Children’s Commissioner champions children’s voice to inform SEND review
The Children’s Commissioner, Rachel De Souza, has released a report entitled ‘Beyond the labels – a SEND system that works for every child every time’. The report details the views of children and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and expresses her commitment to ensuring that children’s voices are at the heart of the SEND green paper consultation. Four key messages emerged from the work:
- Children are ambitious, but do not always have excellent support
- The SEND system should work for all children
- Children want services to work together to provide seamless support.
- Children don’t always feel understood.
From these four core messages the Children’s Commissioner has developed three over-arching ambitions for the SEND review green paper:
Ambition 1: Ensure all children and young people get support that reflects their ambitions
Ambition 2: Children getting timely and effective support, locally, with a focus on early intervention
Ambition 3: Consistent, excellent experiences for all children wherever they are in the system
The report details proposed solutions to each of these ambitions and the challenges that each one presents. The significance of the date of release of this report should not be underestimated as the response to the review has been promised by the end of the calendar year. By choosing to publish the report now it would be fair to suppose that the Department for Education are continuing to engage with the SEND sector to refine its response. Might this delay the response, along with the change of ministers?
