The government has hired a team of advisers in a bid to improve standards in special educational needs and disability (SEND) services for children and young people in local areas where inspections have flagged serious concerns.
The Department for Education said the 13 advisers have been given £90,000-a-year contracts to work with councils to develop “robust, realistic and achievable plans”.
It comes after the government appointed a commissioner to run services in Birmingham and signalled that it will intervene directly in other areas if needed.
The DfE contract documents say the advisers will provide “a clear and sustained focus on improvement with individual local authorities where there are serious concerns about SEND strategy or operational delivery”.
It says these councils will usually have been identified through “the local area SEND inspection system or other diagnostic work”.
Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have been carrying out SEND area inspections and return visits to areas where it is decided a written statement of action is needed because significant weaknesses have been found.
These inspections were introduced to check on the implementation of the 2014 SEND reforms, which introduced the creation of education, health and care plans.
Ofsted and the CQC have now checked on all education authority areas in England through this framework and are now working on developing a new inspection regime.
As Tes first revealed more than two years ago, the majority of these inspections have found significant weaknesses in the council areas it has visited.
Recent figures show that of the 141 local area inspections, published by 21 March 2022, over half (53 per cent) resulted in a written statement of action, which indicates significant weaknesses in SEND arrangements.
The DfE has recently published its SEND Green Paper, which admits that outcomes for children and young people with SEND are poor and that the experience of navigating the system is not a positive one.
In October last year, the government appointed a commissioner to take over services for children and young people with SEND in Birmingham, after inspectors found that significant weaknesses had not been improved.
The DfE intervened in the area after an Ofsted and CQC report found that sufficient progress had been made in just one of 13 areas of significant weaknesses identified three years earlier.
It appointed John Coughlan to be SEND commissioner for Birmingham and issued a direction on the council to cooperate with him. It was the first time it had directly intervened in the running of council services for children and young people with SEND as a result of failings identified in an area inspection.
In an exclusive interview with Tes, children’s minister Will Quince said the government would not hesitate to step in again if a council was failing to deliver on SEND.
The contract for SEND advisers to support local councils started this month and runs for 12 months, with the option to extend for another 24 months.
A DfE document announcing the contracts said: “The SEND advisers will support a portfolio of designated local authorities in the allocated region in continuing to develop and implement robust, realistic and achievable plans for delivery of their SEND services.
“There will be a particular focus on those areas that have been judged by Ofsted and CQC to require a Written Statement of Action where serious concerns continue to be identified following a revisit and or where concerns are identified with regards to their ability to function sustainably.
“Advisers will be expected to align support provided with the outcomes and recommendations of the SEND Review.”
