The roles that this staff member would be required to do include:

• Writing IEPs
• Co-ordinating annual reviews
• Attending reviews
• Keeping appropriate records

In nasen’s view the jobs detailed should be undertaken by a qualified teacher working in a role that is like a ‘SENCO’ in a mainstream school; they involve complex issues and ensuring that a school is meeting its legal obligations outlined in the pupils’ statement is not something we think should be undertaken by unqualified staff.

However what many forward thinking special schools do is train a teacher to act as a ‘SENCO’ but also train support staff to do some of the administrative side of the tasks as part of a team around the child. 

It will be interesting to see how things evolve with the response to the SEND Green Paper but that is another question!

 “Communication should be a right for every individual”, said Jenny Malone whose daughter Claire,   despite battling with Cerebral Palsy, a condition that affects her speech and motor control, has realised her full potential and is now studying Physics at Imperial College London thanks to the provision and support of appropriate technology recommended  by The ACE Centre.

Since it opened in 1984, The ACE Centre has provided support for over 5,000 people like Claire who struggle to communicate, by carefully assessing their needs and recommending the right technology that literally enables them to speak, write and access education.  The Centre also provides essential training and free information services for parents, carers and professionals within education and health services.  

Bill Nimmo, Trustee, The ACE Centre, Oxford, said, “Vital services like ours that provide so much support through high levels of expert knowledge and understanding of people’s needs cannot be allowed to close and we ask the Government to urgently  review the sustainability of these essential  services.”

 “ The ACE Centre Advisory Trust staff and Trustees are deeply saddened that the Centre is scheduled to close at the end of June 2012.  Despite significant efforts to ensure the sustainability and future of our Centre, we are unable to continue to operate in the current financial climate.”

See video case studies of their work here.

 http://www.education.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1817&external=no&menu=1

This document confirms some of the huge changes being made to the way education services are funded. These changes include:

• Local authorities will be given a high needs budget for children and young people with higher needs, most of whom will have special educational needs. This budget will be called the High Needs Pupil Block and will fund all additional provision across early years, schools and post-16 education and training.
• The Government intends to make a general assumption that mainstream schools should spend up to £10,000 out of their core and additional support budget before the local authority takes up the funding out of the High Needs Pupil Block.
• All state funded special schools will be funded for a set number of places at £10,000 for each child. Local authorities who wish to name that school in a child’s statement must agree the ‘top-up’ amount for each child.

The closing date for responses is Monday 21 May 2012. If you would like your comments to form part of nasen’s response please email Lorraine Petersen using lorrainep@nasen.org.uk.

Lorraine Petersen was delighted saying: “Dockside’s victory is a testament to all the hard work nasen and Rising Stars have put into the series. With school’s looking to expand their phonic provision for older students Dockside offers an unrivalled mix of age appropriate texts with the the added bonus of fantastic support materials.”

The full list of winners of Education Resources Award winners 2012:

Best Early Years Resource of Equipment – non ICT

WINNER: Time to Talk Baskets, TTS Group Ltd

 Best Early Years Resource or Equipment including ICT

WINNER: Traditional Storyteller Apps, Day Two Productions

 Best Primary Resource or Equipment – non-ICT

WINNER: Jolly Back Chair and service, Jolly Back

 Best Primary Resource or Equipment including ICT

WINNER: Learnpad from Avantis, Avantis Systems

 Best Secondary Resource or Equipment – non-ICT

WINNER: Investigating Spoken Language, English and Media Centre

 Best Secondary Resource or Equipment including ICT

WINNER: Twig Science

 Best SEN Resource or Equipment – non-ICT

WINNER: Dockside Reading Scheme, Rising Stars

 Best SEN Resource of Equipment including ICT           

WINNER: The Fairy Tales, SEN Assist

Educational Book Award

WINNER: Special Games, LDA –

 Supplier of the Year less than £1 million

WINNER: Crossbow Education Ltd

 Supplier of the Year £1million to £3 million

WINNER: Smart Kids UK Ltd

 Supplier of the Year over £3 million

WINNER: The Consortium

 Leadership in Education Award

WINNER: Jan Lewanowski and Maggie Constable, Languages Consultants, Bedford    

 Establishment of the Year Award

WINNER: All Saints Catholic School, Barking and Dagenham

 Marketing Campaign of the Year Award

WINNER: Staedtler, Staedtler (UK) Teachers’ Club – Stand H20

 Education Exporter of the Year Award

WINNER: TTS Group Ltd

 Innovation Award

WINNER: SIMS Discover, Capita SIMS

 Outstanding Achievement Award

WINNER: Mike Bird, R G Gray Ltd

Lifetime Achievement Award

WINNER: Ray Barker, BESA

Hotfoot from giving training in Denmark, he bounced into our midst with umbrellas and dressing up clothes and gave us an insight into the feelings and defence mechanisms of damaged and disaffected children of all ages. More importantly, he demonstrated how our own behaviour, vibes and attitudes influence our ability to help these damaged youngsters. His central theme was that the important focus must be on the learning not the behaviour.

Teaching assistants, SENCO’s and Support Service personnel all felt it was well worth giving up a Saturday morning in order to enhance our skills in such an entertaining way.  Mike works as an Advisory Teacher with the London Borough of Newham’s Children’s Services and has lectured on behalf of SEBDA at Leicester and London Universities.

There are fewer nasen branches now but we are still here, offering top quality speakers on Special Needs issues, at least once a year. 2012 is nasen’s 21^st birthday and the 20^th anniversary of this branch so we hope for a good turn out on November 10^th to help us celebrate with a special speaker. Tom Payne will be speaking on ‘Managing Attachment Disorders’. Watch for further details in Special Magazine and on the nasen website.

Kay Harvey

As this comprehensive report states the system for delivering and funding of post-16 education is complex and young people and their families are not able to access the information they need.

Nasen welcomes, the Department for Education proposals within the Green Paper acknowledging that the system needs to be simplified in order to make it accessible to both young people and their families. We hope that the proposal to replace the current Statement with  a single, holistic  Education, Health and Care Plan from 0 – 25 will eliminate the current break down in provision and support  at 16 + ensuring that our most vulnerable young people have access to high quality provision until 25.

With the raising of the participation age to 18 by 2015 it is very important they we begin to build high quality further education, employment or training opportunities for all young people but especially for those identified with special  educational needs and disabilities.

At this time when the Department is also reviewing and consulting on educational funding reform we have an ideal opportunity to ensure that the funding of our 16+ provision is open and transparent and fair across the country.

Pearl Barnes, nasen’s President highlighted  in her oral evidence to the committee, the huge geographical variation in provision.  We know that there are some excellent examples of  outstanding practice across England but this is in pockets often supported by individual schools or further education colleges.

Nasen would recommend that the Department for Education consider this report alongside their on-going review of SEND, their proposals to reform educational funding and their on-going review of the curriculum  to ensure that we are offering an education system that prepares all our young people to develop skills, gain employment and live more independently in their adult life.

Lorraine Petersen OBE, CEO nasen

View the full report here http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news/special-ed-report/

In this blog article, Peter Gray and Brahm Norwich, who co-convene the Group, report on a recent seminar, which brought together a range of participants to discuss the Green Paper and hear individual papers from Brian Lamb, Debbie Orton (LA officer) and Kate Frood (mainstream primary school Head teacher).

The Government’s Green Paper, ‘Support and Aspiration’, has heralded a radical new policy approach to special educational needs and disability. Since it was issued, there have been several opportunities for consultation and comment and nasen has been involved in this process. However, it is clear already that there are some ‘fixed points’ in the Government’s agenda, which are led by broader Coalition policies and beliefs, in particular:

(i) focusing individual statutory entitlements on a smaller number of children and young people with complex and significant needs/disabilities, with more coherent and long-term multi-agency planning

(ii) a commitment to greater choice and empowerment for individual parents/ carers as consumers of services and provision, including the development of personalised budgets

(iii) developing greater ‘independence’ in the statutory assessment process, through more substantial involvement of the voluntary sector

(iv) removing the ‘bias towards inclusion’ and strengthening the role and contribution of special schools and specialist providers

(v) creating a more diverse ‘market’ of providers, through the enhancement of the non-maintained (academy and free school) sector

In response to these policy directions, presenters identified a continuing lack of clarity in the definition of ‘SEND’. All agreed that definitions had become too broad (with an associated risk of under-expectation). However, the meaning of the term, ‘complex and significant needs’, is not always commonly understood by Local Authorities, parents and schools. Moreover, the Green Paper takes insufficient account of the relative definitions involved in the broader group of needs that are likely to fall within the new ‘single school-based SEN’ category. There was a general view that perverse incentives for over-identification were likely to continue unless there was a much clearer indication of the quality and standards of service and provision that all schools should be expected to deliver.

The move towards more coherent multi-agency plans for children with complex and significant disabilities was welcomed. However, it was difficult to see how exactly these might link to existing statutory assessment processes, or what impact the plans would have without a stronger emphasis on shared accountability across all relevant agencies.

While the benefits of parental empowerment were recognised, there was concern that the ‘individual consumer’ model and greater use of markets for services and provision were being seen as the only way by which this could be achieved. Participants identified the need for some degree of regulation within any future system. Otherwise, what would be the limits to ‘choice and diversity’ ? How can we avoid a system that favours those who ‘shout loudest’ and ensure equitability for all children with similar needs ? Who will play the role of ‘honest broker’ if there is diminishing capacity at Local Authority level ?

The greater involvement of the voluntary sector was again welcomed. However, participants and presenters from both the statutory and voluntary sector pointed to the lack of clarity in relative roles. How will quality assessment be assured ? What does ‘independence’ really mean (and what are the limits to this) ?

Presenters and participants pointed to the limited meaning of the term ‘inclusion’ used within the party political debate. In seeking to ‘remove the bias’ towards it, the Green Paper offers no vision with regard to the broader aspirations of inclusive practice (differentiated but collective school systems; inclusive curriculum and assessment approaches). In highlighting the skills and expertise available in the special school sector, the Paper was in danger of devaluing the progress made and knowledge gained by teachers and staff in mainstream schools. Again, presenters agreed that the Government needed to be much clearer about the level and quality of the SEND ‘offer’ that should be available in all schools.

There were concerns about the Government’s market oriented approach. Within a finite and potentially reducing budget for education, valuable resources could be diverted to new providers (free special schools and academies) away from the maintained sector. More special school places (if this is what parents/carers wanted) would not be cost-free. A more diverse market might also make it more difficult to plan for specialist services that needed a national infrastructure (specialist training/ quality standards etc). While reference continues to be made to the Local Authority ‘commissioning’ role, the nature of this is unclear, along with the level of influence that can be achieved from an increasingly residual centre.

In his paper, Brian Lamb pointed to the difference between the Green Paper’s ‘radical intent’ and its more progressive/piecemeal proposals for implementation. Since the seminar, the DfE has announced its SEND Pathfinder programme, which will ‘test’ a number of policy developments (personalised budgets; multi-agency plans; banded funding systems) in practice. The tone of the Pathfinders indicates a strong and ongoing Government commitment to achieving its key policy objectives. However, we are yet to see how some of the critical issues raised in our recent seminar will be addressed. In adopting a ‘radical approach’, the Government may have missed the opportunity to really engage in some of these issues and draw on the kinds of thinking that have been built up over time through forums such as the Policy Options Group, which draw together a wide range of perspectives and experience.

Peter Gray and Brahm Norwich

SEN Policy Options Group co-coordinators

To read the SEN policy paper go to the nasen web-page and download the Policy paper

http://www.nasen.org.uk/policy-option-papers/

 The events will enable visitors to:

•  see expert presentations surrounding dyslexia and how to bring out the best in dyslexic children
• take part in discussions about dyslexia
• learn more about the solutions available to help
• share advice and best practice with other parents and educators

Birmingham Events:

• Monday 20^th February: ‘Dyslexia: Learning Independently’ – interactive seminar for secondary school teachers and parents
• Tuesday 21^st February: ‘Engaging reluctant readers ’ – interactive seminar for primary school teachers and parents

 Time: 2:00pm to 4:00pm

 Location: Radisson Blu Hotel, Birmingham

London Events:

• Wednesday 22^nd February 2012: ‘Engaging reluctant readers ’ - interactive seminar for primary school teachers and parents
• Thursday 23^rd February 2012: ‘Dyslexia: Learning Independently’ – interactive seminar for secondary school teachers and parents

 Time:              2:00-4:00pm

 Location:        Regus, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, Victoria, London. SW1W 0SR

Attendance is free, however spaces are limited. Secure your place at this event by registering online at www.texthelp.com/UK/register, e-mailing r.adams@texthelp.com or calling 028 9442 8105 with your full contact details and any accessibility requirements.

This session though light on specifics offered some interesting pointers on current and future Government policy. The entire transcript is well worth perusing and is available to view here:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmeduc/uc1786-i/uc178601.htm

For colleagues using the half term break to catch up on ‘busy work’ we have selected some of the highlights below.

Local Authorities

Q48 Neil Carmichael: There is a general trend developing here. Michael, you have said that local authorities have an indispensable role to play as champions of children and parents, and that is certainly welcome, but if we have a lot more academies, what kind of role is that going to be? What sort of tools are those local authorities going to have?

Michael Gove: …. I do not ask myself what is the right role for local authorities but what do we need to do to ensure that our education system is performing to the best of all our collective abilities? Within that there will be certain roles that will naturally settle on local authorities. This is my attempt to answer a question, which I think should not be taken as a final answer. By definition, there needs to be a broader conversation involving local authorities, teachers, elected politicians at every level-everyone. But my first attempt to answer it is to say that local authorities have a role in making sure that admissions are fair-co-ordinating them and making sure that you do not have any gaming of the admissions system.

Q49 Neil Carmichael: It is a complicated question.

Michael Gove: I will try to answer. Local authorities have a role in: admissions; support for high-need pupils, particularly in terms of SEN; issues like transport; and, if you move to a local authority area where the majority of schools, or indeed all schools, have become academies, I think they can take on a different role as commissioner of services. That is something that we need to explore.

(Taken from Q50 )I think the local authority’s role is explicitly to ensure that, when you come to co-ordinate admissions, you do not have any attempt to use some of the dodges that may have existed in the past. I believe that the changes we have made to the admissions code help empower anyone who is concerned about problems that exist.

Q51 Neil Carmichael: If we continue having more and more schools turning into academies, the local authority will be effectively further diminished in its capacity to intervene. What kind of solution would you have for the remaining schools that perhaps might need intervention or assistance from local authorities?

Michael Gove: I do not think the local authority need necessarily be diminished. The prospect of a school becoming an academy can often raise the performance of a local authority, because previously, when it came to everything from school improvement to the provision of SEN services, it was, “Take it or leave it. You have got to rely on us.”

Now you move to a situation where a school can become an academy and decide to buy into the services from its own council or from another local authority. It is striking that local authorities that I think are doing a good job, like Manchester, are moving towards a traded approach towards school improvement services. We are moving towards a situation where local authorities, if they are enterprising and imaginative, have new opportunities. Local authorities say that they can provide services more effectively because of economies of scale and inbuilt expertise. Well, now there is an opportunity for the best local authorities to paint on a broader canvas.

School Governors

Q55 Neil Carmichael: I will move on to the question of school governance, because that is quite a thing with an autonomous school. I believe that it is important that we think in terms of the skills and responsibilities governors have. There is the question of whether or not they are stakeholder representatives and so forth. How far is the Department going to move in a way that might actually free up schools to think more about the kind of governing body that they might want?

Michael Gove: It is a very good point. Sometimes clichés embody truths, and one cliché that embodies a big truth is that governors are the unsung heroes and heroines of the school education system. Indeed, they embody what Conservatives and Liberal Democrats mean by the Big Society. We believe that we should provide more support for chairs of governing bodies, and the National College is there to help provide them with the support and training that they need to do their job even better. Some schools have too many governors, and some governing body meetings are too long and spend too much time dealing with marginal issues rather than core issues.

We should encourage schools to have a tighter group of governing bodies. Governors should be chosen on the basis of their skills rather than the organisation or interest that they represent, and we can learn a lot from shining a light on the practice of the best schools. I have been really encouraged by the response of the business community, who are trying to encourage more and more people with a background in business to use some of their skills to enhance what governing bodies provide. But, as ever, I am interested in those schools that feel they have cracked this, have got it right, and would like to use the Department for Education as a platform for explaining to other schools how they can benefit from the progress they have made.

Pupil Premium

Q74 Alex Cunningham: You have referred to monitoring the success of children who attract the Pupil Premium.Can you tell us how that will work and how you ensure that cash is targeted at the individuals and not just swallowed up in the overall budget? I recollect times when additional money was going in for the kids who were looked after and nobody could actually tell me what was happening to that money. So how do we make sure that the individuals who attract the Pupil Premium are targeted with that cash?

Michael Gove: It is a fair point. The problem has often arisen with children who have special educational needs and have attracted specific funding as well. You can choose, from the centre or from anywhere, to micromanage how every penny is spent in the school, or you can trust professionals, give them autonomy and then hold them accountable. That is what I believe is right. We give significant sums and they will rise and they will become even more significant sums, because we have only seen a quarter of what will eventually be the entire Pupil Premium going to schools. As more money goes in, I expect that we will see real gains in the measures of the performance of children who received the Pupil Premium.

Q75 Alex Cunningham: But we have seen the additional support grants from local authorities have been cut to support the Pupil Premium: do you still hold with the additional funding thing? If the local authorities are not putting the money in and you are putting it in instead, is that just an even-stevens figure and they are not actually seeing extra cash?

Michael Gove: I had a look at some of the statistics on local authority spending between 2010 and 2011.

Q76 Alex Cunningham: Could you publish them for us?

Michael Gove: They were published last week. I saw that in many areas local authorities’ spending in a variety of things, like child protection and other areas, had increased. There is a view, a widespread one, sedulously promoted by critics of this Government, that spending in many of these areas has been crudely slashed. Not at all. Spending in a variety of areas for children at local authority level in 2010 and 2011 increased.

Teachers CPD

Q92 Damian Hinds: In our current Inquiry on attracting, developing and retaining the best teachers, we have focused a great deal also on continuing professional development and performance management. There is a constant complaint that you can go into teaching and effectively be there for decades without any effective personal development, and there also seems to be something of a lack of a culture of performance management, in that people leave who ultimately, after all the development they can have, are not perhaps suited to teaching. What more can be done in terms of development and performance management?

Michael Gove: A huge amount. I have said before, and I am happy to underline, that I think we have got the best generation of young people coming into teaching ever, and that is driving up the standard overall, but I think there are some people who went into teaching with high ideals who may have become stuck or demotivated. That is partly due to poor leadership from their senior leadership team, and partly due to other factors.

One of the things that we need to think hard about is how we improve performance management. Some of the changes that were made by Sally Coates in her Review of Teacher’s Standards and some of the things that we talked about when we were reviewing performance management and the capability procedures a couple of weeks ago, are helping to drive a culture change, but I also referred earlier to the work of high-performing schools, teaching schools and others. Part of the change is making sure that the classroom becomes a more open environment.

You referred to other nations earlier. One of the striking things I found when I visited the Far East is that the classroom is an open environment in which teachers learn from the leaders of their profession, who welcome observation, and then those who are either starting out or who feel that their practice has become becalmed also benefit from having other high-performing colleagues come in, observe and then offer advice. It is through that process of collaboration that we can drive improvement.

One thing I should say is that there are a number of partners with whom we should work in helping to improve professional development. The unions have a very strong role to play here. I am very grateful, for example, for the leadership shown by the ATL’s General Secretary, Mary Bousted, who has been a champion of improved professional development. There are also organisations like the Prince’s Teaching Institute, which has done a great deal in particular to help deepen teachers’ engagement with their subject. There is more that can be done, including thinking about how we can offer sabbaticals and offer opportunities for teachers to refresh their subject knowledge so that, as Michael Wilshaw has pointed out, we do not get burnout, but increased passion and reengagement.

Special Educational Needs

Q129 Charlotte Leslie: Two-thirds of rioters had SEN. What are we doing about it and what should we be doing about it?

Michael Gove: It is important, when we are talking about special educational needs, to disaggregate the different types of challenges that children and young people face. We should be clear that many of those were children who had behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, and that those were often a consequence of problems very early in their lives, as Damian was talking about earlier. So these are children who do have needs that affect their education: their lives have been blighted, but it will often be as a result of poor parenting, being born in poverty, and poor education earlier in their life, so we need to tackle all of those problems together.

Q192 Craig Whittaker: The Green Paper on SEN talks about steps to improve initial teacher training for teachers in special schools. The headteacher at Ravenscliffe, which is in Calderdale, has grave concerns about the recruitment of specialist teachers in this area because of a lack of focus on special training for those teachers in initial teacher training. Will that change?

Michael Gove: I hope so, yes, and I will report back to you, Craig, and the Committee, on how we intend to do that.

Sarah-Jane Mason, SEN Project Officer for the RHS and co-author of the report, explains, “Over the past twelve months I worked with 130 students and 80 teachers across six different learning environments in Yorkshire. All the students have different educational needs, meaning that a person-centred approach is vital to their learning.

“Gardening is a fantastic tool for breaking down barriers and offering children a different environment in which to learn. Gardening is a practical subject, so for a child with SEN this means it is accessible – it makes learning fun and opens up a new world of possibility. I think one of my favourite stories is that of Ghulam, a 13 year old who was starting to become disengaged from education. Through my work with him he now wants to start his own gardening business when he leaves school and has now enrolled on a placement to gain accreditation through the National Open College Network for his practical skills.”

This was reinforced by Lorraine Petersen CEO nasen who said, “When a child has Special Educational Needs, it is imperative that they feel part of society in order to succeed. From what I have read and seen, gardening in schools put everyone on a level playing field – they all learn together, experience together and move forward together. The other children, teachers and parents are learning at the same time as the children with SEN, meaning they have a shared experience. This experience goes a long way to closing the gap between being different.”

For further information on the RHS, its work with SEN schools and its Campaign for School Gardening please visit www.rhs.org.uk/schoolgardening. To download a copy of Moving up, Growing on, visit the RHS Media Centre http://press.rhs.org.uk.

Sean Stockdale, Editor Special