Tag Archives: children

Virtual Schools have a key role

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Do you know what a Virtual School is? I will assume that regular readers of this blog will know, but for the newcomer or casual readers, it is the local authority service that provides support for the education of both Looked After Children, and those children previously looked after. Recently the role of the service has been extended to include all children with a social worker and, even more recently, children in kinship care.

In many respects the virtual school embodies the very essence of local authority Children’s Services, bringing together support for children in need and their education.  In that respect, it is disappointing that too often the Head of the Virtual School is often only a third-tier officer not reporting directly to the Director of Children’s Services.

The extension of the work of virtual schools to include children with a social worker has been the subject of a recent research report looking at the outcomes of extending the role of the virtual school to encompass all children with a social worker.

Evaluation of the Extension of Virtual School Heads’ Duties to Children with a Social Worker Final Report

The report indicated that attendance, and the consequences of challenging behaviour – suspensions and exclusions – have featured significantly in the work of virtual schools with this new group of young people. Improved attainment, has been less of an outcome. The effects of covid-19 on both attendance and exclusions may well have meant less resources for improving attainment of this group; or that improving attainment may just take longer, and be a consequence of improvements in attendance. Either way, I would have liked to see more discussion about the age at which a child is linked to a social worker, and whether it is easier in the primary sector than the secondary schools to improve attainment?

In many ways, the report makes disappointing reading more than 15 years after the government department at Westminster responsible for education added children’ services to its remit under the last Labour government.

Too often there has been a lack of awareness of the educational needs of these vulnerable young people on the part of schools and social workers, and a real lack of data to allow effective tracking of such young people’s education attainments, partly because of data protection issues.

 I understand that concern, and there is an interesting vignette in the report of child that had a social work for a brief period because of domestic abuse being offered extra maths teaching by their new school because of having been a ‘child in need’ for a brief period. The mother had hoped for a new beginning at a new school. This illustrates the complexity of the challenges in working with these young people and their families.

Many ofsted reviews of Children’s Services highlight challenges with inter-service working, and this report also has concerns. My worry is that in education, the growth of MATs and the downgrading of local authority roles, has made it more challenging for the development of policy around the education for all children with a social worker. The almost total absence of any contribution for elected cabinet members to the review worries my immensely. As with the NHS, local political input is seen as of little effect and not worth considering.

Personally, I think that view is wrong, and a strong local political sense of place in both education and social work with children is vital, as those that have read my demand over the years for Jacob’s Law, and the success of the Clause in the new Bill on in-year admissions will understand.

Homelessness and schooling

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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

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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

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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.  

What do you know of EOTAS?

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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?