HUNDREDS of children in Staffordshire are still waiting more than 20 weeks for a legal document detailing their special educational needs and the support they require, councillors have been told.
Staffordshire County Council has seen demand grow for support for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) over recent years – and the number of children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in the county had risen to more than 8,000 last year.
If a child or young person needs an EHCP, because their special educational needs require more help than would normally be provided in a mainstream nursery, school or college, this document should be completed by the county council with a 20-week timeframe.
But almost 500 children who had been assessed were waiting longer than 20 weeks, members of the council’s Safeguarding and Education Overview and Scrutiny Committee heard.
Some families were also waiting several weeks for a decision on whether or not their children would be assessed for an ECHP in the first place, the meeting was told.
Dr Halit Hulusi, the council’s head of SEND, said:
“On receipt of a request for an assessment from a school, professional or a parent, the local authority has six weeks to determine whether they’re going to assess.
“Consistently now, we’ve been responding to parents within that six-week period whether we’re going to assess or not over 92% or 93% of the time.
“If you think about the number of requests we get it should be 100% – and we are aspiring to that 100% – but mid-90s consistently is a good starting point for us to start working out why we’re not responding in all cases.
“We are at 62% or 63% of requests being agreed and that’s a substantial increase. That demonstrates the increase in need we’re seeing in Staffordshire, but it also indicates a much clearer position from our schools when they’re making their requests, that they’ve demonstrated through assessment and through teaching that this child may require additional provision.”
Cllr Matthew Wallens, Reform UK representative for Lichfield City North, asked how many children were currently waiting beyond the target time of 20 weeks for an EHCP.
Dr Hulusi responded:
“Significantly fewer than in July – we currently have around 480 children beyond 20 weeks waiting for a final EHCP.
“That is regrettable and we’re doing what we can to address that challenge. We’ve had recent capacity to blitz a backlog of assessments – and 300 of those assessments were taken in-house into the central SEND team.
“Those 300 that were waiting the longest have been taken into a specific team to target those assessments and make sure they’re completed by December 2025.
“Current reports from that team indicate that they are on track to complete those 300.”
A Local Area SEND inspection carried out in November 2018 found “significant areas of weakness”, leading to a written statement of action being required to address the issues raised.
A re-visit was carried out in early 2022, which identified that “sufficient progress” had been made in tackling six of the significant areas of concern, but insufficient progress had been made to address two other weaknesses.
The Staffordshire SEND partnership – which involves the council’s children’s services, health partners, education providers, parents and carers – was required to produce an Accelerated Progress Plan (APP) to address the two remaining areas of weaknesses identified – coproduction and quality of EHCPs.
A report to the committee said:
“To date, these reviews have provided assurance that the APP is purposeful, well-managed and yielding positive outcomes in the remaining two areas that require improvement.”
Committee chair Cllr Tracey Dougherty said:
“I think that perhaps the reason we have so many EHCPs at the moment is because of the lack of early years intervention. What do you propose going forward to address that?”
Dr Hulusi responded:
“I don’t think intervention in the early years is the only factor for the significant number of Education, Health and Care Plans. There are multiple factors why we have so many EHCPs in Staffordshire.
“There is an awful lot of work going on in the early years space – our early years team have increased their capacity to respond and ensure that the children with the highest level of need in the early years are identified and early years intervention is in place to mitigate those challenges they experience.
“From January, we are going to be launching a pre-statutory intervention for the early years. That’s something we have been doing at school age for nearly two years now, with the ‘enhanced assess, plan, do, review’ intervention, where we’ve had over 1,000 accessing that particular intervention – and those early intervention methods are now going to be in place for the early years children.
“There are lots of reasons why early intervention or increasing early intervention will have an impact on those numbers, but I wouldn’t underestimate the impact of Covid, the impact of challenges we’re facing from a societal and economic perspective, and general changes in attitude and experiences for young people and families in Staffordshire.
“If you layer that onto some of the effects of cuts that we’ve seen in education and social care more broadly, then that’s a pretty toxic cocktail in terms of putting barriers in front of children’s development.”