Should "highly valued" EHCP Independent Supporters return to help parents navigate the SEND jungle?

Contents

There’s a great deal to unpick in the Government’s proposals for reforming SEND and a lot has been said and written about them over the last few months. It’s clear there are a few good ideas but plenty of valid concerns; loss of legal rights, less accountability, different layers of support but one size fits all, and inclusion bases for all. Worryingly, there are whole groups of children and young people seemingly overlooked: EOTIS/EOTAS, children in care and adopted, and children in custody.

The proposals indicate a greatly increased need and workload for schools, teachers, and support staff, not least where they’re going to find the ‘Experts at Hand’.

With the consultation now closed, questions remain about whether, and by whom or what, our responses will be read, let alone acted on. Regardless of what kind of system we eventually find ourselves in, it’s clear that parents/carers and young people themselves will continue to require ready access to independent and impartial support, advice and advocacy to make sure they understand the rights they do have and to help them to seek remedies if support is not working or forthcoming.

A recognition for more parental support

So it’s encouraging that in its White Paper, the Department for Education does recognise there will be a continuing need for families to access support in navigating the system. It states, ‘we will make it easier for children, young people and parent carers to access clear advice and practical support from Government, both local and nationally’ (Consultation document, p 108). It’s the last six words that will alarm families. It’s a sad fact that many of them have learned, over the last 10 years in particular, that it’s not necessarily a good idea to trust the advice they might receive from local authorities. This is not without good reason, as I can attest from my advocacy work. Similarly, advice from the Government is not always accessible, straightforward, or easy to understand.

The Consultation Document ‘SEND Reform: Putting Children and Young People First’ makes a passing reference to Independent Supporters but is overall vague on what support for parents will look like under the proposed system and whether it will differ significantly, if at all, from what’s in place at the moment. There is an undertaking to increase funding for Parent Partnerships and IASS (Independent Advice and Support Services so that they can provide ‘high quality, independent advice and support for families’.

The elephant in the room is ‘independent’. For a long time now, and through no fault of their own, these services have been viewed with suspicion by many parents, who then often choose to look elsewhere for support. This is because both services are paid for by local authorities, health and social care in varying proportions.

SENDIAS

About 70% of SEND IASS services are ‘in-house’ with services delivered by employees of the local authority. They often have local authority email addresses and telephone numbers. This makes it hard for IAS workers (who by and large do a great job under pressure) to demonstrate impartiality and demonstrate they are working at ‘arms’ length’ from the local authority, although this is a requirement of their National Standards. The other 30% are outsourced to independent providers and, although still funded by LAs, are employed and managed autonomously, working from their own premises. I suspect it’s slightly easier for these workers to demonstrate impartiality.

Maybe this is a good time to consider a more radical restructuring of IAS services, removing them from the remit of local authorities altogether. Perhaps something like the former Independent Support Service would fit the bill. For those who don’t know, 12 years ago, when the Children and Families Act 2014 was enacted, the Independent Support Service was mandated with the intention of providing independent, unbiased advocacy, advice and support for families of children or young people undergoing statutory EHC assessment or transfer of statements of SEN to EHCPs under the new Act.

The scheme was originally planned to run for three years. However, it was extended by a year, partly due to the transfer of statements taking longer than anticipated and partly, I like to think (as I was one), due to the successes of independent supporters themselves.

How did the Independent Support service work?

Independent Support was a free service funded by central government via a grant given to the Council for Disabled Children (CDC). The CDC, in turn, commissioned voluntary organisations to provide a service in every local area, while maintaining oversight of these organisations. An assortment of national charities, such as Barnardo’s and locally-based organisations such as Kids and Amaze Brighton, employed the Independent Supporters. These people were drawn from a mixture of different, but relevant, backgrounds and included parents with experience of navigating the previous system, people who had worked in the voluntary sector, others with experience within local government or working in schools or any combination of the above. All were provided with legal training by IPSEA as well as other training by the CDC, paid a salary and supervised and performance managed by the voluntary organisations who recruited them locally.

The role of Independent Supporters was similar to that of Independent Advice and Support Workers (IASS) but differed in a couple of ways. IS was limited to providing support during the EHC assessment or transfer period only, whereas IAS provided (and still does) support for almost anything to do with SEND, including Tribunals, support for parents with meetings with schools and other agencies, support at annual reviews and so on.

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Why was it so liked?

The benefit of Independent Support for families and the supporters themselves was that the service was truly independent of LAs. It was much easier for Independent Supporters to challenge unlawful practice or generally inadequate service because they weren’t constrained by who their employers were. The system was new, and sadly (and inexplicably, given the two-year run-up), many LAs were ill-prepared for the changes that the Children & Families Act brought about.

Consequently, the new law and what was required of LA’s was often misunderstood: processes such as the transfer of statements to EHCPs were not carried out correctly, and draft EHCPs were often poorly written and lacking in the evidence that would make them better. Independent Supporters were in a position to step in and remedy the situation, acting as a conduit between parents and LAs and sometimes in the process providing informal training to LA staff.

Offering evidence to Minister Gould

As part of the SNJ team, I’ve been involved in meeting the DfE over the potential of resurrecting the role. We hunted down the 2016 final evaluation report by the NDTi and have uploaded it here, as well as provided it to the minister and her lead SEND official. The evaluation concluded that Independent Support was a service ‘highly valued by parents and professionals alike’, with particular praise given for its responsiveness and proactiveness in individual situations, for enabling parents to feel that they had someone trusted who ‘was on their side’ and for its impartiality. SNJ also brought it up in the recent webinar with Minister Gould, who has seemed keen on the idea. A poll of webinar attendees showed an overwhelmingly large majority in favour of what is not (yet) a proposal.

I’ve worked closely with SENDIASS staff in the past, and they were, without exception, kind and empathic people who were genuinely committed to helping families. However, working with one hand tied behind their backs, trying to balance their duty to provide impartial advice and support with demands that may be placed on them by their employers, must be difficult and at times extremely frustrating. I also know that the need for their services far outstrips capacity. As a result, families already at their wits’ end sometimes have to wait too long for the advice or help that they need urgently to resolve a problem.

Promoted

Time for a more effective model of support?

Having acknowledged the need for family support and engagement, the government seems to have overlooked an opportunity to move to a more effective model such as Independent Support. I do hope that someone from the DfE will take a look into this. On the face of it, it looks as though change would be reasonably easy to effect.

As with IS, funding—which needs to be sufficient to enable the service to run smoothly and sustainably—could be allocated centrally to independent organisations. They would, in turn, contract locally managed services in each area, and in the process, cut out any association with LAs. Given the prospective big changes with council reorganisation, they, and parents, are going to need all the help they can get–and that’s without wholesale change to the SEN system.

The previous limitations on the role of Independent Supporters could be extended to those currently undertaken by IAS workers, with training provided by IPSEA as happens now.

We must not lose the current experience that exists

I don’t have any inside knowledge about how current IAS workers would view such a change. Presumably, arrangements could be made to transfer employment to the new providers, taking their considerable experience with them. It would also be necessary to establish whether there would be sufficient providers in all areas to take this on, although this didn’t appear to have been a problem with Independent Support.

On the minus side, parents seem now to be much more suspicious of the Department for Education and central government—and who can blame them? So many feel they’ve been sold down the river at the prospect of lost or weakened SEND legal rights, and fitting their children into pre-planned tick boxes of support.

Previously, I imagined that with funding coming straight from central government, parents would feel more confident about using an Independent Support Service. Sadly, faith and trust in the DfE and central government are now lost to many parents because of how the White Paper consultation has been handled, and their worries about what the reforms would mean for their children.

It’s going to be hard for the Department to overcome this loss of trust and persuade parents that a service funded by the DfE won’t feel pressured to toe the party line. Previously, I believed moving IAS out of LA control would be a positive step. Now I’m not so sure. It could still be done, but it’s a tough ask. Despite what the expensive comms operatives might think, I’m not sure cosy chats between Bridget Philippson and Gemma Collins will do the trick.

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