Position Statement: Top Up Funding EHCP's

This position statement has been written to share with our community and to update you regarding our involvement with the revision of top-up funding for Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP).

South Glos Parent Carers (SGPC) was invited to be part of a review group to discuss a funding model for top-up funding and attended our first meeting in April 2021. This working group also had representation from mainstream and special school heads, financial leads, and the Local Authority project consultants who were leading the review; so, a wide range of stakeholders. For us, this was reassuring knowing there were various stakeholders involved.  

SGPC acknowledges that there is a reason to review how special educational needs is delivered and supported in South Gloucestershire as a whole, as many families report to us things are not working as they currently stand.   

We also acknowledge the local authority has a duty to work within the constraints of the national funding they receive and must show the Department for Education how it will reduce the deficit of its high needs overspend.  

The most important thing for us as a forum is that the needs of children and young people are met so the agreed outcomes are achieved as set out in an EHCP according to the law.   

In the earlier discussions and from the data and case studies we were presented, the working group agreed with the principles that it was important to have a clearer, transparent, and fairer system for all children.    

 The positives highlighted during the discussions   

• One banding system would enable everyone to have a clearer understanding of what funding would be allocated to each child

• Having one tool instead of multiple tools to allocate the funding could reduce the level of confusion

• As the funding will be based on the needs outlined in section B of a plan, this should help improve the quality of new EHC plans and annual reviews. Practitioners will therefore need to ensure their contributions to EHC plans are specific about the needs of the child or young person

• The improvement in specifying needs in plans should enable the Local Authority to have a clearer picture of the support required; so, we would expect to see more EHCPs being completed in the statutory timescales of 20 weeks

Key questions we raised

We see that there are a number of initiatives that the LA are trying to implement which are not just related to top-up funding, some of which we are involved with.  

We have listed the main questions about the top-up funding we raised in the summer of 2021 but some of our questions at the time were not able to be answered at that stage in the process.

1. Statistics & funding

In presentations to date, we see an accepted premise that South Gloucestershire is out of kilter with statistically 'like' areas.  Does this data come from the Government's High Needs benchmarking tool? 

If so, the tool says:

Local authorities can use this tool to periodically assess their own level of need, spend and pattern of provision against

• those of neighbouring local authorities (both geographically and statistically)

• national trends

The forum would also be interested to know how comprehensively the provision in South Gloucestershire has been compared to these statistical neighbours. 

For example;

·       Do these other LA’s have more or less funding historically? 

·       Have they had better or worse provision for support in mainstream? 

·       Do they have a wider range of services offering preventative help? 

We know South Gloucestershire has a history of under-funding; hence the LA are working with the F40 group for fairer education funding.  Are these statistical 'like' authorities doing more or perhaps different things to support children and young people so that an EHC plan is not sought or put in place? 

2. Current system versus funded bands
We wish to understand more about how the proposed bands and their funding will be tested. 

We felt it was difficult to assess whether the draft bands will be workable until an amount is assigned to each band.  They may sound and look like they are on the right lines but if they are under-funded needs won't be met. 

We wanted to know what schools would do if that were the case?

Whilst the forum didn’t know the financial arrangements for each band we wanted to know whether this would mean more schools would not be able to meet needs. If the funding was not right this would have an impact on school placements.

3. Evidence from annual reviews
The type and severity of need and the impact of need within school will be used to define the band for a pupil.

How will the annual review process have sufficient rigour to ensure this evidence is collated?  Families often tell us that EHCPs are not updated after annual reviews, especially in special schools. If the needs are not correctly stated in the plan this will be an issue.

 
4. Timing of initiatives
We have concerns about the timing of the implementation of this work. 

We are concerned that these changes may be launched concurrently with other initiatives under the Dedicated Schools Grant recovery plan.

Will there be a period where we see whether other strands and projects have their intended benefits BEFORE schools have their top-up funding changed? 

For example, will the area open new schools, expand appropriate college provision and fully roll out the South Glos Way first in order to make their expected impacts on the high needs funding budget? 

Our concern is that families and young people get caught between more control around spend (less money) and an incomplete reorganisation of provision.

5. Approval panel membership
Who do you see sitting on the Resource Allocation panel for top-up funding?  What types of roles and what spread of expertise?  How will you ensure that people with the necessary mix of knowledge and experience make fair & equitable decisions?

6. Communication

Communication of this work is important to families so they know what is happening and they can see the bigger picture. We are concerned about how this will affect children and young people and their families who, therefore, need to be kept informed.  

General comments

We are aware that in some reports that have been circulated it states the forum were involved in co-production.

We would like to say this is not an accurate description of our involvement and we have made this clear to those we work with at the Local Authority and have addressed this ourselves. We were involved in earlier discussions and contributed to the information we were presented with.

We work using the principles of the co-production charter in which we want to be involved right from the start of a project to the end of that project before we can state co-production has taken place. This means we can confidently talk about the project we are involved with.

SGPC has asked to be involved in the monitoring of the rollout of the banding system. Our focus will be on how it impacts children, young people and their families.  As part of this, we will be regularly checking in with local families to hear their experiences and will feed these into the monitoring arrangements.

We never endorse decisions because that is not our remit as it may not reflect what our wider community feels. Our families need to trust that we represent the views we collect, and this is vital to us.

To continue our work by ensuring we reflect the wider views of our families, we need to hear from you. If you are a Parent Carer and have any questions, we have set up a feedback form so we can collect everyone’s responses.

You can complete this feedback here

Further information and materials to explain what the plans are to improve services and how this will work, will be sent to schools who will be asked to share with all parents and carers. This information will also be available through South Glos Parent Carers following the Cabinet meeting we will share as soon as we have that information. DUE SOON

We are looking for Parent Reps. Can you spare some time to help us attend all the extra meetings we get asked to be involved with? If you feel you could help us, we would be really pleased to meet up with you to discuss this further.

Contact us to discuss more about helping us share the views of our community.