Open letter from Liz Mills: Additional Needs and Disabilities (AND) Strategy update- September 2023

Dear parents and carers,

Before the summer break, we promised we would provide an update on our progress and priorities around Education, Health and Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) and annual review timeliness, and our recovery plan to address the delays and challenges in the system. We know this is an issue of great importance to many of you.

We are taking decisive action in Surrey to counteract the local and national challenges. Our plan aims to improve timeliness and access to support while waiting, and to develop a more sustainable service for the future.

What we've done so far

In July, Surrey County Council's Cabinet approved our request for an additional £15 million of funding to increase the capacity of key teams; extremely welcome news.

Our immediate priority is to eliminate lengthy needs assessment waiting times as quickly as possible. To achieve this, the first £5 million of additional contracts will be put in place with Educational Psychology (EP) and Special Educational Needs (SEN) agencies during autumn 2023 and spring and summer 2024, securing staff as fast as capacity in the market will allow. This will include 30 additional case officers who will begin clearing overdue cases from this month onwards.

With the help of the additional funding over the three years between 2023/24 and 2026/27 -and alongside the continued delivery of our recovery plan – we aim to clear the assessments for those who've been waiting the longest by the end of 2023, complete all overdue EHCNAs by spring 2024, and reach good levels of timeliness (above national levels) by summer 2024.

More than 230 new specialist school places have also been created for Surrey's children with additional needs and disabilities for September 2023. This is part of our £260m Capital Programme investment to improve the long-term sufficiency of state-maintained specialist educational provision across Surrey, and in turn the experiences of our children.

This ambitious Programme aims to deliver 2,440 permanent additional specialist school places in Surrey between 2019-2026 to create capacity for 5,760 planned places by 2030/31. Through it, Surrey's specialist estate has already been increased by 890 places, from around 3,320 in 2019 when the Capital Programme started to around 4,210 places now. The Programme remains on track to deliver a further 7 projects in 2023/24 which means that more than 960 new specialist school places will have been delivered across Surrey at a cost of £71m.

What we're doing next

Alongside securing extra EP and SEN resource over the coming months, we're improving access to support for those children and young people who are waiting for an EHCNA. We will reprioritise the work of our Specialist Teaching for Inclusive Practice (STIP) service to support schools with early intervention and inclusion, with Specialist Teachers continuing to work with schools to ensure all children receive the help and support they need whilst waiting for an assessment.

We'll also improve our Team Around the School (TAS) offer. Four additional Area Coordinators will bring schools together with key professionals including family support workers, community connectors and youth support workers, over a 12-month period beginning this term.

This will go a long way towards ensuring children and young people's individual needs are met at the earliest opportunity, without the need for a diagnosis or provision to be made through an EHCP. We've identified 50 schools that would benefit from this approach and will be in touch with them from this month onwards.

We intend to increase our Early Years to Primary communications speech and language outreach with an enhanced Language and Communication offer for Reception classes. The new offer will be launched this term, initially to 26 schools who will receive support from a Language Support Assistant for a half day, either every week or every fortnight, depending on need.

The aim is to provide language-rich environments with targeted intervention for children with language delay or disorder and with social communication needs. The team will work with teachers and teaching assistants as well as directly with children, to suggest strategies and interventions that support individuals as well as the whole class. This is in recognition that support for language and communication development will in turn enable children to make the best progress in all areas of the curriculum. We hope to roll the offer out to a wider number of Surrey schools in due course.

Alongside all the above, I'd like to highlight two resources for families where a child has additional needs and disabilities. These are both available via the Local Offer website as part of our early intervention and support offer to you and your child.

The new guidance booklet for parents and carers is a comprehensive guide to all the support and services available for children and young people with additional needs and disabilities in Surrey. It clearly sets out the different routes to support with the aim to help you access the right support at the right time for your child.

Developing a more sustainable service model

We know we need to develop a more sustainable service model and your feedback, along with that of children, schools, staff and other partners, will be vital in helping to shape this new model in the best interests of children and young people.

We're on an improvement journey and are already embedding learning from our auditing and quality assurance processes, but there is more to do. In May 2023 we began an end to-end review of our EHCNA, EHCP and annual review processes as part of our recovery plan, looking in-depth at our policies, procedures and roles. We'll carry on involving families, along with other key stakeholders, in the ongoing focus groups so that you can continue to influence the development of the service.

We'll be doing this work in collaboration with our parent and carer forum, Family Voice Surrey. You can learn about them, including how to become a member and give your views, via their website: familyvoicesurrey.org.

I want to reiterate that we know current timescales for assessments and annual reviews are too long, and delays have caused distress and frustration for families. We have a team of dedicated professionals who have been working exceptionally hard to ensure the needs of children, young people and their families, are met. However, we acknowledge that despite this, things are not where they should be, and I apologise that this is the case.

We are committed to improving timeliness of EHCNAs and annual reviews, and of issuing good quality EHCPs where they are needed, in collaboration with schools and families. Please know, we are determined to make things better, and with the support of the extra resource now available, we believe we can get to a place where every child is assessed in a timely manner and has access to the support they need, when they need it.

We will provide regular updates on our progress via the Local Offer website. You can also find out more about the whole assessment and plan process at any time via the Education Health and Care plan pages.

Local Area SEND inspection: 11 to 29 September 2023

I also want to highlight that Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) began a three week Local Area SEND Inspection in Surrey on Monday 11 September. The inspection will look at education, health and care services for children with additional needs and disabilities (otherwise known as SEND) to assess their experiences and outcomes.

I know that as part of the inspection process many of you will have shared your experiences of SEND provision in Surrey via the Ofsted and CQC online surveys, which are now closed. Thank you for taking the time to do that, your views and experiences are very important to this process.

Best wishes,

Liz Mills

Director, Education and Lifelong Learning

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