Tag Archives: mental-health

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.

Think Tank weighs in on SEND

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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

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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.

Do better funded schools exclude fewer pupils?

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The DfE published the annual data for exclusions and suspensions from schools during the 2023/24 school-year this week. Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England: 2023 to 2024 – GOV.UK Sadly, there are more pupils being excluded than in recent years, and my post from July 2018 Bad news on exclusions | John Howson reflects much , at least at the national level, of what is contained in the latest report on 2023/24. Boys on free school meals, and with SEND, and from a minority group are at highest risk of being excluded, especially when they are in Year 9, and, as ever, the reasons is most likely to have been ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’.

With the worsening recruitment crisis in schools, allied to a challenging financial environment, an increase in exclusions and suspensions was to be expected. What the data doesn’t tell us is whether schools with high exclusion rates are linked to specific academy trusts, and also to high levels of teacher turnover.

I wrote a blog about policies for reducing exclusions in May Reducing exclusions from schools | John Howson and I would hope that if the staffing situation does settle down, so might the number of pupils being banished from school.

As ever, I am struck by the funding issue. London, the best funded part of England has some of the lowest rates for exclusion and suspensions. There are 17 London boroughs in the list of the 25 local authorities with the lowest rate of suspensions in 2023/24, and 19 in the similar list for secondary exclusions. In the list of ten local authorities with the highest rates of exclusion are five authorities in the North East. I think that there may be something in this data that needs further exploration, especially as I would expect teacher recruitment to be easier in the North East than in London.

Interestingly, in view of the debate about mobile phones in schools, the number of suspensions for ‘inappropriate use of social media or online technology’ only increased from 11,419 to 11,614, an insignificant change between 2022/23 and 2023/24 especially compared with the increase in exclusions for ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’ from 446,676 to 569,921 over the same period. Of course, much comes down t how a decision on which box to tick when the exclusion is being reported and the latter category may hide suspensions that actually belong in one of the other categories. This is the risk when there are too many choices for a school to make.

The increase of around 25,000 in assaults leading to suspensions must be very worrying, although I wonder whether most are ‘common assault’ rather than ‘assault leading to actually bodily harm’ or ’GBH’ to use the criminal code levels of violence against another.

Some numbers are so small it is a wonder that they are still collected. Were only 69 pupils – up from 50 the previous year- permanently excluded for theft. Perhaps schools have nothing worth nicking these days.

I hope that next year, we might read of at least a levelling out of the rates of exclusions and suspensions and perhaps a return to a downward trend, especially if there is a relationship between funding and how schools can cope with disruptive pupils.  

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.  

A Virtual School for those missing school?

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The House of Commons Education Select Committee inquiry into SEND has been in existence for around six months. Such was the volume of evidence submitted to the inquiry that some of the evidence has only just been published. Among the submitted evidence published this week was that from Oxfordshire County Council. committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/137147/pdf/

The section of their evidence that interested me most was contained in paras 15-17 about the idea of a virtual school.

Online schooling

15. Oxfordshire County Council’s Virtual School, a service which supports children in our care with a suitable educational placement that meets their needs, has taught the council some valuable lessons in maintaining an educational presence for children.

16. Some children with SEND, especially those for whom education in a school or other education institution is not appropriate, are supported through an ‘Education Other Than At School’ (EOTAS) mechanism. EOTAS provision is usually intended to be short-term, with the goal of finding a more suitable school placement for the young person as soon as possible.

17. We believe it would be worthwhile for the government to explore the creation of a virtual school to support the needs of children with SEND, for whom education in a school setting is not appropriate. This would enable every child to remain on the roll of a school, maintaining funding and visibility for them, and continuing their education whilst a more appropriate long-term placement can be found. Such a school might also be appropriate for other children missing education, such as those arriving with EHCPs mid-year, when no immediate special school places are available. A virtual school would therefore be able to provide continuity of education.

This is an interesting idea that might merit some further discussion as it would clarify the role of the State in educating all children where the parents have entrusted their education to the State.

I wonder whether such a school might also be where excluded pupils could be enrolled if a new school or Alternative Provision has not been found for them. Unlike to present Virtual School for children in care that operates where children are on the role of an actual school, and provides additional support, the New VS would be an actual school, and could require virtual attendance twice a day to help with checks on progress and attendance.

Enrolment in such a VS would also ensure no child was missing school, as too often happens at present when pupils either arrive mid-year into a local authority or are excluded from a school with no new destination.

Such a virtual school might significantly reduce expenditure on private providers as well as ensuring parents did not have to complain to the Local Government Ombudsman that their child had fallen off the radar. Every child in the authority that parents want the State to educate would then be receiving an education every day of the school-year. The school would be free to offer after-school activities and to bring groups of its pupils together where learning in person was appropriate.

The aim should be to manage resources so that children pass through the VS on their way to a learning placement that is suitable for them.  As such, it should replace most packages of ‘education other than at school’ that were never originally designed to be long-term solutions, and too often leave pupils with no check on their development and limited group activities, even on-line where children cannot physically meet together.

Whether the VS could provide all the extras, such as work with animals or other individual sporting instruction in some EHCPs is an interesting area for discussion. Where it clearly aids learning it should be delivered and the volume generated by pupils at the VS should help provide more cost-effective services and coherent local authority wide provision. The VS might also be responsible for monitoring the learning outcomes for pupils where the local authority is paying for pupils to attend fee-paying schools or colleges.

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?

What should we do about children not in school?

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Is it time to start looking for a new solution to the issues surrounding children not in school? Currently too many young people are missing school for a variety of different reasons.

How about a ‘virtual school’ for all children not on a ‘normal’ school roll? The Local Authority where they live would assume responsibility on day one for any child without a school place, whether the child has moved into an area, and there is no mid-year SEND place available, (or other school places) or the young person has been excluded by a school, and has not yet been assigned another school.

Then there are those for who the normal school environment is not longer suitable. They should have a clearly defined place within the education system, managed by the local authority. Only in exceptional cases should responsibility for education be ceded to those parents that ask the state to educate their children.

Many young people might remain on the roll of the virtual school for a short-period of time. However, it would ensure no child for whom the state had assumed responsibility went missing from schooling.

Using the expertise gathered from the established model of virtual schools for children in care together with the work of hospital schools and services should ensure that a body of expertise would quickly develop to ensure all young people, whatever their challenges, had a programme of schooling mapped out for them, even if it didn’t look like the established regime of the traditional school day. However, there would be an expectation of regular contact between the virtual school and the pupil, with individual timetables of learning controlled through the school.

With a pupil being on a school roll at all times, parents would know that their children were part of a framework that includes inspection and has the child at its centre, and also removes the sense of isolation many children not in school can experience. The provision of a virtual school should also reduce the need for the use of section 61 of The Children and Families Act 2014.

The ‘virtual school’ would be able to commission ‘alternative provision’ from registered providers and in some cases be able to transfer the pupil to the roll of the alternative provider, where that was appropriate.

Many pupils in the care of the new virtual school would have special educational needs, as do many children that are the responsibility of the current virtual schools for young people in care. I believe that the notion of a ‘school’ is the best way to educate such children. The virtual school would work with both the SEND sector and the NHS, but be clear what is education and what is therapy, and the responsibility of the NHS.

The present funding model for SEND doesn’t work, and leaves many local authorities underfunded, and a small number of pupils costing significant amounts, while not being on the roll of any school. A virtual school should bring in-house many of the costs currently charged by the private sector for tutoring and other learning and allow some economies of scale to be developed. But, better education for every pupil must be the main aim: no child should be left out of schooling for a single day.