Schools and parents to be consulted on new special needs plans to reduce £65k-a-year placements
Parents and schools are being asked how to help children with special needs and disabilities better and stop them having to take taxis out of town to places costing £65,000-a-year.
Education bosses at Stockton Council say their proposals to give more specialist support for children in mainstream schools will prevent children having to look for independent special schools out of the area and give parents more choice of school placements. They say grant funding will pay for this, along with free training for teachers and support staff, when the changes start from September 2025.
The new model of "additional resourced provisions and SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) units" is meant to cope with rising demand for services like speech, language and occupational therapy. It is meant to make sure "special schools have the right number of places with the children who needs these placements most", according to the council's report.
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Eddie Huntington, the council's head of education, said the consultation would start this week: "This is to go to schools in terms of the current enhanced mainstream school provision. We have 15 schools which provide support for children with various levels of SEND.
"This was to allow them to access some time in school and some time within a unit so they were still very much attached to a school but also getting the support they needed. We are looking at this because they've been in place for a considerable period of time and a number of changes have happened in the school leadership.
"It's a matter of, are these schools still committed to that process? Are there other schools out there who are interested in this process?"
He told Stockton Council's latest cabinet meeting the change in terminology, from "enhanced mainstream schools" to "additionally resourced provisions and SEN units", was a truer reflection of what the town had. He added: "Many of these children don't access as much in mainstream as we would've liked them to, but they are still part of that school community.
"There's some excellent examples out there of what's going on. We want to build on some of that good work.
"It also fits in with our delivering better value strategy and it will go into the vision of having children access learning at a local level and not having to travel a distance in a taxi to access learning, which isn't always as good as it could be provided within their local school."
He said there would be savings from transport to outside places: "We have asked that schools look at this not in terms of capital and buildings but in terms of space they've got and what they can utilise. We will be looking at fees we currently pay them.
"We want to be able to provide the money for them to be able to do the best by these children. It's very much at the heart of what we want for SEN children."
'We'll be keeping them in the borough'
Councillor Lisa Evans, cabinet member for children and young people, said: "To me it fits really well with our vision of providing early intervention to reduce the demand for higher cost placements which are often out of the borough. It aligns with our overarching strategy for SEN children.
"As an example, the average cost of an independent specialist placement is £65,000 per year. It isn't to me as much about the money, and there will be some savings, it's about the outcomes for these young people.
"We'll be keeping them in the borough. It'll be more accessible for their parents to go to their school and to their placement and speak with teachers and specialists.
"For our young people it saves them a taxi drive to an often expensive placement outside the borough that doesn't provide the best opportunities for some of our young people. We've got some excellent schools in the borough that are really good at doing this.
"At St John's a new unit just opened last week that's going to take quite a lot of our young people. We have Ash Trees at Billingham South which is really successful and of course we have Abbey Hill at North Shore.
"This gives our SEN children an opportunity to integrate in a mainstream school. For me the benefits are also for children in the mainstream school, to show more empathy and work alongside some of our vulnerable young people with SEND.
"We're going out to consultation with the schools to see what further work we can do."