How 'broken relationships' in special education in North Northamptonshire are being repaired

A ‘critical level’ of tribunals, broken relationships, a lack of oversight and money being paid to schools for pupils who had already left.

The state of North Northamptonshire Council’s special educational needs and disabilities service has been laid bare in a brutally honest assessment by the service boss.

Straight-talking AnnMarie Dodds took over as Director of Children’s Services at North Northamptonshire Council a year ago, although she had been interim director since the departure of Cathi Hadley in January 2022.

The department she inherited was over-budget, had huge paperwork backlogs and schools were unable to meet the needs of children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs).

On Tuesday (February 28) Ms Dodds appeared before the council’s Scrutiny Commission to outline to members the huge strides the service has made during the past 14 months as part of a wide-ranging improvement plan.

In a presentation, she told councillors that big changes had been made, and more were to come.

She said: “Special school provision was unable to meet the increased needs of children and young people that were referred.

“When I started more than half our children with EHCPs were educated in special schools which was completely out of kilter with other authorities.

"Budgets were under pressure as local special school demand and the use of external independent places had increased. Too many of our children were educated in special schools unnecessarily.

"There was a lack of strategic and operational oversight around SEND.

“The SEND early help offer didn’t exist. The only offer that the council had was get an EHCP, go to a specialist placement. It was crashing the budget and over-assessing some of our children.

"We have some of our children in special schools that don’t need to be there but we have some children who should be in special schools that aren’t, because they’re full. There are challenges at both ends of the budget.”

When Ms Dodds arrived she said that between two and four per cent of EHCPs were being completed within the 20 week timeframe. That number has now gone up to 67 per cent.

In July 2022 there was a backlog of 140 out-of-time assessments and 900 unprocessed annual reviews because case loads for individual staff were in excess of 600. Government guidelines recommend no more than 150 per officer.

Ms Dodds added that this time last year there was a ‘critical level’ of 37 ongoing tribunal cases, with most of them having missed the deadline for submission. She added: “Tribunal cases were through the roof. When I started it was in excess of £250,000 per annum that was being spend on tribunals.”

She said staff had managed to significantly reduce that figure to £73,000 by improving relations with families and talking and listening to them before the need to bring in mediation.

She said: “There were very broken relationships between the local authority and families and schools.

"The parent carer forum were a very small, niche, West Northants-centric group, and there weren’t any parent carers from North Northamptonshire on the forum.”

The meeting also heard that since Covid there had been a big increase in children with speech, language and communication difficulties as well as social, emotional and mental health problems on the council’s books. There had also been a big increase in under-5s with EHCPs – up from 0.3 per cent of children in 2018 to 0.7 per cent of children this year.

She described governance arrangements at the previous local education authority as a ‘shocker’. Many schools were being handed money for children that were no longer at that school. EHCPs were also never closed down for some children and 168 are now in the process of being ceased. The authority has already saved £500,000.

Ms Dodds said: “There were many, many awards of money to schools and organisations to institutions to individuals that were not managed through contracts, that weren’t attached to children.

"Schools were using this as mechanism to increase their income and what we were finding when I delved a little deeper is that some of the children who they were claiming funding for had left the school or had moved on and the money was still being paid to the schools.”

She described how in her first few weeks at the authority she was asked to sign off on £110,000 of investment for a school that had, on the say-so of former officers, formed a ‘unit’ because it had six or more children with EHCP. But there was no evidence as to why the school should receive the money. It meant that the funding would always go straight to the school for its ‘unit’ and not follow the child. Ms Dodds said this was ‘morally wrong’.

The department now only makes awards that are specific children or to units that are recognised as such by the DfE or Ofsted.

During the past year the authority has managed to get the number of children with an EHCP being educated at home down from 22 to four. They have significantly cleared backlogs and are concentrating on trying to get as many children as possible into local schools rather than in out-of-area schools.

The department is expecting a planned Ofsted visit shortly.