Children and Families Bill (SEN reform)
Briefing by NDCS, RNIB and Sense for Committee stage, House of Lords, October 2013
Summary
The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS), Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and
Sense are working together to support a number of amendments to the Children and Families Bill
that we feel will improve outcomes for children and young people with sensory impairments. We
are concerned that part 3 of the Children and Families Bill, in its current form, will fail to achieve
the original ambitions of the ‘Support and ambition’ green paper. In particular, we are calling for
accountability to be strengthened throughout part 3. Unless further action is taken to make it
easier for families to hold local authorities to account for the quality and availability of SEN
support, we fear that the Bill will do little to address the many challenges that children and young
people with sensory impairments, and their parents and carers, face.
This briefing provides background information on the following amendments:
Amendment 172 to Clause 45: Ceasing to maintain an Education, Health and Care Plan .......... 2
Amendment 215 to Clause 72: Inspection and review of local authorities in England .................. 3
Amendments 108, 116, 128 and 239: SEN provision in non-maintained early years settings
..................................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
NDCS, RNIB and Sense are members of the Special Educational Consortium (SEC) and the
Every Disabled Child Matters (EDCM) consortium and support the points raised in their separate
joint briefing on the Bill.
Contact details:
NDCS: [email protected] or 020 7014 1182
RNIB: [email protected] or 020 7391 2083
Sense: [email protected] or 020 7014 9386 / 07917 657437
Children and Families Bill (SEN reform)
Briefing by NDCS, RNIB and Sense for Committee stage, House of Lords
Amendment 172 to Clause 45: Ceasing to maintain an Education, Health and
Care Plan
Amendment
Clause 45
Page 35, line 6, at end insert “and provision is not needed to maintain those outcomes.”
Purpose
Clause 45 allows a local authority to cease an Education, Health and Care Plan if the outcomes
set within it have been achieved. This amendment would require a local authority to continue to
maintain the Plan if ongoing support is needed to maintain those outcomes.
Background
We believe that it would be a flawed approach to allow a local authority to cease a EHCP if a child
or young person has achieved the outcomes set for them. For many children with sensory
impairments, it is only through ongoing support that they will continue to achieve and maintain the
outcomes set for them.
It is important to send a clear signal that children can have special educational needs and achieve
good outcomes. The definition of SEN in the Bill recognises that a child has SEN if they have a
learning disability / difficulty or they have a disability which prevents them making use of education
facilities provided for others. Many children with sensory impairments fall into the latter category
and are only to achieve good outcomes where ongoing specialist support is provided.
In NDCS focus group work, parents often expressed frustration that their child often had to fall
behind before they can get the support they need:
“Although our son made extremely good progress in his first year in his new school, this seemed
to be a trigger to reduce the levels of assistance from all other departments. His speech and
language therapy stopped, everything stopped. It was as if he no longer needed it and he just
dropped, his development went completely backwards.”
NDCS, RNIB and Sense also believe that the wording could also introduce perverse incentives for
local authorities to set ‘easy’ outcomes for children to achieve in order to end the Plan quickly.
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Children and Families Bill (SEN reform)
Briefing by NDCS, RNIB and Sense for Committee stage, House of Lords
Amendment 215 to Clause 72: Inspection and review of local authorities in
England
Amendment
After Clause 72
Insert the following new Clause—
“Inspection and review of local authorities in England
In section 136 of the Education and Inspections
authorities in England), after subsection (4), insert—
Act
2006
(inspection
of
local
“(5) The Chief Inspector must inspect the performance by an authority in delivering and commissioning
specialist support services for children with special educational needs.””
Purpose
The Education and Inspections Act 2006 enables Ofsted to inspect local authority functions in
relation to education. This amendment would specifically require Ofsted to inspect specialist SEN
support services.
Background
The Department has argued that the local offer will improve transparency. However, in one area,
there is virtually no information available to parents: information on the quality of specialist SEN
support services. We believe the Bill misses an important opportunity to improve outcomes for
children with SEN by requiring Ofsted to inspect specialist SEN support services. We believe this
move would improve the overall accountability of the Bill.
In the SEN Green Paper, the Department for Education recognised the vital role that specialist
SEN services have to play. Parents are therefore often surprised that these same SEN
educational services are subject to no real formal scrutiny in the same way that schools are. The
absence of any reliable data on the number of children with sensory impairments and the
outcomes they achieve also means parents have no way of comparing local offers and SEN
provision.
We believe that many Heads of Services will support this proposal. One Head of a service for deaf
children told us:
“I wholeheartedly agree that specialist services should be inspected by Ofsted. All teaching should
be inspected to ensure high quality, rigour and recognition of the specialist nature of the work that
specialist teachers do as well as raising the profile of deaf education and provision. This would
also contribute to narrowing the gap between deaf children and mainstream’s children attainment.”
Ofsted has already identified that local authorities are very weak on evaluation of SEN provision.
In a 2012 Ofsted report on effective practice in services for deaf children, it was found that:
“There was limited strategic overview and no systematic approach across all services to evaluate
the quality of services and their impact on improving the lives of deaf children.”
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Children and Families Bill (SEN reform)
Briefing by NDCS, RNIB and Sense for Committee stage, House of Lords
In the other place, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families stated
that he was exploring with Ofsted how concerns about SEN provision could be covered under
Ofsted’s existing programme for inspecting local authority school improvement functions. This
statement was made in spring this year and no update has been provided since. We believe there
needs to be greater certainty on the local offer and accountability before the Bill progresses
further.
We therefore argue that the Bill could be substantially improved by the inclusion of a new clause
that would require Ofsted to inspect specialist SEN support services.
UPDATE:
On day 7 of Grand Committee stage, the Minister stated that the Department have asked Ofsted
“to study and report on how best to identify best practice in preparing for SEN reforms” and “to
consider particularly whether there is a need for an inspection framework to drive improvements.”
The Minister indicated that it would be next spring before this report would be published.
This commitment was made in response to amendment 111 tabled by Lord Low. This amendment
would have required Ofsted and the CQC to inspect local offers.
The amendment tabled by Baroness Brinton has a complementary but slightly narrower focus on
inspection of specialist support services for children with SEN.
We welcome the announcement made by the Minister at Grand Committee stage. However, we do
not believe it goes far enough. We believe there is already a strong and clear case for inspection
of specialist support services for children with SEN. We believe the case is especially strong for
low incidence SEN, including sensory impairments, because many local authorities and schools
are unlikely to be as familiar with the specialist support needed by these children. We believe the
Department should require Ofsted to begin inspecting these services now, rather than delay any
further.
Suggested questions to raise with the Minister:

Can the Minister set out in more detail the terms of references and timescales for Ofsted’s
study? Will it also explicitly consider the case for inspection of specialist support services for
deaf children?

Although Ofsted’s inspection framework for schools already has a SEN focus, does the
Minister accept that Ofsted inspectors are unlikely to pick up on issues on the quality of support
being received by a school from specialist support services for children with sensory
impairment - where there is just one child with that need in that school?

Does the Minister accept that - because sensory impairment is a low incidence need, requiring
targeted and specialist support - local authorities and schools are more reliant on specialist
support services for children with sensory impairment? Does it follow that there is a case for
more detailed scrutiny of these services?

Given the scale of under achievement experienced by children with sensory impairments, is
there a need for more urgent action to drive improvements? Will any new inspection framework
be in place before the Children and Families Bill comes into force?
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