Dear Colleagues

May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year and send you my best wishes for 2025.

In this News Update I have brought together a number of key developments and documents that have been published in the last few months.

Attendance, Suspensions and Exclusions

The following set of guidance all came into force from September 2024. It is really important that anyone working and supporting pupils with SEND understand all this guidance and the implications for SEND pupils.

Working together to improve school attendance – Updated 19th August

This guidance for schools, academy trusts, governing bodies and local authorities on maintaining high levels of school attendance, including roles and responsibilities has been updated to clarify:

• independent schools are not required to submit daily data to the Department
• penalty amount for children present in public places whilst excluded from school
• supervision requirements for approved educational activities
• statistical meaning for code C2.

There is also added further guidance on the use of code E, code Q, code Y6 and code Y7.

Children missing education – Updated 19th August

This statutory guidance for local authorities and advice for other groups on helping children who are missing education get back into it has been updated to bring the guidance in line with the Working together to improve attendance statutory guidance and the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024.

Providing remote education: guidance for schools – Updated 19th August

This guidance on how schools can maintain their capability to provide remote education when it is not possible for some or all of their pupils to attend in person has been updated to include a link to new regulations on school attendance.

School suspensions and permanent exclusions – Updated 19th August

This guidance on the suspension and permanent exclusion of pupils from local-authority-maintained schools, academies and pupil referral units has been updated to reflect new regulations on school attendance.

Elective home education – Updated 19th August

This guidance for local authorities and schools about children educated at home has been updated with 2 new sets of attendance regulations that came into force on 19 August 2024.

 SEND Developments

SEND in parliamentary debates

In early September there were three SEND parliamentary debates. The first on SEND Services in Somerset, the second on SEND Provision in Hertfordshire and Central Bedfordshire and the third one on SEND Provision in England.  At the end of the third debate Minister McKinnell did a closing speech.

Her key points about SEND were:

• Acknowledgement that the current system isn’t working for too many families
• Children and young people with SEND should receive support locally as far as possible
• A commitment to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools
• Continuation of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme into academic year 2024-25
• A commitment to working with the sector on system improvements
• (Already announced) £140m extra for the core schools’ budget, with 2025-26 budget dependent on the Budget on 30 October
• Acknowledgement of the hard work from sector professionals in education, health and care

Special Educational Needs – House of Lords Debate – 24^th October 2024

The debate covered a range of topics, including:

• The need for more funding for government schools, including special needs schools
• The need to improve inclusivity and expertise in mainstream settings
• The need to ensure that specialist settings cater to those with the most complex needs
• The need to identify and address needs earlier
• The need to develop a whole-system approach to drive improvements
• The need to review the effectiveness of the “education and healthcare plans” process

Support for children and young people with special educational needs – National Audit Office – October 2024

This report assesses how well the current system is delivering for children and young people (from birth to 25 years) in England identified as having SEN. It also looks at DfE’s progress in addressing the underlying challenges to providing a sustainable system that achieves positive outcomes for children.

Its recommendations are:

Given the challenges facing the SEN system, DfE and the wider government should:

• explicitly consider whole-system reform, to improve outcomes for children with SEN and put SEN provision on a financially sustainable footing
• undertake work to understand the root causes behind increases in SEN and demand for EHC plans and special school places to ensure the whole system addressees them
• build a more integrated system by, for example, developing a shared understanding of how identifying and supporting SEN should be prioritised, including within the health system; ensure those with accountability can act, including local authorities requiring providers to accept pupils; and consider where multi-disciplinary teams can make jointly-owned support decisions.

To make better use of funding, DfE should:

• as a matter of urgency, work with MHCLG and HM Treasury, to share with local authorities its plans for ensuring each local authority can achieve a sustainable financial position once the statutory override ends in 2025-26, including how cumulative deficits will be treated and any wider financial impact managed
• develop its use of evidence to better understand how and why pupil numbers change across different settings to assess the need for spaces across local areas and types of setting, and how this will impact, for example, home-to-school transport costs
• develop a vision and long-term plan for inclusivity across mainstream education. This should consider opportunities to adapt funding and accountability arrangements to encourage inclusivity, building an evidence base for where mainstream settings can best support children with SEN; and how to improve parents’ confidence
• ensure that it consistently translates its ambitions into an implementation approach with actions and sufficient detail on how improvements will be achieved, how much they will cost, how they inter-relate, how long they will take and the implementation risks
• undertake a specific exercise, drawing on local authority insights, to identify and share opportunities for efficiencies. This should consider routine reviews of individual EHC plans to assess if they are working, and benchmarks for local authorities to assess how much specialised provision should cost
• improve the data, incentives and processes to ensure children’s needs are identified and supported as early as possible, particularly within early years.

 An excellent summary of the report from Special Needs Jungle can be found here.

Bridget Phillipson’s Speech to the Confederation of School Trusts – 7th November

This document contains the Secretary of State’s speech to the Confederation of School Trusts.

At this conference she announced the appointment of Dame Christine Lenehan as our strategic advisor on SEND.  She will play a key role in convening and engaging the sector, including leaders, practitioners, children and families, as we consider next steps for the future of SEND reform. 

She also announced the appointment of Tom Rees, Chief Executive of Ormiston Academies Trust to lead a group of experts to help drive forward work on inclusion in mainstream education settings. 

New specialist places to be created in mainstream schools – Press Release – 4th December

Thousands of pupils are to benefit from a £740 million cash injection from the Government to pave the way for more pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to achieve and thrive in mainstream schools.

This new funding can be used to adapt classrooms to be more accessible for children with SEND, and to create specialist facilities within mainstream schools that can deliver more intensive support adapted to suit the pupils’ needs. 

 SENDIST Tribunal Statistics – 12th December

The latest figures from SENDIST (2023-2024) released on 12th December, indicates that there was a 54.53% rise in the number of appeals to the Tribumal with local authorities having only a 1.3% success rate.

Check out the details of the statistics on the Special Needs Jungle website.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024 – 18^th December 2024

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill aims to change the law to better protect children and raise standards in education. The government will legislate to allow councils to open schools again, end the automatic academisation of failing maintained settings and make academies follow reformed national teacher pay scales and conditions. The measures, set to be introduced as part of the renamed “children’s wellbeing and schools bill”, represent the latest move away from the academies model by the new Labour administration.

The Bill contains a great deal of detail of the impact this will have on schools. This includes:

• Schools will only be able to insist that a pupil has a maximum of three branded uniform items
• Flexi-schooled pupils will need to be on council registers – the bill will create a duty on councils to create and maintain registers of children not in school, and to support children on those registers if councils seek that support
• The bill will reform the process by which school attendance orders are issued. There will be statutory timeframes for issuing and processing them, and the process for maintained schools and academies will be aligned
• Special school parents will need council permission for home education
• There will be a new legal definition of full-time education – defined as one where a child “could be expected to receive all or a majority of their education at the institution”
• The bill introduces a “more intrusive inspection regime” for suspected illegal schools
• The bill seeks to extend the powers of the Teaching Regulation Agency to cover individuals who commit serious misconduct “when not employed as a teacher, but who have at any time carried out teaching work”
• QTS and national curriculum requirement for academies
• New non-compliance directions for academy trusts
• No automatic academy orders – the education secretary will no longer have a duty to issue an academy order to a school “causing concern”, though she will retain it as a power
• Councils can open new schools (but SoS will decide)
• National pay rules extended to academies … but not CEOs
• There will be new duties on mainstream state schools and councils to co-operate on admissions, and for mainstream, special and alternative provision state schools to co-operate with local authorities on place-planning
• Councils will also get the power to direct academies to admit a child who has been refused admission or been permanently excluded from every suitable nearby school
• Councils can object to academies’ capacity,

For more information on each of these see the Schools Week article.

CONSULTATION: Education Select Committee Solving the SEND Crisis Inquiry.

The Education Committee has launched a major new inquiry focused on finding solutions to the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision.

The Committee is seeking evidence on short term actions to stabilise the SEND system which is currently experiencing increased demand, protracted waiting times and increased pressure on schools and local authorities. The Committee will also be looking at how, beyond stability, long term sustainability of the SEND system can be achieved to support and improve outcomes for children and young people with SEND.

The closing date for submissions is 30th January 2025.

Best wishes