Ben Bradley
Main Page: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)Department Debates - View all Ben Bradley's debates with the Scotland Office
SEND Provision and Funding
Ben Bradley Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this very important debate, and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Sir David Davis) for securing it. I hope that I can contribute with some experience as the leader of a local authority and as someone who sat on the Education Committee’s SEND inquiry in 2019.
I want to describe the problem from a local authority perspective for colleagues in the House. The 2014 legislation was well intentioned, as we have heard, but it has not delivered on those intentions. In some ways it has created an impossible circumstance, where very high levels of demand and expectation now exist on a service that faces huge budget and capacity pressures. That is not sustainable.
Local authorities in many ways are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are expected to meet the demands of families but also have to balance a budget, and all the time with the knowledge that any steps taken to reduce costs may well end up being overturned in tribunal. Inadvertently, and understandably, seeking to give parents of SEND children some authority and control over what support they get is creating an adversarial system. There are funding issues to all that, but fundamentally the system does not work, so funding alone will not fix it. Because it is a partnership across health, schools, local authorities and others, there is a challenge both in meeting expectation and in accountability for the outcomes.
Fundamentally, at a policy level we have a system that says to families that they can have whatever support and services they want. That is a laudable aim, but in reality there are limited budgets and capacity in the system, which means that local authorities and delivery partners are constrained in what they can do. The system has not recognised that contradiction, so the local partnership is still judged against an unachievable target, which is why, in the latest inspections, nowhere nationally is any better than “inconsistent” in its SEND outcomes.
In Nottinghamshire, we fully recognise the need for improvement in the capacity for SEND support, in tackling waiting times for outcomes, and in the scrutiny and accountability of the system, among other things. We have introduced a new SEND improvement board—Dame Christine Lenehan of the Council for Disabled Children it its independent chair—with the intention of driving improvement in the system with proper scrutiny and oversight. We have already seen positive steps from it. We are fully committed to tackling those issues, to the extent that I have also created a specific cabinet role for SEND support.
In truth, though, we are constrained. The inspection regime is not really sure of what it is asking us for. Many authorities have huge deficits in the high needs block, so they are massively overspending, yet they have still received more positive inspection outcomes. We have balanced the budget and do not have a deficit, which clearly has an impact on services, but that does not seem to be a factor in inspection outcomes. Are we being asked to balance that budget or not? We have a legal duty to do so, but it is not recognised by Ofsted.
Nottinghamshire is among the most poorly funded authorities in this space, but we still balance our budget for additional needs. Other authorities have more money and still overspend massively but are rewarded with better inspection outcomes. Fundamentally, the system does not have a shared and coherent view of what it is asking us to deliver. That is a huge issue.
We are also told that the Government’s approach is to increase inclusion in mainstream schools where possible. It is absolutely right for children to receive appropriate support in mainstream setting wherever possible, and for us to work with schools and SENCOs to deliver it. Notts has taken that approach for many years and been held up as an exemplar of good practice in some Government circles, but at inspections we are marked down for it. Again, different parts of Government are telling us different things, so it is not always clear what we are being asked to do.
We take a graduated approach and step children up the pyramid depending on need, but the first response is to try to support children to remain in mainstream school, partly because that is very often the best outcome for the children, and partly because it is a requirement of a system with limited funding that we try low-cost options first. From an outcomes perspective, that is often the right thing to do, because although some children will require lifelong care, we want many of them to go on and live independent lives and be in employment—we should have high ambitions for our children. It is not often the best thing to become more reliant on more services than we need, because it can make that journey to being an independent adult more difficult.
Every child and every circumstance is different, but from what I am saying, Members can see where the tension and conflict arises at each stage. The opinion of health professionals and people tasked with achieving the goal of helping children to become independent adults often clashes with the totally understandable desire of parents to get the most and very best bespoke support for their child.
SEND transport is one of the biggest pressures on council budgets at the minute. Our budget has risen by 50% over five years because of rising demand, inflationary costs of fuel and contracts and wage rises, so we are again in a position of trying to save money. In some cases, that is the right thing to do because the expectation outstrips what is reasonable. However, it will inevitably lead us to further conflict as we have to go back to families and say, “I know you’ve had a one-to-one taxi service to school with a supportive member of staff every day for the past several years, but we now need you to share with somebody else,” or, “We now need you to take your child to school yourself, because you have a mobility vehicle for that purpose.” That might be the right thing to do—these might be rational decisions in order to offer the best services within a limited budget—but it will inevitably cause issues. That is coming down the track. If we end up with such decisions being overturned in tribunal, we are back to the question of what we are being asked to achieve within our limited budget.
On a brighter note, I want to mention some of the work that we are doing in Nottinghamshire. We are taking this incredibly seriously through our independent improvement board and cabinet-level focus, as I have mentioned. We are creating 494 SEND specialist places, including at the Newark Orchard SEND School, which opened last year, and at a new school that we are building in Mansfield this year—I am very proud of that. We are working with SENCOs in our schools to improve the graduated approach and the available support.
Money is not the ultimate answer here. We have well-meaning legislation that does not work. I ask Ministers to consider two proposals: first, the help with SEND transport costs—
