SEND Update: Education, Health and Care Plans - 12 May 2022
Date Added: 12/05/2022
Today we are expecting the Department for Education to release the SEN2 data.
The data will provide a snapshot from January – December 2021 and will show a continued increase in demand for EHCPs, which in turn has contributed to a decline in the number of EHCPs being completed within 20 weeks in Central Bedfordshire.
The number of EHCPs completed has gone up by over 100% over the last two years (2016 – 2019 the average number of EHCPs completed in Central Bedfordshire was 214. Last year we completed 474 EHCPs). Regrettably EHCPs completed within the 20-week timeframe has dropped from 51.2% to 10.8% for all EHCPs, and from 61.9% to 12.7% for those excluding exception cases.
This level of performance is unacceptable - we know how fundamentally important EHCPs are to children and young people with complex needs getting the right support and delays add to the stress and pressure on families.
We owe parents an explanation and how we are addressing this.
As part of our improvement plan, we have been working on improving the quality of EHCPs and to help achieve this we have invested in training for more than 540 staff in Children’s Services, schools and health partners. We’ve developed a Quality Assurance Framework and we have developed new EHCP proformas to ensure that the quality of the plans are consistent across Central Bedfordshire. We are also making progress with our Annual Review process for children and young people with an EHCP, in ensuring the Annual Reviews are done on time. We are on track for all of our Annual Reviews to be up to date by September 2022.
As part of our improvement programme, we have also been investing in training to help our staff in schools get better at identifying needs at an earlier stage, putting in targeted SEN support and identifying where an EHCP is needed. This Early Intervention Offer is important as it enables schools to request additional funding for children with SEND so they can put in support in a timely way, as part of their graduated response.
The timeframes for producing EHCPs has been a challenge due to huge increase in demand coupled with a shortage of Educational Psychologists.
Nationally there has been an increase in demand for EHCPs which has been triggered partly by improvements in identification of needs but also exacerbated by the pandemic, which has led to more children requiring support. This is true for Central Bedfordshire too.
There are a limited number of Educational Psychologists, so it is a highly competitive professional area to recruit to and we have had vacancies to fill. To address this, we have taken a creative approach to recruitment which we are now starting to see come to fruition.
At the end of April, we welcomed a new Principal Education Psychologist, and a Deputy Educational Psychologist will join us in July. It will be their role to oversee the timeliness and quality of Psychological Advice given by the Educational Psychologists. We have also launched another recruitment campaign to appoint more Education Psychologists, while continuing to work with agency and locum psychologists to meet demand.
In addition to this we have launched a career development programme where we have appointed Assistant Educational Psychologists who we will support to get onto training programmes to become qualified Educational Psychologists, and in return they will spend some of their placements with us. We’ll also be working closely with the EP training programmes across the country (of which there are 10 nationally) to provide 2 year placements for trainee Educational Psychologists.
As well as addressing the issue of timeliness, having a better resourced team of Educational Psychologists will complement the work we are doing to improve the quality of our EHCPs.
We understand that this explanation does not offer any remedy to the parents and carers who have waited longer than they should for their child to receive an EHCP. I do hope however, this explanation will give some reassurance that we have a grasp of the issues and that they are already being addressed.
EHCPs will continue to be a key focus of our SEND improvement work and moving forward, we have the right professionals in the team to provide high quality and timely EHCPs to our families.
Kind regards
Sarah-Jane
Sarah-Jane Smedmor
Director of Children’s Services
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