Parliamentary Questions about SEN Direct Payments

[appropriatelyemployed]

See http://goo.gl/vskUr here in case of interest.

That should be here

Verrrryyy interesting, thanks for sharing.

oohh! You are making interesting friends these days.

Not was....IS! It is a matter of 'interpretation' says my LA as it cashes its DoE cheque.

Interesting isn't it the funding. My LA has reorganised services so disabled childrens team and SEN one team, but had planned to do this anyway. I very much doubt they have created any new posts as actually making staff redundant. Only about 5 young people have got personal budgets but they were all needing significant support and previously would have been sent out of area to residential but decided to pool their budgets for a local 'bespoke' (new buzz word) package - which I am pretty sure will have worked out far cheaper than 5 residential placements. They have refused DP to anyone else including the under 5 children who are part of the pilot for testing the single plan. So while I can see there may have been a lot of meetings and management time I can't see how this can have added up to £75k for 9 families to get no more support than they would under the old scheme.

Minister's response pretty slippery we need to get him on MNSN!

Indeed!

I cannot believe that an 'average' of 12 families per LA are getting DP for SEN.

There is this deliberate attempts to conflate direct payments for SEN with direct payments and then just talk about the latter as LAs were offering some form of DPs anyway.

My LA has just re-packaged what it was already offering so they must be making money out of this. Shame on them, really, shame on them.