‘Significant weaknesses’ in local area SEND arrangements 

When the Children and Families Act 2014 was introduced, new legal duties were placed upon local area partnerships with respect to the children and young people with SEND in their locality. From May 2016 Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have carried out a programme of local area SEND inspections and the data from these has been released. These examined the extent to which the partnerships were carrying out their legal duties. After all local areas have had this inspection carried out it has been found that 55% have been required to produce a Written Statement of Action (WSoA) to address significant weaknesses in their area SEND arrangements. While this is a huge figure, it masks the fact that in the last year alone 68% of all inspections have reached this threshold. Once a WSoA has been enacted a revisit is required, and the data is not reassuring. Just under half of those revisited were making sufficient progress addressing all weaknesses, just over half were making progress in some, but not all, weaknesses and two made no progress at all.

However, this is not the whole story, within this data the proportion of WSoA’s at a regional level are vastly different with London (33%) having the least and the East of England (82%) having the most. The impact of this on children, young people and their families cannot be underestimated. As a result of the analysis, the Department for Education, with the Department of Health and Social Care, has commissioned a new ongoing area SEND inspection framework to begin in early 2023 to support local area partnerships to focus more strongly on outcomes for children and young people as wel as compliance to statutory processes.