

Failures by the conservative government up to 2024 to provide enough educational psychologists to meet the growing demand, and to not index-link the basic grant to schools helped produced a system where the explosion in demand broke the system.

While any report with an analysis of the problem and suggestions for how to tackle it, ahead of the present government’s White Paper, is welcome, we should not have reached the current position.  

One final point, the report seems light on the issue of training for all staff from TAs to teachers to school leaders. The lack of an appreciation of the needs of those that work in schools has been another feature of the long period of Conservative government.

I look forward to see what the Labour government’s White Paper will suggest when it appears.

Homelessness and schooling

Posted on by
Reply

Is the education of children made homeless well enough safeguarded? Compared with the education of children in some of the world’s worst trouble spots, this may seem like an irrelevant question to ask of society in England. However, as a recent report from a House of Commons Select committee has made clear there is more that we can do in this country for this group of young people. England’s Homeless Children: The crisis in temporary accommodation

I am slightly surprised that the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee didn’t decide to conduct a joint inquiry with their colleagues at the Education Select Committee on this topic, but, perhaps, they initially didn’t think that schooling would be an important feature of their report.

Homlessness almost always means a move from one accommodation to another. For a school-aged child this can have one obvious consequence; their status has changed. This change in status isn’t something the family is likely to share easily with the school, although I suspect sensitive primary school class teachers and heads will notice the change fairly quickly. In secondary schools, unless the class tutor picks up on the change, it may well go unnoticed until it becomes an issue.

The most likely issue for schools is that the change in accommodation may mean a different, and possibly longer route to school. This might mean children that used to arrive on time may now be late through no fault of their own. The temporary accommodation might also not provide adequate space for learning and homework, so that might deteriorate as well. How schools deal with this situation explains a lot about their policies and the values behind them.

In more extreme cases, homelessness means that a child must change school mid-year, with all the attendant bureaucracy that entails. The Select Committee were concerned that there was no requirement to inform schools.

‘Currently, schools are not always notified when a pupil becomes homeless or changes school due to a move into temporary accommodation. This prevents schools from offering additional support which those children may require. Similarly, GPs are often unaware that families are experiencing homelessness, leaving an incomplete picture of the health impacts of homelessness on children’

The Committee recommended that

‘As the Government seeks to establish ‘consistent identifiers’ for children through its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, it should ensure that these can be used as a formalised notification system, so that a child’s school and GP are alerted when they move into temporary accommodation.’ Page 30

At least the current Bill before parliament will stop academies and Trusts from stonewalling on accepting in-year admissions.

I would go further an require a child moving school to be placed on the roll of a virtual school run by the receiving local authority, if a school place could not be identified within two weeks, regardless as to how long or short the period of homelessness might be. Children need some degree of support and continuity and to see that their schooling is important to those responsible for supporting the family.

What Lib Dems want for SEND pupils and their families

Posted on by
Reply

I was delighted to see the Liberal Democrats weighing in on the SEND debate by writing to the Prime minister and setting out five key principles behind any reform of the SEND system. This is what their letter to the Prime minister said:

Our five principles and priorities for SEND reform are as follows:

  1. Putting children and families first Children’s rights to SEND assessment and support must be maintained and the voices of children and young people with SEND and of their families and carers must be at the centre of the reform process.
  2. Boosting specialist capacity and improving mainstream provision Capacity in state special provision must be increased, alongside improvements to inclusive mainstream provision, with investment in both new school buildings and staff training.
  3. Supporting local government Local authorities must be supported better to fund SEND services, including through:
    1. The extension of the profit cap in children’s social care to private SEND provision, where many of the same private equity backed companies are active, and
    2. National government funding to support any child whose assessed needs exceed a specific cost.
  4. Early identification and shorter waiting lists Early identification and intervention must be improved, with waiting times for diagnosis, support and therapies cut.
  5. Fair funding The SEND funding system must properly incentivise schools both to accept SEND pupils and to train their staff in best practice for integrated teaching and pastoral care. Our five principles for SEND reform – Liberal Democrats

These principles come from a motion debated at last year’s Party conference and represent a check list against which specific policies can be measured, such as increasing the supply of educational psychologists to deal with both the annual reviews and initial assessments of EHCPs.

If there is anything missing from the list, it is the role of the NHS, and specifically around mental health and education. This is the area of need where the system has really broken down. Many of the other issues are cost related due to inflation and more young people living longer as well as increased demands from an age range of support than can now reach up to the age of 25. The issue of mental health has swamped the system and the NHS must play a part in helping define what is needed.

With the main opposition at Westminster disinterested in the issues of education that are facing most families, the Lib Dems should be leading from the front. This letter should have been sent at least a week ago.

As my earlier posts of today have shown, the Lib Dems next education campaign can be around securing enough teachers for schools in our more deprived areas. Such a campaign can take on both labour councils and Reform voters to show there is a radical alternative in the Liberal democrats.

Education may not feature very high in polling about issue in elections, but on a day-to-day basis it isn’t far away from the conversations in many households. From mobile phone to AI, funding for school meals to citizenship, Liberal Democrats should be calling the government to account.  

SEND parents need support now

Posted on by
Reply

I have written three posts about SEND since I restarted this blog in May, on the override; EOTAs and more generally. As a result, I was going to sit out the present debate about what might happen in the autumn without making any further comments. However, I thought this paragraph by John Crace in the Guardian was the best summary I had seen about where we are one year into this government. Labour picks on kids as Farage reaches for his human punchbag

‘Now, Send is not perfect. The bill is getting bigger by the year, thanks both to better diagnosis and to some parents gaming the system. But it is essential for many children who benefit from education, health and care plans, and parents are worried sick they might lose out. In the absence of any clear direction from the Department for Education, many disability campaigners are fearing the worst. That children will be treated as cost centres to be downsized. That children diagnosed in the future won’t be entitled to the same benefits as children with the same level of disability are now. This one will now run and run well into the autumn.’

It is going to be a worrying summer for many parents, and that isn’t fair on them. I am all for looking at how the system is being gamed – see my blog about EOTAS – in some ways by a few parents, but most parents are genuinely worried. SEND is the only issue I ever saw a parent cry in a cabinet meeting when trying to prevent a reduction in the spending on transport. These parents have a heavy burden of love to bear, and the State should remember that.

However, the elephant in the room, and one John Crace doesn’t mention is the NHS. Afterall EHCPs replaced Statements of SEN Need. One big difference was the addition of the letter ‘H’ for health. So far, all the attention has been on local authorities, and the NHS rarely receives a mention.

Now I think that as soon as it is obvious that a child will need an EHCP, the NHS, whether maternity unit or GP surgery, should always start the process. It should not be left to a primary school headteacher to so often have to begin the process of applying for the EHCP.

At the same time, the NHS might want to look at early screening for conditions affecting early learning, and put in place a much stronger programme than at present.  

SEND is also an area of life where we need to be clear about what we want from the Early Years Sector. The sector has a part to play in early identification of issues in learning, and surely staff need better training to both observe and report these early learning issues. Much has been taken about the transfer from primary to secondary school, but hardly anything about the knowledge transfer into the school system from early years. Of course, where the school has a nursery class, transfer should be straightforward. But what of other children, and especially those that spend most of their early years in the care of relatives or live in isolated in rural areas?

The government seems to like leaks, so how about some positive leaks around SEND? The government must not go on holiday leaving these parents to suffer over the summer.  

Solve the High Needs Block statutory override issue now

Posted on by
2

June is the time of year when local authority Directors of Finance start thinking about the budget for the following April. HM Treasury is doing the same thing for the government but, with a Spending Review just announced, their task this summer should be much easier than usual as Ministers have already negotiated with the Chancellor. Directors of Finance have no such protection and are bound to produce a balanced budget for councillors to approve or face the prospect of having to issue a s114 notice and default, as some councils have already had to do in recent years.

It was very surprising not to see an announcement in the recent Spending Review about the statutory override many upper tier councils are carrying on their balance sheets,

The statutory override on council balance sheets is a result of overspends on council’s High Needs Block spending that finances the pupils and young adults with special educational needs in their local area. (SEND)

There are suggestions that a significant number of upper tier authorities with be unable to present a balanced budget for 2026/27 to councillors next February for approval unless something is done about the present statutory override that currently ends in March 2026. If nothing else is put in place, some councils will not be able to present a balanced budget and hence will default.

The simple answer would be to extend the override until March 2027 to see what the White Paper on SEND, now promised for the autumn, will bring. That move just buys time for a longer-term solution.

I wonder whether the DfE thought local government re-organisation might be a way of dealing with the deficit when new councils were being formed. After the results of May’s elections, I cannot see the present government wanting to push ahead with reorganising councils and creating new elected Mayors if such a move were to hand more victories to their opponents, and notably to the Reform Party. If reorganisation grinds to a halt that route out is no longer available for solving the issue of the override.

Another alternative is to switch the 2% precept on Council Tax from adult social services to SEND and let the NHS take the strain on funding for the mostly elderly residents currently being paid for out of the local government funding 2% precept. Such a move would not be popular but could be possible. As it wasn’t in the Spending Review it seems unlikely.

The DfE could rearrange their spending and transfer the consequences of falling pupil numbers from the Schools Block to increase the High Needs Block and do the same for the Early Years funding to keep it constant on a per child basis but recognise fewer children means less total spending. Such a move would affect funding for schools and early years setting with falling rolls.

Do nothing and councillors in Parties running councils will return from their summer breaks to be confronted with a list of serious reductions in services and personnel that might be needed in 2026. Such reductions won’t be efficiency gains, but unacceptable cuts on the level of a fire sale.

Solving the problem of the statutory override between now and the parliamentary recess for the summer should be the number one priority for all involved with education and local government. Not to do so would have consequences that are unthinkable.

The situation regarding the statutory override should not have reached the present position. In my view, it would be a gigantic failure of political will if it is not solved now.

A broken system: not just mismanagement

Posted on by
Reply

When searching the DfE website this morning for the latest numbers about schools and pupils to allow me to compare the number of teachers per school for different subjects, I was distracted into looking at the number of ‘open notices’ from the DfE to Councils across England. Currently they total around 30 such notices and there are others that have been closed in recent times. These notices refer to the provision of either special needs (SEND) or children’s social services.

There really must be something wrong with a system where nearly 20%, or one in five, of all upper tier local authorities have such notices that are issued to councils for ‘poor’ or ‘inadequate’ performance. I had expected the majority of such notices to be for SEND services, but in fact half are for Children’s Social Services. This raises the question of whether in some authorities, and especially smaller unitary authorities, there is the funding to cope with both SEND and Children’s Social Services?

Of the local authorities with ‘open’ improvement notices for children’s social services, most are small metropolitan districts of unitary authorities.: Liverpool, Nottingham City and the counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire are the exceptions. The pattern for SEND notices is different, with six counties, four metropolitan districts, four unitary councils and one London borough with ‘open notices.

What is striking about both lists is the geographical split. The relative absence from the list of well-funded London boroughs – only three appear, and only one in the SEND list, compared with eight metropolitan districts really is worthy of note and discussion. Comparing the distribution with my recent report on pupil teacher ratios does suggest that funding, or the lack of it, may play a part.  

If the 16 other authorities with closed notices since 2020 are added to those with ‘open’ notices, then almost a third of all local authorities have been on the ‘naughty step’ with the DfE and Care Quality commission so far in this decade.

If that percentage and the split between types of authorities doesn’t raise questions about why and why some authorities are more likely to be faced with improvement notices than others, then I think we have a serious lack of inquiry.

The relationship between the size of an authority and competence to deliver high quality services is important, both because of the Reform Party’s pledge to cut out waste, and the Labour government’s intention to reform local government. Both need to be seen in light of this list. Is bigger better, or is local government outside London just not well-enough funded

Of course, I must declare a personal interest, since I look over as Cabinet Member for Children’s Service (excluding SEND) after Oxfordshire received a ‘notice’ in the autumn of 2023 about the quality of its SEND provision.

To some extent with SEND, authorities are at the mercy of the NHS, over which they have little power, and that relationship with SEND needs to be investigated thoroughly. Penalizing democratically elected local government for the failing of a nationally run NHS is neither fair not equitable. That the government’s funding of the High Needs Block may add to local government’s problems also needs to be taken into account. Oxfordshire is in the bottom 30% for SEND funding.

What do you know of EOTAS?

Posted on by
Reply

Even though it pains me to say so, the following FOI question and answer from a well-respected county council raises some interesting questions about audit and governance, and the monitoring of expenditure on SEND pupils.

Question: How many young people had EOTAS packages of over £100,000 granted by xxx County Council during the 2024/25 financial year, and of these packages, what was the largest amount of any package in operation during the financial year?

Answer: The information is not held in a centralised format. Therefore, to be able to obtain it, a manual audit would need to happen to cross-reference systems for 153 individual electronic records and associated financial systems to determine the total cost of each child or young person’s combined EOTAS package, each taking 20 minutes to locate, retrieve and collate, totalling 51 hours.

So, it appears that the county council in question does not know how much it is spending on each child with an EOTAS (Education Other than at School) package. It seemingly knows how much is being spent on each element of the package, but doesn’t have a spreadsheet that allows all elements to be brought together in a total per child.

Now it is not for me to question the lack of curiosity of the Director of Children’s Services or the Lead Member in the authority, let alone the Director of Finance, but it was an element of spending that I was concerned enough about to monitor when I was a cabinet member.

I have the same question out to a number of other local authorities, so it will be interesting to see whether I receive the same sort of answer. What is probably the case is that these packages are contributing to the High Needs block deficits in many local authorities.

A second shire county told me it couldn’t answer the question because the number was less than five, and might thus reveal details about an individual: fair enough, but I assume it means that there are somewhere between one and five such packages of more than £100,000 per child. It would be interesting to know what such education packages might contain, and why they are so expensive.

At a Scrutiny Committee meeting in November 2024, Oxfordshire County Council officers told the committee in a Report about EOTAS in 2024 “The annual spend as of November 2024 is £2.1 million for 52 children and young people.” (para 18 Report to Scrutiny Committee) That is an average of £40,000 per child with an EOTAS package.

EOTAs packages are as a result of s61 of the Children and Families Act 2014.

61Special educational provision otherwise than in schools, post-16 institutions etc

(1) A local authority in England may arrange for any special educational provision that it has decided is necessary for a child or young person for whom it is responsible to be made otherwise than in a school or post-16 institution or a place at which relevant early years education is provided.

(2) An authority may do so only if satisfied that it would be inappropriate for the provision to be made in a school or post-16 institution or at such a place.

(3) Before doing so, the authority must consult the child’s parent or the young person.

Might it be time for the National Audit Office to have a deep dive into this part of SEND spending to see whether the expenditure is producing the desired results for these young people?

A new model for schooling?

Posted on by
4

Public First have today published an interesting report on the ‘collapse’ in school attendance.

Here are the headline conclusions. ATTENDANCE-REPORT-V02.pdf (publicfirst.co.uk)

“Quite simply, too many children are currently missing school to the extent that it affects the continuity of their learning. Disadvantaged pupils who most need the security, stability and care that good schools offer, are most likely to be persistently absent – and the gap is widening. The current data points to a full-blown national crisis – and this report’s findings help to explain why.

The link between attendance and attainment is well known. Sporadic attendance impacts children’s academic results, mental health and resilience. Those who take an occasional day (or a week, or a fortnight) off school miss building blocks of knowledge. Catching up is a treadmill that becomes unmanageable and so their learning is fractured.”

The most worrying aspect of the report is that “Disadvantaged pupils are most likely to be persistently absent.” This raises a number of questions for policymakers at both national and local levels.

How do we reset the link between education and society so that the disadvantaged see the benefits of schooling, both at the formative stage of a child’s early years and the foundation stage and also later in their approach to adulthood and the world beyond schooling.

I thought the change to patterns of schooling might come with the third wave of the IT revolution, and be driven by middle class attitudes to a pattern of schooling that has changed little over the past half century. However, Public First point to a different picture, and one where urgent action is needed to reconnect with a group in society that seemingly no longer sees the value in schooling.

Government’s have tried the stick, but this group are often impervious to fines, as they don’t have the money to pay them, and it is not worth the costs of chasing them. With a criminal justice service no longer fully functional at a local level, more draconian actions seem like tilting at windmills; a waste of effort. Rather, is it time for a campaign to win hearts and minds. Insert schooling into the most viewed soaps and TV programmes. Find and use the influences of this group in society; footballers, singers; personalities.

The education service must become more welcoming. During the recent hot spell, some school leaders put discipline before compassion and ordered winter uniforms to be worn. Is this a time for such strict action or for a different approach?

Should schools with good attendance records help fund those that need to reengage with parents, and does our fractures system enable best use of resources to meet this challenge of selling education to those that may well benefit the most from what it has to offer?

As a teacher in the 1970s, I know that some children rarely attended school, and were often disruptive when present. I welcomed their absence then. These days, I take a wider view: but forcing children into school without recognising the needs of schools as well as of parents is to deal with only one part of the problem. Please do read Public First’s report

Sad end to term

Posted on by
Reply

It is now more than nine years since a teacher died after being stabbed in her classroom by a pupil. The news today from Tewksbury reminds us that although rare, and nowhere near as common as such incidents in the USA, teaching is not an entirely risk-free activity, as I know from personal experience.

My thoughts and best wishes are with the stabbed teacher, their family and any pupils that witnessed the attack. I hope the teacher was no badly hurt. Below, is the post I wrote when the teacher was stabbed to death in her classroom in 2014.

Condolences | John Howson (wordpress.com)

Condolences

Posted on April 28, 2014

The news of the stabbing to death of a teacher in Leeds is both truly shocking and saddening at the same time. Fortunately, such deaths in schools are rare in the United Kingdom, and it is no small irony that this fatality happened in a Roman Catholic school in a challenging area just as the death nearly 20 years ago of head teacher Philip Lawrence did in north Westminster. We may live in a post-Christian society, but the Churches still offer education in many of the more disadvantaged areas of our country.

My thoughts and condolences are with the family and friends of the teacher, as well as the pupils and those that work at the school, and the wider local community. Nearly 40 years ago, I was the victim of a classroom stabbing by an intruder that could in different circumstances have ended in a fatality. As a result, I can understand something of the grief such an unexpected event give rise to. Fortunately, unlike in my day, there will no doubt be extensive counselling offered to all concerned. I don’t know the circumstances of this stabbing, except that the news bulletin says that it was a female teacher in her 60s who presumably had been at the school for some time. More will no doubt come out over the next few days and then at the subsequent trial.

The Court of Appeal has recently taken a tough stand on the carrying of knives, and rightly so if we are to reduce the incidence of violence still further in society. But, despite all the draconian laws it is impossible to entirely prevent attacks where there is a will to do violence to another.

Finally, perhaps the Secretary of State might consider a memorial in the new offices for the DfE after they move to Whitehall in 2017* that recognises the sacrifice of the small band of teachers that have given their lives to their profession. There may not be many of them, but they deserve not to be forgotten.

*Such a move never took place, but the idea of a memorial might still be worth considering.

Ending child illiteracy by 2025: reprise

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes a visitor to this blog uncovers a previous post that is worth a reprise. I think that this post from 2015 is one such post. Many of the points hold good today, even to the issue of the Labour Party and tuition fees. Let me know in the comment section what you think.

Ending child illiteracy by 2025

Originally Posted on 

The Liberal Democrat plan to end illiteracy by 2025 announced today would mean that every child born in 2014, ought to leave primary school in 2025 able to read and write at a standard identified to lead to success in secondary school and beyond. To help them meet this commitment to end child illiteracy by 2025 the Lib Dems would boost the early years Pupil Premium to an even higher level than the primary school Pupil Premium thus recognising the vital importance of a child’s early years for learning and development.
The Lib Dems would also overhaul early years teaching qualifications by letting nursery staff work towards Qualified Teacher Status and by 2020 requiring a qualified teacher graduate in every school or nursery delivering the early years curriculum.


As a Lib Dem, I have been fighting for better early years education for decades. This aim is reminiscent of the Millennium Development goals of 2000 that sought to ensure primary education for every child throughout the world by 2015. And what’s the point of primary education if children don’t learn to read, write, count, and lay down the skills to acquire the tools they will need for their future lives as adults.
Despite a focus of attention on the lack of education success among the poor that goes back to work undertaken when Ruth Kelly was Secretary of State in the Labour government, it is still clear, as Nick Clegg pointed out, that it is those less well off in society whose children don’t make the expected levels of progress.


Labour has been hinting about cutting tuition fees if elected. As Labour was the Party that introduced them in the first place in 1997, and then increased them, requiring students to repay the cash borrowed from day one rather than when they started earning, as now, Labour must say if it favours supporting undergraduates ahead of ending illiteracy in the next parliament; it cannot do both and still stick to its spending plans.


To achieve the ambition of ending illiteracy by 2025 means providing the cash for schools and early year settings to achieve this goal. Depriving local authorities of the cash to support pre-school settings where health, welfare and education issues can be dealt with together won’t allow the goal to be achieved. Yes, the bulk of the funds should go to schools and through an early years premium, but the work needs co-ordination and that is where local authorities need funds. By all means make it a ring-fenced grant, but do not force local authorities out of supporting initiatives by cutting their funding.


Schools also need to know how to deal with that small group of parents that are indifferent to their child’s progress and don’t, can’t or won’t work with the school and pre-school setting in helping their children learn. Helping schools know what works rather than everyone re-inventing the wheel will also ensure best use of the money. Does that mean a role for local authorities?