Any Governors

[inappropriatelyemployed]

Quick question as a very new Governor looking at some info on vulnerable groups - should SEN/children with disabilities in this group?

I know they will be separately tracked but does there need to be an acknowldgement that they are also vulnerable groups.

Is there any Ofsted guidance?

We include in 'vulnerable children':

children with SEN (school action, school action plus, statement of SEN)
children with medical needs
children with child protection issues
Looked after children

We also monitor the lowest performing 20% (though this group is not the same as 'vulnerable children')

Can I just say that children with SEN and disabled children are not the same. Children with SEN have special educational needs; children with disabilities, or as people now say, special or additional needs, need not. It depends on the child.

If you look at raise online data it will track the progress of children with SEN and Looked After Children but not children with medical needs and children with child protection issues.

Thanks very much. That is really helpful. I should have said children with SEN and children with disabilities.

Is it up to schools to decide who to include in the term 'vulnerable' or does Ofsted provide guidance?

As I understand it there is some discussion about Ofsted asking schools to focus on bottom 20% of achievers rather than monitor children with SEN (this is probably related to the way that SEN funding and support will change once the green paper becomes law, as it will cover far fewer children -- school action and school action plus will disappear).

Your LEA should provide training for governors in monitoring SEN. It's a really good idea to go on their courses as you will get up to date, local authority specific information.

Thanks. SA/SA+ will disappear but there is a vague 'school assistance' category to replace it.

OUr LEA has volunteered to trial the new arrangements, which means in practice that they are now refusing to fund the first 11 hours of any statement, and the school has to fund that out of delegated funds -- which have also been cut because the LEA is now paying the hours over 11. (They used to fully fund all statements over 15, but not at all under that). The result is that schools actually lose money on all statemented pupils who have statements with fewer than 25 hours. The new funding arrangement is preparing the way for portable funding to be spent by parents, which sounds fine in theory but will undermine schools' ability to provide for all children with SEN. The school I'm a governor will lose over £100k next year because of the changes.

But in reality LAs are not trialling these personal budgets to any significant degree - if you look at the evaluation evidence from Pathfinder LAs

Also, I think SEN DPs will be so bogged down with get-out clauses, that parents are going to achieve them very rarely. I got them onlt by obtaining legal aid in my son's name for judicial review.

Currently they are being refused for any reason e.g. with blanket policies refusing them if there is a block contract for provision in place.

LAs simply do not want to lose control to parents.

100k is a very large amount to lose. Are you at a secondary school?

I'm sure you're right about DPs. I can't see that anybody wins, to be frank. Certainly not schools who are trying to provide for a lot of children with SEN.

We're a primary school. The actual amount is quite a lot more than 100k but I don't want to make the school identifiable.

There is another side to this funding reform.

With the previous legislation, my LA lowered the amount of funding they delegated to schools simply because more schools were applying for statements. This meant more schools had to apply for statements (because there was less delegated funding), as a policy decision, which in turn, in my opinion, lowered the entry requirement for a statement, distorting the level of a child's additional need (when compared with national levels).

Requiring a school to show how much they have spent before extra resources are applied for prevent this exaggeration of needs just to receive extra funding (for the school).

There are so may stories concerning statemented funds not following individually funded children ie school using the money / resource as they see fit eg person assigned to do 1 to 1 doing photocopying, working with other children.

The problem of a child's funding not being spent on them was extremely difficult to address, before this reform.

If the child was coping with the lesser resource being channelled towards them they still suffered as their actual 'need' was being distorted (possibly with permanent implications) and schools had no incentive to address this issue.

If they were not coping it could be difficult for parents to ascertain what the problem was, not being able to very easily track what their child's funding was being spent on.

A statement seems to be universally understood as being indicative of a high level of need, yet not all authorities even attempt to require schools to quantify their provision subsequent to awarding the statement.

Instead they seem happy to work using vague matrices, in terms of severity of need, whilst the only aspect of need that is quantifiable is the money that has been spent or that needs to be spent. They have probably taken the view that the administration of monitoring provision would cost more. This is why they then buy in block provision in order to ensure some money actually is spent on Special Needs.

This is why I am pleased that schools need to demonstrate what has been spent. It prevents the manipulating of LA policies by schools, purely for extra revenue. However I fully appreciate there are still many problems, the new legislation does not go far enough to ensure fairness at all.

^ Doing it this way may enforce a cultural change concerning what a school can deal with at a base level. When you read about all this 'working to rule' from teaching unions it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to see how the 'rules' would require more children, with even slightly delayed self care skills, be deemed special needs. Previously teachers (in my Aunt's generation) saw helping children with coats, wiping noses, the odd toilet accident etc as an important part of their job, as an Early Years Practitioner.