Local and Area SEND Inspections and reviews

Southend Inclusion Review - February 2023

Southend-on-Sea City Council is currently leading on a review of:

  • inclusion
  • the SEND graduated response and;
  • alternative provisions across schools, settings, and services

This also includes a review of:

  • inclusive practice within the local area and;
  • associated support available to children and young people, families, and schools

To support this review, Southend's Education Board agreed an annual ring-fenced budget, to increase opportunities for inclusion in Southend. The focus of the first years spend is for children and young people of compulsory school age.

A Task and Finish Group was appointed to lead on this piece of work and implementation of recommendations outlined in the review's findings. The group has representatives from:

  • Primary, Secondary, and Special Schools
  • Alternative Provisions
  • Early Years
  • A School SENCO
  • Southend SEND Independent Forum (Parent/Carer group)
  • Local Authority Officers from Education, Social Care, and partners in Health

The Task and Finish Group has identified 4 key themes for focus:

  1. The effectiveness of the SEND graduated response in relation to early identification and intervention.
  2. How schools, pupils and their families can be better supported by the LA and other external services to enable children and young people with SEND to be educated successfully alongside peers in a mainstream school.
  3. To explore practise, service provision and modelling, and training to meet the growing social, emotional, mental health, anxiety and related medical needs of children and young people in Southend.
  4. Current alternative provision options available locally and potential gaps or needs.

In addition to the Task and Finish Group, a number of aligned surveys went out in October 2022. These went to the following groups to capture their views and experience of inclusion:

  • All schools, including academy trusts, maintained, special and alternative provisions. Response rate was 96% (50 out of 52 schools). One Infant and Junior School provided a joint application
  • Parents and carers via Southend SEND Independent Forum (SSIF). 91 parents and carers with children and young people with SEND completed the survey
  • Statutory Children's Services, local authority education services and health
  • School Governors and Academy Trustees

There was apparent consistency of themes across all survey responses. All aligned to the original themes from the Task and Finish Group but provided greater clarity on where practitioners and parents felt the specific focus and highest areas of need should be directed.

Theme 1: The effectiveness of the SEND graduated response in relation to early identification and intervention.

  • Schools, services, and parents identified a need for consistent assessment processes and tools to ensure all schools in the local area are aligned and following the Southend SEND expectations. Specifically, for those with emerging needs and SEND support. The LA will resource a suite of tools for assessment that supports profiling needs, with flexible strategies and interventions.

  • Commission an inclusion expert to upskill existing staff and work with all Southend settings, offering a flexible approach to identifying strengths and challenges of our provisions against Southend-on-Sea's inclusion expectations. Embedding excellent inclusive practice across all schools which evidence consistency of an effective graduated response that demonstrates nurturing practice.

  • As part of this work, co-produce an inclusion plan/charter with Southend settings for all provisions to commit to an agreed suite of inclusion expectations. The emphasis must be on collaboration between all settings and services to attend and engage in any area wide training offers which in turn influences the implementation and development of inclusive polices and practice.
  • Commission effective practical resources for Speech and Language Therapy (SALT) that are flexible in meeting the diverse needs of children both within school and at home that are in addition to the current offer.

Theme 2: How schools, pupils and their families can be better supported by the LA and other external services to enable children and young people with SEND to be educated successfully alongside peers in a mainstream school.

  • Commission a high-quality training provider that leads on relational practice and trauma informed approaches. It was identified that the provider needs to focus their work on raising a consistent knowledge base, understanding and early identification of the cause; managing and deescalating presenting behaviours; and bespoke training offer for individual school needs, building on the schools' strengths and areas for development.

  • Developing a network of trained school-based inclusion champions who can provide outreach and share best practice to other schools and settings in the area.

  • Replicating the above inclusion champions within Southend services to schools and families all working towards the same monitoring and delivery framework, providing consistency of a shared understanding and practice.
  • Enhancing the capacity, knowledge base and expertise of the inclusion outreach service to increase outreach to schools and enable effective modelling and best practice.

Theme 3: Responding and meeting the growing social, emotional, mental health, anxiety and related medical needs of children and young people in Southend.

  • Specific training that is bespoke to a school's needs and delivered on site, whilst also reinforcing consistent approaches and models across the city. Training needs to both upskill and train all school staff whilst providing focused training to key staff such as Senior Leadership Teams including SENCOs. To continue to champion and provide the ongoing development of school staff and school inclusion polices.

  • Areas identified for specific training by both schools and parents/carers were: Neurodevelopment and neurodiversity; managing violent and challenging behaviours with effective positive handling and de-escalation techniques; children with sensory needs; and relational practise (including trauma informed, attachment awareness and adverse childhood experiences).

  • Although training for parents covered a similar range as above, this needs to focus on co-produced delivery for advice, resources and facilitated parent support groups.
  • Review the commissioning of and access to counselling services in Southend, including family counselling.
  • Explore the current triage and single point of referral for accessing all services including universal. Increasing awareness, improving communication, and ensuring buy-in by all partners to align to a single front door for accessing support for children with additional SEMH needs.

Additional resource budget for school SEND resources and hubs.

  • An ability for schools to bid for additional funds to provide innovative interventions in meeting children's additional needs as part of their effective inclusive offer. This requires a quality assurance framework to evidence permanence measures around use of funds and outcomes for children, as well as ongoing monitoring arrangements to ensure practice and/or provision is embedded and makes a difference.

Theme 4: Alternative Provision (AP) Pilots

The local authority is also running a number of alternative provision pilots. The scope and specification for these pilots were determined by the outcome of the survey results from schools, parents and carers, and services.

The results identified the need for provisions to support all primary and secondary key stages. For dual registration, either placed in a base in a mainstream school or in a new off-site provision.

Four main areas of focus were identified as:

  1. Low level SEMH to meet the emerging social and emotional needs of children and young people presenting in anxiety, emotionally based school avoidance or trauma offering a fully supported reintegration back to mainstream.
  2. Higher level SEMH for those children and young people with longer term needs, falling under the remit of the Education Access Team (EAT) due to medical and mental health needs, and requiring an interim base to bridge the gap between EAT (tuition) and school offering a fully supported reintegration back to mainstream.
  3. An assessment unit for SEND Support, assessing the holistic needs of the family through nurture base principles.
  4. Transition champion, supporting children and young people and their families into different educational phases and/or settings through a bridging base.

The local authority is in the process of agreeing and commissioning the pilots with successful schools/trusts in our local area. These are due to run for the next two academic years from September 2023 with the success of the pilots being reviewed at appropriate stages. The LA will inform families, schools, and services which pilots have been successful and for which age groups soon.

Contact details

This is an exciting time for inclusion and alternative provision in Southend. If you have any questions or queries please contact me on SarahGreaves@southend.gov.uk

Sarah Greaves - Inclusion Review Lead