At an SEN school but want to change the school at the Annual Review. Has anyone done this?

[greenduck]

DD has been at a specialist school for nearly a year now but we are not happy with the school. I don't want to go into too much detail but we are looking at changing the school in Part 4 of the statement at the annual review meeting.

I am in discussion with other prospective schools so that we have a new school to name. We haven't had an annual review before so I'm not sure of the process. Do we go along and discuss our unhappiness and state that we want to change or do we need to give notice prior to the meeting?

I've spoken to IPSEA who seemed to think that so long as the fees were less (or we paid the difference), there shouldn't be a problem but this seems too easy, given our experience of the statementing process.

Has anyone had any experience of the annual review meeting and been in a similar position?

In theory Ipsea are right, but there might in some circumstances be a danger that the LA will seize on the opportunity to nominate one of their own maintained schools.

The LA would still have to be satisfied that the school you want can meet your dd's needs - no matter if they were funding it or not. We pay the fees for ds3 but the LA come along to his annual reviews every year (even though the school is not named in part 4) to make sure that he is getting the education set out in his statement.

The SEN Code of Practice chapter 9 deals with the annual review process. You can read it here if you don't have a copy

Thank you both.

I'd forgotten about the Code of Practice. There's lots of useful information in there, so thank you for reminding me to get it off the shelf!