Call for crackdown on schools lacking SEND support in Warwickshire

Councillor Kam Kaur (Con, Bilton & Hillside), the county's portfolio holder for education, says Warwickshire County Council is grilling schools with high exclusion rates and is calling for the government to give them the clout to act.

It came during the discussion of the county council’s plans to more than treble the resourced provision places it makes available for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) pupils in Warwickshire schools.

With demand and costs growing, the idea is to weave more specialist support into mainstream schools, taking the pressure off oversubscribed special needs schools and reducing the need to pay for costly private providers – the council has stated “the rationale is not to remove children from special schools”.

The plan and ideas behind it were welcomed by rival political parties but Labour group leader Councillor Sarah Feeney (Benn) expressed concern that more proactive schools could become victims of their own success and put upon by those less inclined to do the right thing.

“There are still some schools in our authority that are perhaps not quite delivering what we want in terms of reasonable adjustment needs,” she said.

“I don’t want it to become a case of them being able to push their children towards resourced provision, I think we need to make sure they are doing their bit first before we start moving children towards other schools with resourced provision.

“We have some really excellent provision, schools that really care about their kids and are really invested in good outcomes for SEND kids. I want to make sure that they don’t suffer for doing so well.”

Cllr Kaur noted how the county does not have direct power over academies, independent bodies that run the vast majority of secondary settings across the country, not just in Warwickshire.

She said: “We know the schools that are not particularly good at being inclusive and we are proactively working with those schools. We know that from the exclusion rate so we are very mindful and understanding of those.

“We are now looking at how we escalate when that support mechanism doesn’t work, because we don’t have powers over schools, we cannot force them to do anything other than fulfil our statutory duty to educate children.

“We are very much on that, going in with the data to ask how we help them to improve and what they are doing about it. We are now challenging schools more with that data, we have the facts in a way that we didn’t before.

“If they persist, we will now be escalating to the Department for Education (DfE) and to the regional director. If we have no powers, the schools are not listening and the parents are frustrated, it creates more problems in the system, so I think there needs to be a way of escalating and for government to understand that this is a problem.”

Cllr Kaur had earlier already stated that “if the child requires specialist provision this will still be commissioned”, which reassured other political groups, and highlighted the advantage of more SEND children being catered for closer to their homes.

It was also raised that schools do not have to say yes to rolling out resourced provision but Cllr Kaur said she had been heartened by the response to recent engagement, revealing that five Warwickshire schools have recently shown an interest.

Referring to monthly meetings of the Warwickshire Education Board, she said: “We discuss and share good practice and what is coming on the horizon.

“We have talked a lot about SEND, what the challenges are within schools, understanding the workforce and that there is a pressure there, also understanding the demand.

“We have no power over the academies and trusts, we cannot force them to have resourced provisions, but we can work in partnership with them and it is really important we do that.

“We had the headteacher’s conference a few weeks ago which was attended by more than 220 different schools and governors, and from that we have already had five schools come forward to say they would like to be considered for a resourced provision which is really good news.

“I think schools are beginning to recognise the advantages of having resourced provision on their sites.”