The challenge

Parents or carers of a child with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND) are no different from any other parent: they want the very best for their child, including in education. A combination of high demand, inadequate funding and flawed educational performance measures has resulted in a system that is not working well enough. It is also clear that more money is not the only answer – over £1.5 billion of additional funding has already been put into the sector through High Needs Block over the last two years.  Our work has shown 3 key challenges which we have been addressing with over a dozen local authorities:

• Behaviour and cultural challenges in a fragmented system: Responses to children’s needs are fragmented and opportunities to join up are missed, resulting in a lack of trust and misaligned expectations around the level of support required to meet need.
• Gap in Early Intervention: Often earlier support is available but not understood or used local offers are hard to navigate and poorly understood leading to over 50% of children whose needs could have been reduced, delayed or prevented escalating.
• Needs and outcomes are not clear: With the lack of a measurable local needs profile meaning value-based sufficiency planning is difficult and makes progress/ impact on children’s needs impossible to track.

Our solution

Our focus is on helping deliver sustainable High Needs systems, developing a clear overview of demand, cost and outcomes along the child’s journey – and ways to re-balance spend towards earlier intervention. Through measuring system change in this way we are able to evidence direct benefits from our work – achieving both spend reductions and crucially, improvements in outcomes.

Our work in re-framing High Needs provides:

• A deeper understanding of what is happening in the high needs system including opportunities to intervene earlier, achieved by creating a clearer baseline of demand and cost, co-created with partners
• Evidence through our unique demand analysis methodology of where demand can be prevented, reduced or delayed – and how.
• Partnership and parental alignment to this view – through developing a local inclusive ambition focused on inclusion and preventing escalation of need.

Reductions in demand and cost through the delivery of interventions along the child’s journey including fast paced behavioural trails to build confidence and momentum.