Create an environment where SEND staff can do quality work

Our learning from the interviews and focus groups is that handling potential disagreement ‘flashpoints’, such as refusal to assess, or refusal to issue a plan or disagreement over the content of a plan, requires LA SEN team members to have excellent interpersonal skills, person-centred values, attitudes and behaviours, and the skills and knowledge to carry out their role legally and in the spirit of underpinning the principles of the Children and Family Act 2014.

To minimise disagreements and maximise early resolution of those that do arise, it is at this early stage that it would seem most appropriate to concentrate any resources that can be put into the system e.g. improved standards of recruitment of staff, initial and regular training, staffing capacity matched to demand. Many parents interviewed for this research raised their concerns about the quality of SEND team staff, especially at case officer level. Issues raised included examples of case officers being unaware of the correct processes to follow for EHC needs assessment; being unable to provide information on personal budgets; repeatedly not answering e-mails or phone calls; communicating in a manner perceived by the parent as rude or dismissive;

communicating as if they knew the child better than the parents, despite never having met the child, and coming across to the parent as abrupt and uncaring. Our sample of parents was drawn from the minority of parents who have experienced SEND

disagreements: their views about SEND team staff may not reflect the views of the majority of parents interacting with SEND teams.

Among the parents interviewed, there were those who had gone through the process of EHC needs assessment and drafting of the EHC plan. The majority of these parents reported receiving poor quality draft EHC plans. Issues were about these being poorly written, incorporating cut and paste from reports that made a nonsense of the meaning of what was in the reports, lack of specificity, failure to incorporate the parents’ views

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(even when that part of the process had been done in a very person-centred way). For example, Parent 37 reported a very positive experience of EHC needs assessment:

"My experience was of very child-centred planning, with the right support in place. A lot was based on observation of [my son] i.e. it was child-centred,

gaining the reports and engaging with the appropriate agencies effectively and in liaison with them." (Parent 37)

She was therefore very disappointed to find that, "The plan was very poorly written [...] not measurable, reasonable or achievable. It left things open to interpretation and therefore there was poor provision in Section F. It went through nine drafts to get to the Final.” During the delay of producing these nine versions, her son was excluded from his school. Again, we emphasise that the group of parents interviewed were those who had experienced SEND disagreements. Their experiences of the EHC plan

development process cannot be assumed to match the experiences of the majority of relevant parents.

Once parents and an LA SEN team were in disagreement, it seemed very difficult for issues to be resolved; instead, more and more seemed to go wrong. For example, paperwork being lost, or sent to the wrong school, or draft EHC plans being sent to the parents with the wrong child’s details on the front and the wrong child’s name

throughout (this was reported multiple times in our small sample of parents). These issues exacerbated the original disagreement. Other examples were of meetings called to address the disagreement that, instead, made things worse through the tenor of the conversation. For example, one parent reported being told to her face by an SEN manager, “Why would I waste money trying to educate your daughter?” The interviews with parents included many examples of incidents in this vein. This suggests that there is a need to spread good practice around ‘self-correct’ processes (for example,

stopping, reflecting, re-considering, meeting with the parent and young person or child). Analysis of interview data from parents in our sample showed that disagreements that were not resolved quickly, but were instead exacerbated, often linked back to SEND teams that were described by the parents as under pressure and/or to case officer-level staff reported as having had little or no training in SEND law and good practice, or in good practice in working with parents. It was also clear from our parent interviews that these parents were also under pressure, being the parents of one or more children with SEND.

It was clear from their interviews that the parents expected that SEND teams would have the knowledge, skills, qualities and workload capacity to put the legislation into practice in the spirit in which it was intended. They expressed disappointment when, in their experience, this was not the case. A few parents interviewed (e.g. Parents 20 and 78) argued that LA EHC needs assessment and planning officers should have

mandatory training in the relevant legislation and the SEND Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years (DfE, 2015) before they were allowed to work with parents or write EHC plans.

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From the LA focus groups, we heard about good practice in this regard, with locally developed training being given and systems of monitoring timelines and case

management supervision put in place. (Further details in the forthcoming associated

Good Practice Guide, Cullen, 2017.)