The SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan: significant or ineffective?
- Umamah Malik
- Sep 29, 2023
- 3 min read
The Department of Education has committed to additional funding to fulfil children's and young peoples’ potential, build parents trusts and provide financial sustainability. However, stakeholders across education, health and care have criticised the Plan for failing to address accountability, collaboration and overreliance on the independent educational sector. Further, there are fears that what funding is being provided is not sufficient nor will it be provided quickly enough to enable local authorities to effectively reduce their budget deficits.
Earlier in the year, the Department of Education published the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement (API) Plan. The API Plan outlines reforms that aim to:
Support and stabilise SEND in local areas by, for example, reducing financial deficits through the Delivering Better Value and Safety Valve programmes;
Address supply issues in the short and medium term so that children and young people receive sufficient local support; and
Implement a £70 million Change Programme in which up to nine Regional Expert Partnerships will develop and test provisions for example, National Standards to aid future funding and legislation.
Key reforms:
National SEND and AP Standards
Standards, to be developed in 2023 and mostly published in 2025, will regulate the entire system to address needs earlier and reduce bureaucracy. This will include Local Authorities producing standardised EHCPS and families and providers having greater clarity on available support.
Accountability
Several steps will be taken to strengthen accountability and consequently, increase parents' confidence. For one, a local and national inclusion dashboard will be implemented from autumn 2023 which will give parents updates on local performance. This is to help parents make decisions and further incentivise local authorities to improve. Additionally, every Integrated Care Board will have to name an Executive Board member held accountable for SEND. Whilst the process for resolving disputes regarding EHCPs will be improved by developing the mediation stage to be more effective and clarifying the party responsible for solving complaints.
Skilled workforce and preparation for adulthood
Greater focus will be placed on children returning to mainstream educational provision or being prepared for adulthood. New leadership roles, Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator and National Professional Qualification, within schools will oversee this new approach.
The Department plans to invest £18 million between 2022 and 2025 to double the capacity of the Supported Internships Programme for young people with SEND. Around 5,000 early years staff will be trained by August 2014 to gain accredited Level 3 early years SENCo qualifications. Further, £21 million will go towards training additional educational psychologists in 2024 and 2025 together with greater access to speech and language therapists being provided through the Change Programme.
Financial Sustainability
Core funding of £3.5 billion from 2023 to 2024 will be provided to enable more children and young people who need specialist placements to have access to suitable schools quicker. A new system of funding bands and tariffs will support the implementation of National Standards across the country whilst ensuring local authorities are provided with support to reduce their financial deficits.
Further, the Department will assess how the system uses independent special schools to improve state-funded specialist provisions. This is alongside the £2.6 billion being invested from 2022 to 2025 to fund new places and improve existing provisions in schools.
Conclusions
The increase in funding, acutely needed, is welcome news for all. However, the question remains as to whether this will make a significant difference to local authorities’ struggles. The financial shortfall in the SEND system is estimated to be at least £1.3 billion according to data from 2020-2022. At least 43,000 children with special needs are in schools outside of their local area which results in significant expenses for authorities - only worsening the funding shortfall.
It will take at least two more years for much of the funding to be released. Meanwhile, demands for EHCPs are rising. In 2022, around 1.5 million pupils in England had special educational needs which was an increase of 77,000 from 2021.
The API Plan also does not outline any specific proposals to address the system’s dependence on independent schools to provide specialist provisions. Current issues go beyond the training of SENCo qualified staff and speech and language therapists. EHCP appeals that name independent specialist provision as more suitable often point to their provision of 1:1 support, small classrooms, specialist teachers and extra-curricular activities.
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