"Special schools are in a very 'liminal' space at the moment - between being wanted and unwanted."
In the past week, newly uncovered local authority SEND Reform Plans, revealed by Schools Week and Tes magazine, offer the first glimpse of how councils intend to deliver the Government's SEND reforms. Overall, they raise significant concerns about implementation, parental (lack of) confidence, workforce capacity and access to specialist expertise.
They also highlight a fundamental tension at the heart of the reforms. Special school expertise is expected to be central to the Experts at Hand programme, yet there remains little clarity on how that expertise will be commissioned, funded and shared. At the same time, local authorities are being incentivised to reduce reliance on special school placements.
In her latest blog, NASS CEO Claire Dorer OBE sets out the challenges facing special schools as the reforms begin to take shape and the unanswered questions about their future role within the SEND system.
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The past couple of weeks have seen a flurry of articles, based on journalists who have been able to uncover some rather reclusive Local Authority SEND Reform Plans. Every Local Authority was required to submit one of these in June, setting out how they would work towards the ambitions proposed in February’s SEND Reforms consultation. The Department for Education is expected to have marked this homework this month and will either accept or reject the plans. It’s worth more than just a passing grade – acceptance of the plan comes with a cash prize of a 90% write-off of the Local Authority’s High Needs Block overspend.
In their wisdom, the Government decided that these did not have to be made public. NASS, amongst others, has challenged this but, as yet, there are no plans to require publication of the plans. Major system change is being proposed without key stakeholders being able to even see if or how they might be impacted. With the 2014 reforms failing at the point of implementation, despite a very open and collaborative process to that point, one wonders if the Government has failed to take some key learning on board.
The plans secured by both Schools Week (Revealed: What SEND reforms are proposed for your area?) and Tes magazine (Government warned of 'critical' risks to SEND reforms | Tes) reveal significant anxiety from Local Authorities about delivering on reforms – about parental (lack of) confidence, burnout of mainstream school staff and the Experts at Hand being largely unavailable.
When the reforms were announced back in February, there were generally warm words from stakeholders about the Experts at Hand programme. The £1.8 million pot initially seemed like a lot of money – less so when split over 3 years and divided up between all local authorities. There were welcome aspirations to increase the numbers of available Educational Psychologists, Speech and Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists and Specialist Teachers. Of particular interest to NASS and our members was the assertion that funding would be made available to enable better sharing of expertise between special and mainstream schools. It’s something we have long called for. However, as my colleague Jasper wrote recently (The experts are at hand - but where are they coming from? | NASS) the detail on how this would be secured and facilitated has been lacking.
The published SEND Reform plans allow a chance to see how local authorities are planning to use the funding. Overall, it doesn’t make for a reassuring read! Across the plans, local authorities talk about difficulties in securing more professionals – specialists are not quick to ‘grow’ and they were already in too short supply across the system. There are realistic concerns about this expertise being unavailable to draw on until the reforms are well underway. 30 of the 40 plans obtained by Schools Week rated this as a risk that was ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to occur, and it is not likely that there will be simple mitigations to apply.
The plans are far less detailed about how special school expertise will be drawn upon. Whilst this is a key element of Experts at Hand, most published plans are more likely to focus on how numbers of placements in special schools can be first held at current numbers and, ultimately, reduced. Indeed, local authorities will be financially rewarded for not increasing special school numbers, with ‘top marks’ going to those local authorities who achieve this feat. Alongside this, we have seen local authorities such as Hertfordshire seeking to reconfigure their special schools to focus exclusively on the ‘most complex needs’ (still no shared definition of what this means). This places low-incidence highly specialised, but not inevitably ‘complex’ provision under severe threat. Some local authorities have challenged this and stated that further special school capacity is needed – we hope that this will be accepted and not penalised.
It feels as if special schools are in a very 'liminal’ space at the moment – between being wanted and unwanted, highly specialist but only until they can train mainstream to do what they can do, the right place for some children but the wrong place for most. It’s a time of huge uncertainty, at a point where two thirds of special schools are beyond their stated capacity and struggling to meet the needs of existing learners from within existing staff. It’s not a place where you would automatically think about giving up some of your staffing and expertise to support the local mainstream schools and inclusion bases intended to diminish your role further.
The failure to define how special schools fit into the Experts at Hand programme stems from a wider problem to define the role that special schools could or should play in the new system. The reforms talk warmly about the role they play for those with complex needs whilst also saying that children do worse in special than mainstream schools. There is no clear vision for the role that special schools are being asked to play and, consequently, no clear plans or pathway for how special schools can develop and adapt to meet this vision.
In practice, this leaves clear tensions and confusions. There has been no guidance to local authorities on what good commissioning of special school support looks like and it has been left to each authority to determine what they might need from special schools and to secure it. Under that broad task sits multiple co-dependent tasks which appear to have been given no consideration. Perhaps the most fundamental is identifying what support, skills and expertise are needed from special schools to support mainstream inclusion. It is likely that most mainstream schools have a wish to manage behaviours arising from unaddressed needs of autistic children and/or those with social and emotional needs. Special schools with this expertise may well find a willing mainstream audience and we already have some good examples of this, such as Muntham House School’s work on CAMHS support. It is less clear how lower incidence expertise will be commissioned, such as for children with physical disabilities or sensory impairments. Will every special school’s expertise be in demand and, if so, how will this be identified, managed, and more importantly, funded?
There has been no guidance on how expertise should be commissioned and then procured from special schools. What is a fair price for this expertise? Most of the special schools NASS works with are keen to offer support and provide outreach. However, first they have to develop the capacity to release staff or create stand-alone outreach services, both of which require developmental costs long before you get to paying for service delivery. The Experts at Hand funding is explicitly directed towards service delivery, rather than service development but the charges for this have to include elements of back-office costs to make services sustainable. Most special schools that deliver outreach do so without recouping the cost of their input as a gesture of goodwill. That’s a testament to the schools, but it is a precarious model on which to build sustainable reforms. It is made more precarious by a lack of national guidance and standards on how local authorities should go about this task.
If we get to a point of identifying the expertise that mainstream schools need, the next key task that is currently invisible is determining if and how this expertise builds capacity in mainstream. We tacitly assume that being exposed to expertise is a good thing but what are the inputs and processes that lead to expertise held in special schools becoming expertise also held in mainstream schools? There is a lot of talk about training for mainstream school staff. I’d argue that this is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for building mainstream school expertise. How do we enable and fund special schools to develop and sustain practice? Do we know what expertise can translate to mainstream settings and where the limits of this lie? For me, this takes us back to the problem caused by the lack of a specified role for special schools – we cannot tell when mainstream can reasonably be expected to have reached the limits of its expertise and when a special school is the right placement. Beyond this, we do not have a clear sense of the relative impact of environment on inclusion. As many parents have already pointed out, expertise in itself won’t help their children to manage in a 2,000-place school with echoey corridors and crowded dining halls.
We are in a strange place at the moment of both waiting for the Government’s response to the SEND Reforms consultation and seeing the proposed programmes already underway in a number of key areas. The juggernaut is already rolling down the hill – how easy will it be to stop it, or at least divert it into a slow lane to avoid it crashing? Our contact with our special school members shows us that we have a sector with expertise that are keen to share but there are many barriers to actually sharing it effectively. In July I met with Schools Minister Georgia Gould who undertook to be clearer about the future role of special schools. It’s now time to make good on that promise.