Bristol City Council apologise after parents say it is ‘continuing to fail’ SEND children

Bristol City Council is “continuing to fail” children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) one year after a damning watchdog report, according to parents.

The authority’s top officer with responsibility for SEND apologised after mothers shared their struggles to get the right support for their children this month.

The apology came as Bristol City Council reported on progress to address failings highlighted by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission in December last year.

The joint watchdog report into support offered to SEND children in Bristol raised “significant concerns” about the effectiveness of council staff, school leaders and the area’s Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) – which decides how the local health budget is spent.

In response, the council and the CCG’s issued a joint “statement of action” in March, setting out what would be done to address the five key areas of weakness identified.

To address “extensive delays” in meeting statutory deadlines, the council promised to “immediately” speed up how quickly it deals with needs assessment requests and issues education and health care plans (EHCPs) for children.

A SEND protest in Bristol. Photo: Bristol SEND campaigners

It also promised to provide parents, carers and children and young people with “timely and helpful communication, information and support” to guide them through the statutory process.

But Bristol mum Hayley Hemming told scrutiny councillors last week she had to fight for a needs assessment for her son and ended up paying £2,500 for it privately.

“A year later, the EHCP is in place and so is the provision, but the school haven’t been able to access any funding, so my son’s one-to-one is the school TA (teaching assistant) so the other 29 children in his class have no TA at all,” she said.

Mother Tammi Clark said she received no communication from the council at 20 weeks – the statutory deadline for councils to issue EHCPs – and was “finally” told the delay was due to a lack of educational psychologists (EPs).

She said she complained to Jacqui Jensen, executive director for adults, children and education, in September but her email was “ignored”.

“This seems to be a systemic failure of communication which is a top-down issue,” Clark told members of the people scrutiny commission.

She said the executive management team should be held “personally responsible” and called for the “immediate” removal of responsibility for SEND from Jensen.

Clark also called for a “special hotline” for EHCP complaints and a publicly available “tracking system” for all EHCP applications.

“In my view, Bristol City Council is continuing to fail SEND children,” she said.

Tammi Clark (bottom right) speaks at the people scrutiny commission. Image: Bristol City Council

Jensen, who attended the meeting on Monday, December 14, made a fulsome apology to Clark and told her she had immediately requested a review of the complaints and communications process.

The council was recruiting EPs as quickly as it could, she added.

Jensen said: “I would like to apologise to you that our complaints system failed you and you didn’t get a response from me or you didn’t get a response from the office in the way that we expect it to work.

“I’m really, really sorry that I disappointed you, and I’m sorry that the complaints failed you and it was my name on that and I’m really sorry for that.

“I’m sorry that we’re not running a service that’s fully compliant. I’m sorry it has been years getting to this point. We’re nowhere near where we need to be and we started from a low base  but we are making some inroads.”

The meeting heard that a new funding system for EHCP support should be in place by next academic year.

It should mean funding will follow each plan rather than schools having to apply for top-up funding once a plan is issued.

Education director Alison Hurley added that a “family portal” was being developed so parents, carers and children and young people can see “see exactly where they are in the system and what needs to happen”.

She said the council was “moving in the right direction” regarding timeliness of EHCPs and aimed to reach the national average – 65 per cent issued within 20 weeks – by autumn next year.

The average so far this year was around 20 per cent compared with 0.7 per cent last year, she said.

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Read more: £28.7m investment in SEND provision as Bristol in unable to meet current need

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Hurley said the council had achieved or partly achieved nearly 90 per cent of the milestones against the statement of action for July and November, but admitted it would be some time before families noticed a difference.

She said: “Our compliance in those milestones that we see at this stage are very much about reform of the governance arrangements for reform of systems and processes.

“What we’re still not able to see in evidence… this will come at a later date, is that real day-to-day impact on all of our families and children and young people across the city.

“So we have got an improved system, our stats are showing we’re going in the right direction, but what will take longer to come is for that to really feel like that impact is there for our families.

“So I’m acutely aware that whenever we update about our improvements and we’re able to show progress, that there will be families, and we’ve heard from two parents this morning, that that is not yet realised for them.”

Amanda Cameron is a local democracy reporter for Bristol.

Main photo: Bristol City Council

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