Purpose

The timely completion of Education, Health and Care needs
assessments makes an important contribution to ensuring that
children and young people with additional needs and disabilities
receive the right support, in the right place, at the right
time.
The Education Health
and Care Needs Assessment Timeliness Recovery Plan is being
accelerated to address the current significant delays.  This strategy to improve timeliness is
multi-faceted, but one of the most critical parts of the plan is to
significantly increase short term capacity to the Educational
Psychology service and SEN services to address the overdue workload
of needs assessments and annual reviews. 
 
A SEN contract is required
initially for up to 12 months because it would not be feasible for
the service to recruit or manage the level of temporary resource
quickly or effectively enough to meet the level of workload
expected in the short term.

Content

RESOLVED:
 

1.   
That Cabinet gives approval to procure additional
Educational Psychology service capacity and Special Educational
Needs service capacity up to the aggregate contract value of
£15m over 3 years between 2023/24 and 2026/27.

2.   
That Cabinet approves the delegation of contract
award decisions to the Executive Director for Children, Families
and Lifelong Learning in consultation with the Cabinet Member for
Education and Lifelong Learning and the Cabinet Member for Finance
and Resources.
Reasons for Decisions:
 

The timely completion
of Education, Health and Care needs assessments and annual reviews
(collectively referred to as EHCP Timeliness throughout this
report) makes an important contribution to ensuring that children
and young people with additional needs and disabilities receive the
right support, in the right place, at the right time.

 

The EHCP Timeliness
Recovery Plan is being accelerated to address the current
significant delays and approvals are required to avoid delays in
procuring services and allocating funding and resources. There is
an urgent need to retain existing capacity and secure additional
flexible capacity in the Council’s Educational Psychology
(EP) and Special Educational Needs (SEN) services to improve the
timeliness of these services at pace.

 

Approval of the
recommendations in this report will have multiple benefits, the
most important being an improvement in the experience of families
and outcomes of children and young people with additional needs and
disabilities undergoing an EHC needs assessment or awaiting an
annual review.