ePetition details

Improve SEND Services

We the undersigned petition the council to ensure that Kent County Council complies with the points set out in the justification below (1) - (10). Despite the 2019 and 2022 Ofsted/CQC visit and re-visit which highlighted nine areas needing improvement, and the subsequent Improvement Notice and Accelerated Progress Plan, we, who are the parents/carers of children and young people with SEND or are young people who access SEND services, are not experiencing an improved service. Quite the contrary.

We urge that you, as our Councillors, make yourselves familiar with the relevant legislation regarding SEND. We ask that Councillors take steps to ensure that Kent County Council:

1) Improve their communication with us - please provide a non-automated response to our emails and phone calls within five days (though preferably as soon as possible as delays cause a great deal of anxiety) and be honest in all your communications with us. Over the last year, many parents/carers have found that communication with KCC has deteriorated even further with the introduction of the SEND Enquiries Hub.

2) Improves decision making (make the right decision first time round) - too many parents/carers/young people are still having to appeal decisions that KCC are making regarding EHC plans, school placements and EHCN assessments.

3) Complies fully with the SEND Code of Practice and the Children and Families Act 2014 - make sure that all relevant staff are familiar with the laws regarding SEND.

4) Adheres to all statutory timescales for: EHCN assessments, issuing EHC plans, Annual Reviews of EHC plans, Amending EHC plans and naming placements that can meet SEND needs by phase transfer deadlines (instead of naming placements for children and young people that are wholly unsuitable to meet their needs and thus forcing families to appeal to obtain a suitable placement).

5) Produces high quality EHC plans that fully comply with the SEND Code of Practice regarding content, such as describing all SEN in Section B, SMART outcomes in Section E and SEN provision that is detailed and specific in Section F.

6) Complies with all Tribunal orders and decisions within the legal timescales.

7) Provides EOTAS packages for those children and young people for whom they are unable to find a suitable placement, or for whom school is inappropriate.

8) Ensures that all educational settings know how to carry out Annual Reviews that fully comply with the SEND code of Practice.

9) Ensures that caseworkers are consistent and keep accurate records of all correspondence, so that families do not have to repeat information.

10) Ensures that all educational settings identify and support children and young people with SEN, whether they have a diagnosis and/or EHC plan or not.

Our children only have one chance at childhood. The children and young people with SEND today, are the voters of the future - we hope that you listen to us and give them a reason to vote for you at future elections by taking steps to improve their lives now. The wellbeing of children and young people with SEND in Kent is in your hands, please do not let them down.

For point 2, a previous FOI request showed that, in 2023, for cases that were concluded that year concerning refusal to assess, 97 cases were conceded by the LA before the case got to the hearing stage, 69 cases were "won" by the appellant, and only 6 cases were "won" by the LA.

This ePetition ran from 22/04/2024 to 31/05/2024 and has now finished.

309 people signed this ePetition.

Council response

Message sent on behalf of Rory Love, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills

Dear Ms Burton,

I write in response to your online petition posted earlier this year. May I firstly apologise for the delay in providing you with a formal response.

While this petition did not secure sufficient public response to meet the threshold for committee discussion, I should like to assure parents and carers that reform and improvement of the Kent Area's special educational needs (SEN) services remain a priority not only for councillors, but for the entire Council. I fully understand that it takes time for the improvement to reach all parents, and this is especially the case for parents who have had a poor experience of our services in the past. But there have been considerable milestones this year that demonstrate that historic failings are not being repeated. Most importantly, a growing group of parents are reporting improvements across the SEN service and in schools, which means that many children are already benefitting from an increased level of support, allowing them to achieve their full potential.

The Ofsted/CQC revisit in 2022 highlighted that the Kent Area, which includes Kent County Council (KCC) and its partners in the Health and Education sectors, needed a full transformation of its services, as in spite of considerable effort and investment, there had been insufficient improvement progress since their initial assessment in 2019. In response, KCC's Children’s, Young People, and Education (CYPE) leadership focussed on rebuilding the fundamental functions of the service. Poor communication, late decision making, and a lack of pupil’s voice were identified as symptoms of the dysfunction within the service. I was appointed to my Cabinet role as part of the response by The Leader of the Council to the shortfalls identified in the 2022 revisit report. Together with our senior leadership team, my first task was to focus efforts in rebuilding the SEN team’s capacity and expertise. While these initial larger scale improvements were necessary to ensure that the service had the strong foundations it needed to make sustainable improvements, I fully understand that these changes take time to filter through to the experience of individual families. However, there are now clear signs of the impact of the improvements we have already made, and there is a clear commitment from KCC and our partners to continue making the necessary reforms. So far, we have seen the following improvements:

• Over the past year, Kent has nearly tripled the number of assessment decisions made per month. This has cleared significant proportions of historic backlogs, meaning families who have waited longer than they should have waited now have their decision. This also means that staff have a smaller caseload, reducing the chance that future cases will miss deadlines. As an illustration of the clearance of backlogs of work, last summer, our oldest case was 124 weeks old. Put another way, that was two full years over the 20-week deadline. Our latest performance monitoring shows that in September 2024, the oldest case is just 29 weeks old.
• Staff have had one tenth of their working week dedicated to catching up on phone-based communication, which has resulted in over 3000 additional families being contacted to discuss their child’s needs and their progress through the Education, Health, and Care (EHC) Plan process. This contact time must be balanced with the work necessary to complete EHC Plans to statutory timescales, but staff are encouraged to make contact with families as much as possible during the remaining time each week.
• While it is acknowledged that there is still work to be done, Phase Transfer saw significant improvements compared to previous years. This year, 92% of families with a child transferring to secondary school received an answer by the deadline compared to c.70% in 2023, which represents over a 30% improvement year-on-year. The Post-16 process saw 70% of families receiving an answer (compared to c.20-30% last year) completed by the deadline, which is over a 130% increase. Further improvements are planned.
• In a recent independent survey, over 70% of autistic children reported being happy in their Kent school, compared to a national average of 20-25%
• All staff have been given mandatory training or re-training in the Code of Practice and how it should be applied to their role. Kent has also invested £3m in school training to improve the inclusivity and support available in mainstream schools.
• Robust learning loops from audits to practice workshops have been implemented, which has demonstrably increased the quality of the EHC Plans produced.
• System improvements have increased the quality of information held for each child and halved the number of data quality issues.
• We have engaged with school leaders to become Inclusion Champions who have supported Kent in:
o Improved and more consistent decision-making in processes and panels for Request to Assess, Agreement to issue, and High-cost placement.
o Improvement to the quality of new EHC Plans
o Cross-county school engagement to develop a better understanding of the continuum of need, which means children with SEN but without EHC Plans are also provided improved support
o Significant contribution to building confidence in the SEN system, as they are all respected leaders in the sector
• The most dramatic improvement has been the proportion of EHC Plans issued within 20 weeks. In August last year, just 2.3% of Plans were issued within 20 weeks. In September 2024, 64% of Plans were issued within 20 weeks; meaning that Kent County Council is outperforming the national average by over 27%.
• The new Minister for Children and Families, Janet Daby MP, has acknowledged both the commitment and the achievements of Kent County Council and its partners, and has lifted the Government's Improvement Notice for our SEN services.
KCC’s Scrutiny Committee recently agreed to implement a regular schedule of SEN oversight, which highlights KCC’s ongoing commitment to ensuring these initiatives continue to provide improvement for the families of Kent. In addition, I was able to secure an additional £2m for SEN budgets in this year's KCC Budget, to ensure that there is sufficient staff capacity for individual families to experience these improvements first hand. This has helped fund the backlog team, which has been instrumental in bringing down the ages of the oldest cases throughout the last year as outlined above. While it is clear that further improvement is still necessary, parents can be increasingly confident that there are plans in place not only to resolve all previously identified areas of weakness, but to continue the reforms we have been introducing so we can develop a service that meets the developing needs since the revisit.

May I thank you for taking the time to organise your petition, and reassure you that I share your ambitions on all ten steps that you have highlighted, and that work is progressing on meeting them, as I trust I have demonstrated above.

Yours sincerely,

Rory