Council announces extra £1.3 million for special needs services in Camden

Camden Council is to pump additional cash into its special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) services after a report found they were in “crisis”.

A Town Hall inquiry revealed that the average wait time for families seeking autism and ADHD diagnosis was an “appalling” 86 weeks on average.

On Wednesday, the council’s disability panel was told that services had been restructured and an extra £1.3 million was being invested.

A report from Vikram Hansrani, director of education commissioning and inclusion, said the redesign had freed up more money for SEND provision.

Regular SEND and inclusion surgeries have also been included in the council’s offering “to make it easier for families to get updates or information about
their cases”.

“This marks a culture shift in how we are providing services and responding to families,” the report stated.

It added that a further “circa £2 million” had been awarded by the council in capital grants to schools to help them enhance accessibility and inclusion.

The council said it had achieved a surplus due to effective management of High Needs Block (HNB) funding.

A key focus for the local authority is cutting waiting times for diagnoses and improving the support it provides to families in the interim.

As of July this year, the council maintains 1,562 Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP) for children and young people who live in the borough.

EHCPs include a plan statement that entitles youngsters with more complex needs to targeted support, beyond what schools’ basic SEND resources can give.

Between January and July this year, 76 per cent of new EHCPs were issued within 20 weeks.

While this rate is higher than the national average (54 per cent), in the report the director said the council wanted to see this go back to previous highs between 90-97 per cent.

The drop “in part is due the council seeing the largest increase in [EHCPs] since the introduction of legislative changes in 2014 over the past year,” the report added.

The assessments were introduced by the Children and Families Bill a decade ago. Since 2016, the number of pupils with ECHPs has risen by over 80 per cent.

In January, the Institute for Government called for the system’s reform, arguing that the 2014 Act was the ‘root cause’ of SEND spending, which had led to huge deficits in school budgets across the country.

Last month, Camden Council said it had experienced a spike in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests around SEND in August and early September.

Residents complained of a “pattern of ignoring communication”, citing emails sent to council officers that never received responses.

The Town Hall suggested this was co-ordinated to “disrupt the council and particularly the SEND service by the volume of FOI requests around this subject”.

It dimissed the “vexatious” requests on the grounds that several “[contained] allegations about individual named members of staff, with accusations which are unjustifiably personal and abusive”.

Figures from the Department for Education (DfE) this year revealed more than 430,000 pupils in the UK now have an EHCP — around 25 per cent of the 1.6 million pupils registered with SEN.

Before its election victory, Labour promised 6,500 new teachers—to be paid for by adding VAT to private school fees—but its commitments on SEND funding were more limited.

Its manifesto said it would be “improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools, and requiring all schools to co-operate with local authorities on SEND inclusion”, but it did not mention EHCPs.