Targeted support for SEND

Our vision for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is the same as for all children and young people - that they achieve well in their early years, at school and in college, that they find employment; lead happy and fulfilled lives; and experience choice and control. In 2014, we made significant changes to the way the SEND system works.

Those reforms were designed to put children and young people with SEND at the heart of the process, by joining up services for 0-25 year olds across local authorities, schools and colleges, and health and social care, and by focusing on positive outcomes in terms of employment, independent living, health, and community participation. The reforms involved significant changes to the ways in which that local agencies work together to commission and provide services for children and young people with SEND.

Whilst encouraging progress has been made in the way that local authorities and health partners are delivering services, there is still some way to go before the reforms and associated cultural changes are fully embedded across the education, health and care sectors. Through our targeted delivery support contracts, we want to build on our current programme of focused support for local areas to help them embed the reforms and improve their SEND service performance.

Our priority is those local areas with the most significant issues in delivering their statutory SEND duties including, but not limited to, those with a Written Statement of Action following their Ofsted/CQC inspection, those which have not made sufficient progress after a revisit and those needing support to effectively manage their High Needs budget. We expect bidders to capitalise on the success of work delivered to date by the Delivering Better Outcomes Together (DBOT) consortium whilst proposing innovative measures to increase the pace of improvement and maximise the impact of the support provided to local areas.

The functions of the targeted support for delivery of SEND services contracts will include, but not be limited to the requirements set out below. Participants are invited to populate Section 3 of the attached, however as previously specified the requirement, objectives and structure of the potential opportunity going forward may be subject to change.