The government is looking at which children’s needs should be met in special and mainstream schools as part of its reforms of the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system, but has yet to decide on the future of education, health and care plans (EHCPs), an adviser has said.
Dame Christine Lenehan, the government’s strategic adviser for SEND, told a conference this morning that the government had been modelling a range of children’s needs and deciding where these should be met in a new system.
A new White Paper setting out the government’s reforms is set to be published in the autumn, and as Tes revealed earlier this year, the Department for Education has been considering the future of EHCPs.
Answering questions at a Westminster Education Forum conference this morning, Dame Christine said the government has still not made a decision.
She said: “We are still working towards a White Paper in the autumn, which is likely to be...October, when the government comes back from the party conference season, but remember this is a moving feast, and there is a lot of work to be done before we get there.
“The government will have had to make a decision on EHCPs when that White Paper is launched.”
Work in progress
Earlier in the online event, she said: “We are still trying to work through this process in terms of how do we hold on to plans? Who needs plans? Are plans the best routes to delivering support for families, and what does it look like?”
Ministers have made clear that a key focus for SEND reforms will be ensuring that the mainstream education system is more inclusive.
But Dame Christine told the event that special schools and alternative provision had not been forgotten as these reforms were being developed.
She added: “One of the things that we have been doing is we have been modelling a whole range of children to say, within a new system, where would those need to be met.”
Schools minister Catherine McKinnell has said previously that research suggests tens of thousands of children could be educated in mainstream settings rather than special schools if the system improved.
There has been widespread controversy over fears that SEND reforms could result in EHCPs ending, or in a reduction in children’s legal rights.
Addressing this, Dame Christine told the event that the parental lobby had lost confidence in government.
She added that the government wanted to communicate that it is “making these changes because we believe your children’s lives should be better, not because we want to take things away”.
SEND system has ‘two separate problems’
Opening her speech at the conference, she said that the system had two fundamental but separate problems: that it was no longer financially sustainable and that outcomes for young people were not good enough.
Dame Christine said: “We know that at schools, there are massive funding pressures. We know that local authorities are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. It is why the government has extended the statutory override [on council high-needs deficits] for the next two years, so that we have a bit of space to try to get this sorted out. So we have to do something financially.
“The second thing, but the very separate thing, is that the outcomes for children in the system are not good enough. And the secretary of state is very clear that even if the financial challenge was not what it is, we would want to be looking at this system, because we can’t be satisfied for the outcomes of children that we’ve got now.”
Dame Christine said that part of the answer was to have a more inclusive education system. She warned that evidence showed that it’s currently “easier for schools to exclude the child than include a child”.
Ofsted is set to inspect inclusion as one of the evaluation areas of its new inspection framework, due to be launched later this year.
Dame Christine said the reforms would look at what inspection mechanisms and what funding mechanism supports inclusion.
A Tes investigation published today has explored whether the current inclusion drive is focused enough on identifying and preventing practices in schools that are failing to be inclusive.
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