Department for Education's first report on SEND reforms

The Department for Education (DfE) has released two substantive reports assessing the impact of the special educational needs and disability reforms.

The special educational needs and disability reforms took effect in September 2014. Before this, in October 2011, the DfE launched 20 trials across 31 local authorities. These were called pathfinder programmes and they were designed to identify difficulties with the reforms and find solutions.

The DfE has today, 30 July 2015, published the final reports which assess these pathfinder programmes. They look at how parents feel about special educational needs support in the pathfinder regions vs those not in pathfinder regions. As those regions have been working under the new regime for an extra 3-4 years, they may give a window to how parents nationally are likely to see special educational needs support in 3-4 years’ time.

The two reports can be found here. There is a summary report running to just eight pages. A comprehensive report containing all the data is also available, running to a mere 238 pages.

What are the findings?

The reports are balanced. They find that the reforms have had some positive impacts, however, the costs of those changes is significant. The ‘benefits’ of the reforms also seem fairly muted.

There are thousands of statistics that could be drawn from these reports. In isolation, they could be used to prove almost anything.

We provide the following to try to give a balanced view of the data obtained:

• Under the ‘old’ system, which was the reason for the reforms, 20% of families felt dissatisfied. That figure has not changed despite the reforms

• The number of families happy about the assessment process and procedure has increased from 26% to 33%. The report describes this as “significantly more satisfied”. We are not sure that this conclusion can be drawn from this change

• The positives about the new process were that families felt that the process was user-friendly, enabled access to a wider selection of services and put families are the centre of the process

• The difficulties with the new process were that key workers were not often available, delays often occurred, there was a general lack of information, there was a lack of specificity in the Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and that EHCPs were not being followed

• The number of families that felt that the process was straightforward has increased from 40% to 52%

• Three quarters of families have never heard of the Local Offer. This is worrying as the Local Offer is meant to be a fundamental part of the reforms, designed to help families know what services are available. Local authorities should publish the Local Offer and raise awareness of it. Failure to prepare a Local Offer has already been a feature of judicial review

• The families in the pathfinder local authorities that did know about the Local Offer found it less helpful than those outside of the pathfinder local authorities.

• The number of families that strongly agreed that educational provision is “suitable” has increased from 32% to 40%

• The number of families that strongly agreed that social care provision is “suitable” has increased from 25% to 38%

• The number of families that strongly agreed that health provision is “suitable” has increased from 30% to 36%

We would note that there is a significant difference between “suitable” and “adequate”. Whilst the support might be “suitable” – i.e. it is for the right special educational need and disability – it may not be an adequate level of support.

• The number of families that consider that “adequate” support is provided has increased by only 4 percentage points

• The number of families reporting that their child has “good” or “very good” health in the pathfinders is less than in non-pathfinder local authorities. This calls into question the level of engagement by local health services in the pathfinder local authorities

• The reports look at ‘outcomes’ for children, such as seeing friends, enjoying school and getting on with peers. These outcomes show no real difference between pathfinder and non-pathfinder local authorities

• The reports look at ‘outcomes’ for adults, such as parental quality of life, control over daily life and parental health. These outcomes show no real difference between pathfinder and non-pathfinder local authorities

• Families are unsure whether there is any actual benefit to the special educational needs reforms. When asked whether support services are better under the ‘new’ regime, 11% of families in the pathfinder local authorities replied ‘don’t know’. This response was given by 3% of families in the non-pathfinder families. This means that the local authority operating under the ‘new’ system had fewer families who knew whether there was any change

• The families that previously thought that the process to secure additional support was “too long” now consider it be “about right”. This is in response to the reduction from 26 weeks to 20 weeks.

The cost of it all

The report finds that the process now costs local authorities an extra £254 per family. It seems that this is the extra cost to ‘new’ entrants to the system. This means that to go from SEN Support to an Education Health and Care Plan now costs £254 more than it did to go from School Action / School Action Plus to a Statement.

As the reforms were brought in to try to involve parents, the report considers the costs of the reforms as against the number of parents that now feel ‘better’ about the system. The cost per parent who feels ‘better’ is calculated to be £3,175 per family. Clearly, if more families feel ‘better’ about the system, that cost will be driven down.

Can we draw any conclusions?

It will not be controversial to say that most people are disappointed with the Local Offer.

Local authorities are simply not putting Local Offers together properly or promoting them adequately. What is a worry though is that the local authorities that were meant to find out the problems with the new system have managed to prepare less accessible and poorer quality, Local Offers than the local authorities not in the pathfinder programmes.

We could look at this cynically and question whether there is a material improvement, or simply that parents feel less ‘worn out’ from seeking support. Taking it on face value though, it is promising to see some families reporting that they feel provision is adequate. This is limited by the list of difficulties that families had with the ‘new’ system as that list seems very similar to the concerns with the ‘old’ system.

From our experience, local authorities are telling parents that they need to be more cooperative and engaging with them as a result of the special educational needs reforms. We wonder if simply being told this makes parents feel that there has been an improvement.

Much of these results suggest that the pathfinder programme was not very effective. More families in pathfinder local authorities did not know whether there had been a change in services as compared to non-pathfinder local authorities. As a significant part of path-finding was to improve services, this difference is worrying.

We think that the reports indicate that the reforms have brought some benefits. However, the lack of information and collaboration are limiting these successes. The cost of these reforms currently seems to be a significant issue. Hopefully, they will be justified in the course of time.