Around one in five councils in the country have been chosen to pilot the government’s long-awaited special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reforms.
The Department for Education has said these local authorities will help inform the development of new national standards to improve the consistency of SEND provision for pupils across the country.
It has today named 32 councils that will work in nine regional partnerships to deliver its Change Programme.
When the government published its SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan in March this year, it set out plans for a £70 million Change Programme to pilot some if its planned reforms.
This includes the creation of new national standards in SEND, which are central to its plans.
Today, it has announced the groups of councils that will be working in partnerships in each of the nine regions of England for its Change Programme.
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Children’s minister Claire Coutinho said: “Making sure children with special educational needs and disabilities get a superb education is a priority.
“Earlier this year our improvement plan set out systemic reforms to make sure every child and young person gets consistently high-quality support, no matter where in the country they live.
“Today we’re making sure that those reforms are informed by the experiences of real families, up and down the country, and creating the thousands of new places at specialist schools and in staff training courses that are needed to make sure our plan is a success.”
In the SEND and AP plan, the DfE said that by the end of 2023, it would start testing elements of its new national standards with its regional expert partnerships, who would “help co-produce, test and refine” them.
The government also said that it would aim to publish a significant proportion of the new national standards by the end of 2025, “with a focus on those that are most deliverable in the current system”.
The plan also set out how the Change Programme would help to introduce local SEND and alternative provision partnerships.
The DfE plans for these partnerships to “bring together partners to plan and commission support for children and young people with SEND and in alternative provision” and to create evidence-based local inclusion plans setting out how the needs of children and young people in the local area will be met in line with the new national standards.
The government said in March that it would develop and spread best practice of partnerships and plans through the Change Programme, starting with the regional partnership areas “from spring 2023”.
The DfE has also announced today that seven new free schools have been approved, which will create more than 1,000 new places in Cambridgeshire, Kent, Merton and Norfolk.
