Our improvement work was originally built on following four ‘pillars’, taken together to address the eight areas for improvement specified in the Joint area SEND inspection report.

Within each pillar are several Focus Areas broken down into the smaller actions. Each has a lead person, an agreed timescale and a description we will measure success.

We have now incorporated these into our 2023 SEND Strategy.

Pillar 1 – Joint commissioning

The report said the organisations that commission services were not working well together. Commissioning means planning, designing, paying for and monitoring services. For SEND services, this is mostly done by Torbay Council and NHS Devon.

The actions we will take include:

• Using local data and intelligence to create a better ‘Joint Strategic Needs Assessment’ to bring together and detail local needs across social care, education and health.
• Establishing a joint commissioning group, made up of all partners, to develop clear and strategic ways of working closely and effectively together.

Pillar 2 – Inclusion

The report said local organisations didn’t work well enough with each other, nor with local families. It said we did not involve families in decision-making about services or in monitoring how well they were working.

The report said there was too much difference between the levels of service that some people got compared to others in a similar position.

The actions we will take include:

• Creating an ambitious SEND Strategy in partnership with local families
• Designing effective ways of making sure the strategy is working, once it is being delivered
• Improving the culture across all teams – from the people delivering services to senior leaders – by agreeing core values and then training and encouraging everyone to behave in ways that embody those values
• Producing a report setting out how the lived experience of families will inform all work across the system
• Improving communications between families and service providers and commissioners
• Improving the way different parts of the system work together behind the scenes so that parents and families only have to ‘tell their story once’ when engaging with local agencies.
• Transforming the way schools and early years settings assess, plan, carry out and review their provision for each child and young person with SEND to make sure they get the tailored support they need.
• Using exclusion data to highlight which schools need support to reduce the number of students being excluded

Pillar 3 – Becoming an adult

The report said the range of opportunities and choices for children and young people with SEND when they reach 16 was poor and needed improving.

The actions we will take include:

• Embedding traineeships, supporting internships, apprenticeships and school leaver schemes – and setting targets for the number of young people taking them up – to increase the number of young people with SEND in education, training or employment once they have left school or college
• Seeking out Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans that have worked well to share and widen good practice.

Pillar 4 – Quality assurance and community engagement

The report said there was too much variation in the quality of Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans and that the views of parents were not treated seriously enough.

The actions we will take include:

• Carrying out a full review of the way EHC plans are produced in partnership with Family Voice Torbay.
• Making sure the process for seeking the views of parents, carers and children is fully accessible and is effective in gaining comprehensive information on a ‘tell your story once’ basis.
• Improving quality checks on EHC plans and training teams to produce high quality, consistent and effective plans
• Making sure EHCs contain a clear thread running through them that helps the young person achieve their personal goals, all the way through to adulthood.