11 Jul 2022
Dear Parent / Carer,
Following my last letter in January, I wanted to update you about our ongoing work to develop SEND services in Suffolk. We have been very busy working with our partners across Suffolk to make changes and improvements to services
Here are some of the actions and achievements since my last letter.
- We have continued to recruit staff to vacant posts across Inclusion, including recruiting 13 officers to Family Services since January 2022, which includes 3 new Family Service Managers to the vacant posts.
- We have extended the temporary contracts for our two data coordinators who continue to support us with refining our data records.
- We have also extended the temporary contracts for our Advisory Teachers who are working with Family Services.
- We had a new Educational Psychologist (EP) start with us in March and two new EPs due to start in September 2022, which will bring some much-needed capacity to the team.
- The Family Services capacity review was completed by IMPOWER and indicated that if we are to continue to work in the same way with the same trajectory of need to support young people, we would need to recruit more than 20 new members of staff across Family Services. This is addition to the recruitment we have already undertake and described above. We have started to recruit in April 2022 using the £1.1million new investment.
- IMPOWER are working with the Family Services team to support them in improving the quality of conversation they can have with parent/carers and children and young people with additional needs and disabilities.
- We have changed course slightly with the SENCO support line, to build on the current SENCO support line offer which is already available to schools. We are launching an Inclusion Support line, this will be available for all educational settings, colleagues in social care and health to contact for information, advice or guidance to support children and young people with SEND. These posts are currently being recruited to.
- Leaders across the SEND Partnership met with the Department for Education (DfE) and NHS England to review progress against the written statement of action, the DfE noted that a tremendous amount of work had been undertaken although the impact of this is yet to be perceived by many parent/carers.
- Time to Listen events were held in March giving senior Local Authority (LA) and Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Officers the opportunity to hear directly from parent/carers. We use the information from these sessions to help us cross reference that all our work will address any challenges faced by parents/carers.
- Over 30 partners across Suffolk Parent Carer Forum (SPCF), Education, Social Care, Health, and Schools attended a Coproduction training event. This was a really useful session to ensure we had a shared understanding of what coproduction means and how we can productively work together.
- Valuing SEND, a new tool for Suffolk schools to use to support accurate identification of needs and matching that to evidence based provision to meet needs, is being trialled.
- A new member of staff has been appointed in the Work Force Development team to lead in the development of training and induction for staff across Inclusion Services. This will include a review of the current induction training for Family Services with a view to move to online training programme for staff.
- Training for LA and CCG colleagues involved in SEND Decision Making Panels has been delivered in April.
- 82% of phased transfers were completed by the statutory deadline of 15 February and 32% of phased transfers for post 16 were completed by the statutory deadline of 31 March. We know more work is needed to improve annual reviews and phased transfer cohorts – and we are exploring further options of support. This was an improvement on last year.
Next Steps
Our next steps during the summer term are:
- Understand the feedback from schools on the Valuing SEND trial and look at what has worked well and what might need to change
- Finalise the SEND Decision making panel process and ensure membership from Social Care, Health and schools.
- Continue to recruit to new posts across Inclusion from the £1.1million investment by SCC.
- Reflect on the training received to improve conversation with families and look at how we can further improve or change
- Soft Launch of the Inclusion Support Line and introduction of the new advisors
- Continue to improve statutory time scales. Whilst improvement was seen for 15 February deadline, we did not see any improvement for the 31 March deadline.
Other News
- The SEND and Alternative Provision green paper has been published, we will be discussing with partners across SEND what the collective view on the suggestions on the changes needed to the system and we will respond to the consultation.
- Officers from the Local Authority will be joining SPCF in May for an Open Event to meet parent/carers.
If you would like to be kept up to date with our progress and with future developments of SEND in Suffolk, you can:
- Follow us on Facebook and/or Twitter
- Sign up to the Local Offer email subscription list
- Check the News page on our website where we regularly post news and updates
We anticipate that our next update will be published at the end of July 2022. If you have any questions about the review in the meantime, you can email us at sendreview@suffolk.gov.uk.
Yours faithfully
Ros Somerville
Assistant Director, Inclusion, Children & Young People’s Directorate, Suffolk County Council