Issue - meetings

Sarah Callaghan, Director of Education and Skills, Lancashire County Council, and Zoe Richards, SEND Partnership Improvement Lead, Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group, introduced the item.

Sarah Callaghan reported that the Lancashire local area Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Services had been inspected by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in November 2017 to judge how effectively the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) reforms had been implemented, as per the Children and Families Act 2014. 

The inspection identified twelve areas of significant concern and a subsequent inspection revisit was therefore undertaken in March 2020 to see if sufficient progress had been made in these twelve areas.  The second inspection revisit confirmed that sufficient progress had been made in seven of the twelve areas but that further work was required in the remaining five, which are noted below.

•  Leaders had an inaccurate understanding of the local area;

•  there were weak joint commissioning arrangements that were not well developed or evaluated;

•  there was an absence of effective diagnostic pathways for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across the local area and no diagnostic pathway in the north of the area;

•  transition arrangements in 0-25 healthcare services were poor; and

•  the local offer was inaccessible and the quality of information published was poor.

In view of this, a draft Accelerated Improvement Plan has been put together for Lancashire, which focusses on these five areas for improvement.  The Plan will be formally monitored, with progress reports being made to both the SEND Partnership Board and the Lancashire Health and Wellbeing Board, along with further reviews by the Department for Education and NHS England.  It was noted that the final working draft of the Plan must be submitted to the Department for Education and NHS England by 30 September 2020.

Sarah Callaghan and Zoe Richards summarised the Plan, talking about each area of concern individually and the key performance indictators that have been put in place to counter-act those issues.

In response to a query about best practice in developing the action plan and how service users have been engaged in this process, it was reported that service users sit on both the SEND Partnership Board and SEND Operational Group and rigorously challenge actions and progress and shape the development plans for the Accelerated Progress Plan.

In addition, engaging with service users had taken place by engagement co-production and co-delivery and was working very well.  With regard to overall improvement of the service, plans were in place to determine how engagement with service users can be further improved by using several different mechanisms; ie, undertaking surveys, having virtual meetings and by liaising with schools to ask children for their opinions on their experiences of services by incorporating this into lessons.  In terms of best practice with regard to Autism Spectrum Disorder, benchmarking had taken place with other areas and meetings have taken place with the newly established National Autism Team, who are keen to have a joint co-learning process.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5