Schools should not be only bodies legally responsible for SEN outcomes: Ofsted

Schools should not be the only organisations to be held to account legally for the outcomes of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, a report by Ofsted has recommended.

“All the services involved in any common assessment should be bound equally by its terms,” the watchdog argued.

The recommendation was one of several made by Ofsted in a damning report – Special educational needs and disability review: a statement is not enough – that claimed that thousands of pupils identified as having special educational needs would not be if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all.

The report found that the current system is “focusing too much on statements of need, and checking pupils are getting additional services, and too little on how much this support is actually helping children progress”.

Some 1.7m school age children in England are now identified as having special educational needs or a disability. Ofsted said these children were “disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, are much more likely to be absent or excluded from school and achieve less well than their peers both at any given age and in terms of their progress over time”.

The watchdog also said parents felt they had to “fight for the rights” of their children under the current system, and that a statement of special needs was a guarantee of additional support. Ofsted’s inspectors nevertheless found that identification of a special need or disability did not reliably lead to appropriate or good quality support for the child concerned.

The report criticised some schools for identifying some pupils as having special educational needs when their needs were no different from those of most other pupils.

Meanwhile, where diagnosis was complex, access to services was not as straightforward than for children with the most obvious and severe needs.

Ofsted’s recommendations include:

• Any further changes to improve the system of assessment should focus on quality and improving outcomes for learners
• Schools should stop identifying children as having special educational needs when they simply need better teaching and pastoral support
• When a child or young person is underachieving, the school or setting should begin by analysing the effectiveness of its generic teaching and systems for support before deciding that they have special educational needs
• Early years providers, schools and colleges should be able to meet a wider range of additional needs “as a matter of course”, and their main funding should reflect local levels of need accordingly
• Specific rights to additional provision, enshrined in law, should apply only to disabled children and young people where the Disability Discrimination Act applies
• Where young people are protected by the DDA, their rights to additional provision should not depend, as they do at present, on where they are being educated. “In particular young people aged between 16 and 19 should have similar entitlements, whether they are at school or college”
• Evaluation should focus on the outcomes desired for and achieved by children and young people with additional needs
• The Code of Practice for Special Educational Needs and its statutory basis should be reviewed to reflect Ofsted’s recommendations across relevant departments
• Any further changes to legislation or guidance should not simply add to the current arrangements “but, rather, should simplify them and improve their consistency across different services and for children of different ages and levels of need”.

The Ofsted report was based on 345 detailed case studies of young people’s experience of the system, discussions with other young people and their parents, and visits to 22 local authorities and 228 nurseries, schools and colleges.

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Christine Gilbert, said: “Although we saw some excellent support for children with special educational needs, and a huge investment of resources, overall there needs to be a shift in direction.

“With over one in five children of school age in England identified as having special educational needs, it is vitally important that both the way they are identified, and the support they receive, work in the best interests of the children involved. Higher expectations of all children, and better teaching and learning, would lead to fewer children being identified as having special educational needs.

“For those children with complex and severe special needs, schools often need the help of health and social care services. All these services should be focused on the quality of what they are doing, and how well young people are doing as a result. At the moment too much effort is going into simply checking that extra services are being provided.”