Getting funding for college places or special needs support

[FionaJNicholson]

I've been carrying out a survey amongst local authorities in England to find out whether many are aware - and making use - of the Alternative Provision Funding mechanism to claim back money spent on special educational needs support and college places for home educated 14-16s.

I've just put the results up here edyourself.org/articles/FundWingReport.php

As an aside, it's incredibly time-consuming trying to coax this sort of info out
of some local councils which is why I haven't been able to release the results
till now, but I wanted to get something published in time for people to use with their LAs for
funding the next academic year 2011-12.

sigh, no idea why that rogue w crept in! I don't know if I can edit my posts so here is the correct link

edyourself.org/articles/FundingReport.php

Thanks for that Fiona.

I had my son's home ed review in early April and mentioned this to our LA adviser. He is both home educated and has SEN and we've been looking into college places (he's 12). He's also taking his first IGCSE this summer. She wasn't aware of your survey and we both suspected that the request had been made to a senior colleague and not filtered down to front line staff. She said she'd look into it further but that was six weeks ago and I've heard nothing back.

Any thoughts on how best to pursue it?

It's incredibly difficult to get up to date email addresses for local authority home ed people! I wrote to all the ones I knew or had managed to discover, but some had moved, others didn't reply. Council info departments often don't know who deals with home ed. If I were you I would now send a link to the Funding Report edyourself.org/articles/FundingReport.php and advise yr LA bod can get in touch with me to go on a mailing list for updates if that would be of any use? I do think you will have difficulty getting college place for a 12 year old though. What's the college said about admission policy for 12 yr olds?

It's incredibly difficult to get up to date email addresses for local authority home ed people! I wrote to all the ones I knew or had managed to discover, but some had moved, others didn't reply. Council info departments often don't know who deals with home ed. If I were you I would now send a link to the Funding Report edyourself.org/articles/FundingReport.php and advise yr LA bod can get in touch with me to go on a mailing list for updates if that would be of any use? I do think you will have difficulty getting college place for a 12 year old though. What's the college said about admission policy for 12 yr olds?

It's about a year since I made enquiries, but they said I could start transition right away if I felt he was ready for college, though I'm not sure if they'd have accepted him onto a course at 12. I was asking about GCSE courses and their only condition was that he would be familiar with some of the syllabus as their GCSE programme is essentially for resits, for students who hadn't got the grades they'd wanted. they were certainly open to having him though.

I forwarded your link to our LA adviser this morning but haven't had a reply back yet. We've had a lot of problems in our area with bad practice and I am convinced the higher levels would have kept this hidden. The adviser was utterly blank when she visited here in April and clearly had never heard about funding possibilities for HE.

The fact that money can be claimed for home ed teens college places is a well-kept secret. I remember coming out of the Select Committee session (October 2009) where they'd just grilled Graham Badman and the civil servant who had been giving backup to Badman absolutely insisted that LAs could claim money for college places. She said they'd always been able to do this and she didn't know why more weren't doing it already. We were really cross and said well, you don't exactly tell anyone that it's possible, in fact GRRR you keep producing Briefing Notes for MPs and Ministers which say that home educated children aren't eligible for any funding.

Even this current year's guidance is a bit rubbish, because if you read it one way it says you can't get money and if you read it in a different way it says you CAN. I've had some LAs telling me point blank that they aren't allowed to claim for home ed children.

It's one of the many reasons this report has taken so long to pull together because typically I'd write to an LA home ed person and they'd say "I don't know about this, it would be really good if we could do this, I'll see what I can find out" and then it would go all quiet and I'd prod them a bit and they'd say "oh sorry I drew a blank, not sure who can deal with this, nobody at the council sees it as a priority etc etc please let me know if you find out anything..." Not saying this invariably happened but it was quite common.

I've fixed up a meeting tomorrow in my home city of Sheffield with council reps and home educators and people from 14-19s at the local college just to get the people asking questions in the same room as the people with the answers! (Well, hmm that's the theory...)

However, I've just been looking at my web logs and there were an awful lot of councils on my website yesterday!

I've had a reply back from our LA HE advisor and she too has 'drawn a blank' when trying to find out more about college funding. She's had a look at the link you posted and will use it to prod some more. She is keen to be fair with home educators but I know her hands are tied by senior colleagues, which seems to be very common, unfortunately.

These are my notes on what happened earlier today at the Town Hall meeting in Sheffield.

Fortunately, we weren't too late to get 14-16s college places sorted for this
September, though in future we would plan meetings in November with
interviews/offers in January to take up place in the September following (ie the
start of the new academic year)

The money definitely seems to be there for home ed 14s-16s college. Or rather, the
council knows it can get the money back once it's paid it out. We think (to be
confirmed) that evening classes, GCSEs (where offered!) A Levels, BTEC, Diploma,
vocational courses, full-time and part-time are all covered.

As a general point, it turns out in Sheffield that the process for sorting 14-16
college/alternative provision is NOT to go first to the college, but to go
through the council 14-19 Extended Curriculum Team, because they are the people
who know the full deal about what's available.

For places this September, the Council's 14-19 team is going to allocate a
Placement Officer as soon as possible who will meet with individual families +
probably the home ed officer from the council to discuss what the young person
wants to do and to go through the options. Additional learning support (for
special needs) is not funded through the normal channels for 14-16s so we need
to do more digging to find out what's available and how to pay for it.

For the time being there will still be a notional ceiling on the number of 14
and 15 year olds in college because the college says it's a whole lot more
work/pastoral care etc for under 16s and they don't get paid for this and it
changes ethos of college. But they already know this will probably change with
the Govnt's Wolf Report saying colleges should open up to 14-16s.

More info on funding for college 14-16s and special needs where children are home educated
edyourself.org/articles/FundingReport.php

As a postscript, if it helps, pls point your LA EHE advisor to my notes on the meeting with Sheffield Council because it's not too late to get college places sorted for this September and the Director of Children's Services in Sheffield has taken a personal interest in moving this forward. Anyway, I just made a new web page here edyourself.org/articles/SheffCouncilFundingMeeting.php

Thanks, have forwarded that.

Not sure how to proceed on a personal level. Since our college would want students to be familiar with the syllabus so that they can essentially take GCSEs as resits, it may be just as easy for us to go the IGCSE route and miss out college altogether. Obviously it's good to have the choice though, so I'm encouraging our LA to look into it further just in case.

Many thanks, Fiona.