Tag Archives: local authorities

SEND, fuel duty and the Apprenticeship Levy  

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SEND was identified as one of their 3 top priorities by 60% of a random sample of 100 delegates at the recent Lib Dem Conference. 45% ranked it first and 15% second, often behind funding in general.

This result isn’t a surprise to anyone in education, although falling rolls doesn’t yet seem to have worked its way up the political agenda to be a top priority for councillors and activists. I am sure that will change.

Anyway, as regular readers know, before the summer break I expressed concerns about the SEND deficit many local authorities are facing, only to have the end date for the ‘statutory override’ kicked down the road from March 2026 to March 2028 two days after my blog appeared. I m sure there is no link between the two, just great timing on my part.

So, what might local authorities do. Two suggestions, one possible and one for consideration. Local authorities need to check that they are spending all the Apprenticeship Levy raise by them in its present form. They should not be returning any unspent cash, raised from maintained schools to HM Treasury. Apprenticeships across the SEND landscape can be a good investment, and certainly a better use of the cash than sending it back to Westminster. Hopefully, all local authorities are now making full use of the Levy cash collected.

My second suggestion needs some work. At present, SEND transport is a massive cost to many local authorities. The recent NI hike won’t have helped, and should be recognised in the funding for the High Needs Block. If not, it is a tax on SEND, and indeed education as a whole.

The other tax is Fuel Duty. Unlike VAT, I don’t think it is recoverable by local authorities, despite making up around 50% of the price of fuel at the pump. Assume a taxi does two journeys a day for 190 days a year, and uses a litre of diesel for each journey with a SEND young person. That’s around 380 litres a year. As 400 is an easier number to use, let’s round it up to that number. To compensate, let’s say diesel is £1.30 per litre. This puts the fuel cost at £520 per taxi per year. Ten taxis, £5,200; 100 taxis: £52,000. Now assume 50% fuel duty and the possible saving mount up.

Agriculture has long had a red diesel scheme to cut fuel costs.  Education should not be paying income from the High Needs block back to HM Treasury in tax. Like business rates, a fuel rebate scheme should be in place where local authorities certify fuel purchased, and receive a rebate of the duty.

However, this might incentivise the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles, so the scheme should be predicated on a growing percentage of vehicles being electric, and thus not requiring the rebate. Vehicles could also be required to be less than five years old, and with a minimum miles per litre outcome.

Such a scheme won’t solve the problem, but every little helps, and it might encourage the use of electric taxis that are both cleaner for the environment and, until the government changes the rules, less costly in tax paid by local authorities.

150 year-old Committee system to be abolished

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Earlier this week the government announced the end to Council Committees as a decision-making process within local government, requiring all councils to move to a Leader and Cabinet model.  Fortunately, scrutiny committees will still be permitted. Written statements – Written questions, answers and statements – UK Parliament

So, it will be a Labour government that will finally ends the governance of state education by Committee. For over a century, the Education Committee, comprised of councillors and other persons, usually representing the main faith groups with schools in the area and ‘persons with experience in education’ was the mainstay of policy-making for the nation’s state schools, and up to the early 1990s further and public sector higher education as well.

Indeed, my first appointment to a Council was to the Education Committee, as one of the persons of experience. In that role, I was appointed to Oxfordshire’s Education Committee, and one of its sub-committees in the 1990s. I served until the County moved to a Leader and Cabinet model at the end of the decade. Some 20 years after that original appointment, I became the Cabinet Member covering the education portfolio in the same county.

This move to ban committees is a curious one at the present time when so many councils do not have a majority for one Party, and are run by coalitions. Managing coalitions in the cabinet system makes it harder for each Party to have an input into all portfolios, except at the level of cabinet. I suspect it has made cabinet meetings longer when there are differences between the Parties within the Cabinet. The alternative is that difficult decisions are dropped, rather than dealt with.   

The cabinet model is also bad news for back bench councillors, especially where there is a large majority for one Party, because other than the scrutiny function, where they may sit as the occasional substitute, they will have little or no formal role in decision-making. The committee system did allow greater participation from councillors, even if it was slower at reaching decisions.

My guess is that even when formal committees are banned, unofficial groups will still be formed to help cabinet members. They may be Cabinet Committees; task and finish groups for particular projects or even unofficial committees such as the Corporate Parenting Panel of councillors from all Parties that was revived during my time as cabinet member.

The real tragedy of this move is that it represents a further nail in the coffin or local democracy. Committees meet in public for the most part, and that means there can be public input before a decision is made. The risk now is that decisions may be scrutinised after they have been made, but less so before being agreed.

One solution is to ensure that there is widespread consultation before decisions are made, as has just taken place in Oxfordshire on whether or not to charge for SEND transport for the 16-19 age group.

Councils are businesses, but not companies.  How they manage decision-making with their democratic responsibilities is no matter to be taken lightly. But a time of political turmoil is an odd time to mandate that only one system of governance is possible.

Reducing exclusions from schools

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Reading the Youth Justice Board Bulletin this week alerted me to a new publication about a piece of research into exclusions by schools led by the University of Oxford. Equity-by-Design_Excluded-Lives.pdf  The report contains the following in its conclusion

‘Addressing inequality in education requires a radical rethink that shifts the focus from accountability on school academic performance to accountability for the inclusion and wellbeing of the child in balance with achievement and attainment. We believe that ‘Equity by Design: Our Children, Our Responsibility’ contributes to this essential process’. (page 8)

The report also notes that ‘The challenge for schools in England and the current Labour government in its policy development is how to address issues of equity and inclusion in schools in a period of multiple pressures on school leaders and staff, their pupils, and available resources. These pressures are reflected in high and rising levels of exclusion that disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalised children and their communities.’

All worthy stuff, but the lack of a focus on staffing in schools, especially in view of the interactions with adults being the most common reasons for an exclusion was a bit of a surprise to me.

‘Training from Initial Teacher Education/Initial Teacher Training to the National Professional Qualification for Headship should address inclusive and relational practice and its implications for teaching and learning, behaviour policies, and pastoral care, as relevant to the context, role, and stage of professional development of staff.’

I found their conclusions on staffing wordier that useful. I hope they meant that all staff need to be trained to be aware of circumstances that might escalate into an exclusion, and that training should be tailored to the circumstances of the school. It is important for schools to identify what percentage of exclusions result from interactions with non-teaching staff that don’t seem to rate a mention in the report.

Still, the support in the report for a collaborative approach that involved local authorities did cheer me up.

‘Local area collaborative infrastructure models.

In order to tackle what we identified as the somewhat fragmented middle tier, policy development should encourage and enable trusts, schools, AP, FE, LAs, Local Inclusion Boards, and Family Hubs to form local partnership ‘Inclusion Groups’ based on collaborative working and the sharing of learning with joint accountability for decisions.

The remit of these ‘Inclusion Groups’ would be to collaboratively identify local needs and to reconfigure where responsibilities should lie to address and meet these needs. By doing so they will be able to determine provision for individuals and decide on the overall approach and its implementation.

These Inclusion Groups should enable LAs to support and challenge schools/trusts as well as empower headteachers and other partners to request action. They should also develop family hubs and other co-location models and work with local communities and third sector partners. Their work should Reviews’ and they should report back to partners annually. Additionally, the role of education should be strengthened in local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and partnerships.’

However, I am worried about the funding for such inclusion groups and who is to take responsibility for them in the fractured world of education that exists at the present time.

With exclusions at around their highest levels for two decades, there is clearly an issue to be tackled. Personally, I think the curriculum is the best place to start. Reviewing the Key Stage 4 offering so that it provides a relevant for all pupils and not just for those aiming to stay on at school into Key Stage 5 would be a good place to begin any changes. However, we may not have the teachers to offer any radically different curriculum at the present time.

Children in secure units

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After a difficult year in 2021/22 when the number of children taken into secure units rose from 142 to 165, there was a welcome reduction back to 139 children in 2022/23; more in line with the longer-term trend, despite the overall growth in the population within the age groups likely to end up in secure custody. Now, one child in such institutions should be one too many, so how do children end up in such places?

There are three possible routes by which a child can end up in a secure unit, often many miles from their homes:

Children detained or sentenced and placed by the Youth Custody Service.Thisincludes children detained for, or convicted of, a serious offence under the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 or the Criminal Justice Act 2003; or subject to a Supervision Order with a residence requirement or a Detention and Training Order under the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000.

Children placed by the local authority in a criminal justice context. This group includes children remanded by a court under section 102 (Remand to youth detention accommodation) of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012; or accommodated pursuant to section 38 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.

Children placed by the local authority on welfare grounds. This includes children who are placed into the homes by their local authority under section 25 of the Children Act 1989 for the protection of themselves and/or others.

Children accommodated in secure children’s homes: 31 March 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

On the face of it, the criminal justice system appears to be working better for children than a decade ago, if the aim is to reduce the number held in secure accommodation for either their protection or for the protection of others. The largest group in secure units is of boys aged 15, a similar age to where exclusions from schools tend to peak.

Resources could well be aimed at working with schools to devise strategies to divert these young men from the behaviours that put them on the track to a spell in a secure unit before they reach the peak age. After all, the characteristics of those likely to become high risk are well known.

Academies must be expected to play a part, and schools of all descriptions must not just ‘pass the buck’ to someone else to deal with. Of course, there will be the rare offender with no previous history of involvement with public services, other than a school but, even in this group, such individuals are likely to be a rarity.

Around half of the children spend less than three months in secure institutions, but it seems worrying that a portion spend a considerable time locked-up. It would be interesting to see the category of child spending more than a year in a secure institution. Are they the serious offenders eventually destined for a place in a prison, or are they there because a local authority cannot find a suitable placement in the community. Some commentary on the outcomes of these children would also be of interest in order to know whether or not a spell in a secure unit changes lives or just entrenches behaviour?

Why do some schools suspend more pupils than other schools?

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The levelling up debate seems to have somewhat been overshadowed recently by the concerns about Ofsted, and the issues with worker’s pay and conditions. However, the problem of how to increase success rates for some schools hasn’t disappeared.

As I have written before on this blog, the lack of any local ability to intervene in the absence of government funding stream for levelling up, means that improvements are often haphazard, if they even happen at all. Academy chains could shunt pupils out of their schools, and leave others to cope, and failing schools have limited support outside of opportunity Areas or other places with special funding.

For a long period of time, part of Oxford city – that city of dreaming spires – has been divided into two; the generally, affluenct and successful North and West of the city, and less well-off south and east, as the ONS data from the 2021 starkly reveals. Not so much a case of the wrong side of the tracks, but the wrong side of the river Cherwell – not, note, the river Thames.

As a result, it is perhaps not much of a surprise to find that two of the state-funded secondary schools within the city – both located in the south of the city – have places in the top 200 secondary schools by the rate of suspensions during the Spring term of 2021/22 school-year. Fortunately, neither is in the top 100 schools, and for both they are probably faring better than they were a few years ago.

This an issue that the government’s Social Mobility Commission Social Mobility Commission Quarterly Commentary: March 2023 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) might wish to explore in some detail.

Five of the 20 local authorities with the most schools in the top 200 secondary schools are authorities with selective secondary schools. One is a south coast unitary with a disproportionately large number of its non-selective schools in the list of the top 200 schools. Like Oxfordshire, it is an authority unlikely to attract extra funding for its schools under levelling-up, but there must be an issue to explore as to why so many of its schools are in this list?

A few years ago, University Technical Colleges used to feature strongly in this type of list, but closures and presumably some better understanding of transfer at fourteen has reduced their number to four, two of them being the only schools in their authority in the list.

The extent to which feeder primary schools for these 200 schools also feature in the list would be an interesting exercise to undertake. Also, it might be interesting to ask why one county has only one school in the list, whereas an adjacent unitary has three schools?

There is something of a north-south divide in the list and relatively few schools in London are in the list: an interesting turnaround from the last century, when I am sure that there would have been more of the capital’s secondary schools in the list. No doubt, the strength of some of the academy chains located in the capital has made a difference.

Do means matter?

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The DfE has published some performance data for academies and multi academy trusts Multi-academy trust performance measures (key stages 2, 4 and 5) – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) The outcomes are quite rightly heavily hedged about with qualifications about how schools have become academies, and also that schools differ in size, character and parental choice. Indeed, I wonder whether the original reason for why a school became an academy, perhaps more than a decade ago is still relevant?

What struck me at first glance was that as the secondary sector becomes dominated by academies there is a reduction to the mean (average). Various Secretaries of State have wanted all schools to be above average, as this exchange with Michael Gove when in front of the Education Select Committee revealed. Michael Gove’s Kafkaesque logic – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate However, I don’t think he was the only Secretary of State to fall foul of this aspiration. Academies in the group forced to change their status because of under-performance not surprisingly do less well than those that chose to become an academy.

The key question for the current Secretary of State must be what do you take from this data in terms of the ‘levelling up’ agenda? I don’t think the present incumbent of the post of Secretary of State for Education has been asked the question about averages, but that shouldn’t stop her asking the question about what policy changes are needed based upon these outcomes?

As an additional discussion point, the secretary of State might like to ask her officials two further questions. What is the relationship between the schools in these tables and the percentages of NEETs produced by different types of schools, and how can schooling work to help ensure as many as possible of our young people eventually enter the labour market at the end of their initial education and training journey? After all, we should all be life-long learners.

After last year’s aborted attempt to make all schools academies, and the mauling of the Bill in the House of Lords there is still a need to ensure the middle tier works to the best advantage for all children. Whether there is a role for local democracy in schooling is still a live issue, but not one that will feature highly at the next election.

But, regardless of who runs schools, there is still work to be done to achieve excellence for all and that no child is left behind, to quote just two aspirational messages from past attempts at improving the outcomes for our schooling system.

Of course, without sufficient teachers, the risk is of deterioration not improvement in outcomes; not what the Chancellor wants to see if the economy is to continue to grow.

Are you paying too much to advertise a teaching vacancy?

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The most read blog post this month is the one from 2020 entitled ‘How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?’ Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) So far, yesterday’s 10th birthday post comes in second highes, with 20 views as against the vacancy post that reviewed the publication of the tes company accounts for 2019.

Today, the tes group, now entirely shorn of it print heritage, released its accounts for 2021-22 to August 2022. The company, fronted by its UK management, is ultimately owned by Onex Partners V, part of the Canadian ONEX Group of equity investors. Their third quarter report for 2022 identifies an investment of $98 US in the Tes Global (“Tes”), an international provider of comprehensive software solutions for the education sector  18d46e0 f-a5b9-435a-a039-9849ef723683 (onex.com) page 9

So, our major teacher recruitment platform, now offering a much wider staff management service to schools, increased its UK (mainly England) turnover from £54 million to £68 million in the year to August 2022. How important both staff management and the UK are to the profit of ONEX can be determined form the following figures

Turnover             2022                     2021

UK                        £68.2 mn          £54.0 mn

Europe                £  2.9 mn             £ 2.6 mn

Rest of World     £  9.0  mn           £ 9.0 mn

Income

Staff

Management    £61.2 mn          £56.5  mn

All activities      £80.2 mn           £66.1  mn

TES accounts – see link above page 29

So, in the last school year the tes took £68 million pounds from UK schools, the bulk of the money for recruitment and staff management by subscriptions from schools. 84% of staff management revenue came from subscription income and, as the accounts note (page 2) this was a 26% increase in revenue, presumably as more schools and Trusts migrated to subscription packages from point of sale purchase of advertising. The profit for the operating year was £28.7 million compared with £2.3 million the previous year that was badly affected by covid.

The group values its software at £46 million. That leaves me wondering what the book value of TeachVac’s simple but effective job matching service should be? Perhaps the £3 million suggested by our advisers is a little on the mean side.

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk costs less than £150,000 a year to operate. Being generous, it might cost £500,000 if operating on a similar cost model to the tes. The DfE job site probably costs a bit more, but we don’t actually know how much. The question for schools, MATs and the education sector is ‘How much of the money you are spending with the tes is for the downstream activities on staff management and how much for the job bord and matching service, and is it value for money?

Assume only 10% is for the matching, that could be £5-6 million of the subscription income after allowing for the tes turnover on Hibernia and other activities. TeachVac was established to demonstrate to the sector the cost-effective nature of modern technology over the former print advertising methods of recruitment. Readers can make up their own minds over value for money when comparing the £500 annual subscription to TeachVac that will reduce as more schools sign-up, and the cost of a subscription to tes.

How PTRs have changed over time

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Forty years ago, I wrote an article about variations in local authority provision for education that appeared in the Oxford Review of Education (Volume 8, No2). Part of the discussion in the article centred around the range of pupil teacher ratios within schools after local government reorganisation outside London in 1974 had completed the changes to the local government landscape started in London a decade before.

Of course, our school system was very different in 1974. Most authorities were still transiting from a two tier selective system to a fully comprehensive system; most based their new systems upon the traditional two tiers, but some used one of the variations of first, middle and upper schools that constituted the three tier system.

Local authorities had the freedom in the 1970s to decide how much of their funding to spend upon schooling, and although there were national guidelines on spending on resources and staffing, they were not mandatory. However, teachers’ pay, then as now the largest item of a school’s expenditure, was centrally controlled, as was the ratio of promoted posts to classroom teachers. The differential between the highest paid teacher and a classroom teacher was much narrower than it is today, especially in the secondary sector.

On the staffing side, there were few support staff, and hardly any classroom assistants working in schools forty years ago, so one class one teacher was very much the model across the board, with classroom teachers in the primary sector, and comprehensive schools following the model of the selective sector with subject specialists replacing classroom teachers that had been commonplace in some secondary modern schools.

Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTRs) can be calculated in the same way today as they were in 1974. Helpfully, the DfE published the results for all state-funded schools in England, by local authority, based upon the data collected in the November Staffing Census. The latest data, published in June 2022, was from the November 2021 census, so now some 14 months old.

What is interesting, despite the changes in local government boundaries is to compare the range of 1974 PTRs in the secondary sector with those from the 2021 census.

Best PTRWorst PTRdifference
197415.719.74
198013.618.65
202113.618.44.8
Source Howson 1980 and DfE 2022
Source Howson 1980 and DfE 2022

 Compared with 1974, the difference between the best and worst local authority areas was greater in 2021 than in 1974, and similar to the difference in 1980 when the article was being prepared. What is noticeable is that both the best and the worst levels improved between 1974 and 1980, but are now, forty years later, still very similar to where they were in 1980. This despite academies, unitary authorities and the devolution of budgets to individual schools.

Even more interesting is the position of London schools. In 1980, London boroughs occupied eight of the top ten places for ‘staffing’, using data from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy data. In the 2021 census, four outer London boroughs have dropped down the ranking, as has Newcastle, to be replaced by northern towns and cities. However, London, now with individual boroughs rather than the combined Inner London Education Authority still takes a disproportionate number of the places in the authorities with the most favourable PTRs.

Since 2010/11, all but two local authorities with data for the whole period have seen a deterioration in the secondary PTR for their area. Slough and Southend on Sea, both authorities with selective school systems, have seen the biggest worsening in secondary PTRs over the period of Tory government.

With the pressure on funding, it is interesting to speculate what the outcome of the 2022 census will be when published this June. Could we witness some of the worst secondary PTRs in half a century?

Absent without leave

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The DfE has an experimental dashboard recording weekly pupil absence data for overall absence and authorized and unauthorized absences at the local authority level. https://department-for-education.shinyapps.io/pupil-attendance-in-schools/ So far, the dashboard has data from 14,580 schools for the 30th of September data.

I have just extracted one list from the dashboard. This is the25 local authority areas with the highest percentages of unauthorized absences in the secondary school sector.

YearWeek beginningLocal authorityAbsenceAuthorisedUnauthorised
202226/09/2022Middlesbrough11.60%4.60%7.10%
202226/09/2022Knowsley11.00%4.50%6.50%
202226/09/2022Isle of Wight11.50%5.90%5.70%
202226/09/2022Sunderland10.20%4.70%5.50%
202226/09/2022Salford9.60%4.10%5.50%
202226/09/2022Hartlepool9.40%3.90%5.40%
202226/09/2022Stoke-on-Trent9.90%4.60%5.40%
202226/09/2022Newcastle upon Tyne10.20%4.90%5.30%
202226/09/2022Gateshead10.70%5.70%5.10%
202226/09/2022Bradford9.80%4.90%4.90%
202226/09/2022Doncaster10.10%5.40%4.70%
202226/09/2022Newham7.80%3.00%4.70%
202226/09/2022Sheffield8.20%3.50%4.70%
202226/09/2022Liverpool9.80%5.30%4.50%
202226/09/2022Kingston upon Hull, City of9.50%5.10%4.30%
202226/09/2022Stockton-on-Tees8.70%4.40%4.30%
202226/09/2022Rochdale8.90%4.70%4.10%
202226/09/2022Blackpool8.70%4.60%4.10%
202226/09/2022Leeds8.40%4.30%4.10%
202226/09/2022Rotherham8.90%4.80%4.10%
202226/09/2022Calderdale9.30%5.40%3.80%
202226/09/2022Barnsley9.30%5.50%3.80%
202226/09/2022Coventry8.70%5.00%3.70%
202226/09/2022County Durham9.70%6.00%3.70%
202226/09/2022Sandwell7.30%3.60%3.60%
Absence rates by geographical area -worst 25 for the end of September 2022

What is striking is the geographical spread of authorities. None in the South West, East of England and East Midlands and only one each in London and the South East. So, from five of the nine regions of England there are just two local authority areas in the list. Whereas the North East contributes more than five authorities to the list, although only two of the five local authority areas heading up the list.

Now, it may be that schools in some areas take different views about what constitutes authorized or unauthorized absences even though there are well-defined categories. Some may also be better at recording data. However, there is another similarity with the areas in the list. Most are areas with either significant pockets or in some cases even larger areas of deprivation within the geographical area.

Some, such as Blackpool, have been Opportunity Areas under previous government schemes to support education. Seven areas had more than 10% of secondary school pupils not in school at the end of September. Such a level of absence might be understandable either later in the year or during the depth of winter, but so early in the school year it is troubling.

Many of these areas have high unemployment levels and would seem to be targets for areas of growth. However, the skills base won’t be there to develop if the education of a proportion of pupils is so disrupted.

Might the current curriculum have something to do with the decision by these pupils to stay away? Government still looks more favorably on training teachers for EBacc subjects than for more directly vocational areas such as business studies.

Interestingly, most of these areas are not ones with significant teacher recruitment issues.

When are deficits called reserves?

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Local authorities are currently starting to put together their budgets for 2023/24. Upper Tier Authorities with responsibility for the High Needs block of the Direct School Gant that deals with expenditure on pupils with special needs will be looking at a year-end overspend in many cases that will need to be added to the amount already sitting off-balance sheet in a temporary solution to the problem of how to pay for this expenditure. The money has been spent by the local authority, but not paid for by central government, so it sits awkwardly in an account waiting for a solution.

At some point, if the DfE or The Treasury deems that the local authority should no longer carry the deficit, but fund it from reserves, this would be a major headache for, I suspect, many local authorities, regardless of their political control. In the present financial climate, the solution is more challenging than it might have been a year ago. As a result, I expect the government to ‘kick the can’ further down the road extending the current arrangement until March 2024, and leaving local authorities with even bigger numbers to worry about.

How might the issue be solved? Before devolved budgets came into being for schools in the 1990s, authorities might just have top sliced their education budget. I cannot see Schools Forum, the body that discusses education funding at a local authority level, agreeing to such a move these days, although the DfE could no doubt mandate it somehow.

An alternative would be to use the precept method, as has been used for social care funding, by allowing local authorities to increase Council Tax by an amount to cover the deficit they have incurred that is not on their balance sheet, but in ‘reserves’. This passes the problem to local taxpayers, despite schooling now being a centrally financed activity.

The government at Westminster could just pay off the figure authorities have in their reserves, either in one lump sum or more likely over a period of several years. But, with their demands for cuts in public expenditure to finance tax cuts, this seems an unlikely option.

Increasing pupil numbers, better healthcare and the acceptance of new medical conditions was always going to put increased demand upon a school system and its funding for pupils with special needs, and especially one that both had not always planned for the changes and was required to do more after the switch to EHCPs from Statements of Need following the 2014 Education Act. A good example of worthy legislation that doesn’t seem to have been fully costed as to its on-gong effects.

Meanwhile, parents probably see declines in service locally, as officers struggle to keep the costs of running the service within bounds. These parents often carry a heavy burden caring for their offspring and fighting a local government system is not something they want to do, but sometimes are forced to undertake. There must be a solution that puts the needs of these young people first.