Bristol City Council Send Updates Continue To Show Issues
Bristol City Council Send updates came to a committee meeting this week
- EHCP timeliness
- Educational Psychologist Crisis
- Children Missing Education
- Labour Cabinet top up cuts sees EHCNAs increase
Updates on Bristol Send were discussed at a meeting at the council house this week, with a committee hearing where issues and improvement plans affect the state of the city’s education and Send service.
The Children and Young People Policy Committee met in central Bristol for its scrutiny responsibilities for all the things that affects children and young people in Bristol. This includes education, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send), education department performance, early years, corporate parenting and children and family services. The full list is available, as well as links to its meetings on the Bristol City Council website.
Issues with Send and Education Health Care Needs Assessments (EHCNA) and Education Health Care Plans (EHCPs) has been chaotic in the city since the transition from the old style Statements into reforms of the Children and Families Act 2014.
The committee meeting was led by chair Councillor Christine Townsend for the Green party in Southville.
In an update by Executive Director of the Children and Education Directorate, Hannah Woodhouse, the committee looked at Send and EHCP issues continuing to plague Bristol families.
EHCP Data Progress Paper
Hannah Woodhouse told councillors that issues of timeliness regarding EHCPs had been discussed in the council’s Children’s Quality, Improvement and Performance (QuIP) Board. Bristol City Council refuses to release documentation around this meeting under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) because it will ‘undoubtedly lead to high volumes of enquiries from potentially affected families, which will impact upon the ability of officers in the service area to perform their roles.’
Woodhouse said: “In the performance paper, in the data, its sets out the number of new requests for EHCPs, number of children awaiting EHCPS as well as timeliness data in there as well. And we’ve had obviously published a question and answer around the number of children awaiting EHCPs. So the data sits there as well.
“It is fair to say that this continues to be a really significant challenge for all of us. And again I just wanted to sort of recognise the distress and concern from families, from parents and from children with special educational needs while they’re waiting for statutory assessments. It is a statutory assessment, it’s not a target and we do recognise that. And so we are working to communicate really well with parents and carers through the Parent Carer Forum. Really grateful for their support in this work.
“In terms of the 20 week timeliness, we are at 12 per cent of EHCPs finalised in 20 weeks as of now. Obviously our year to date is higher than that. But that’s where we are now. But however, we have finalised more EHCPs this month than we have previously. So whilst the timeliness of the 20 weeks is dropping we are finalising more and that’s because we are as we talked last time, we’re finalising more who have gone beyond the 20 weeks. What we’re looking at is those legacy outliers I guess that have taken longer and what we’re wanting to do is make sure that no one goes beyond, certainly 52 weeks and trying to bring down the longer waiting EHCPS whilst also recognising that 20 week is a statutory expectation.”
Woodhouse said that the Send service was undergoing restructure, with a commitment to increase its staff in recognition of the “scale of demand that has hit that service.”
She continued: “We’ve had a 30 per cent rise in requests over the last year, children coming forward with EHCPs. And that will put pressure on the service if you’ve got the same number of people, which is why we’re expanding the service and obviously that will take time to work through as we continue to focus on it.”
With regard to Tribunals, Woodhouse said that Bristol had continued to see a lower number of tribunals against the national average. She added this was despite their overall decision making around EHCPs not changing.
She told committee members that Bristol City Council has finalised 640 EHCPs this year, with 1300 requests to date in 2024.
An officer response to EHCP data raised during public forum stated that from the start of January until the end of October 2024, Bristol City Council had received 1304 EHCNAs.
This was averaged at a rate of 130 requests per month, an increase on the average of 99 per month on data from 2023.
Of the open 1304 EHCNAs, 684 are within the 20-week timeframe, but 620 fall outside of the statutory deadline.

Data in the accompanying Children and Young People Policy Committee Update Report paper for the meeting raised more questions than it answered when compared with the answer given to public forum.
The average wait time for EHCPs at the end of October 2024 – according to public forum data – was at 33 weeks.
The average wait time in the performance paper headlines said that as of 30 September 2024, it was 41.8 weeks

Educational Psychology Issues
An EHCNA Recovery Plan has been put into place at the council aiming to improve both the ‘timeliness’ and ‘quality’ of EHCPS.
Papers say: ‘A restructure of the SEND Team and streamlining of decision-making processes is in process to enable this, alongside piloting new ways of working to provide Educational Psychology contributions in children’s plans. Work also continues to strengthen our work with schools to support the effective implementation of the graduated approach and wider inclusion strategies.’

However, the council is currently struggling to staff the service, having dropped from a team of 32 Educational Psychologists to just seven, since September 2022.
In the public forum section of the committee meeting, member of the public Dan Ackroyd, told the council: “My understanding is that Bristol City Council currently has only seven Permanent Educational psychologists and has fifteen vacancies.
“I have searched online, and I do not seem to be able to find anywhere that BCC is recruiting for these roles.
“I would be interested in hearing if BCC is actively recruiting for these roles, if so where, and how difficult it is to fill these roles.
“It must be producing a tremendous burden on the current staff when the vacancy rate is double the number of filled roles.”
Hannah Woodhouse replied: “We have just finished a recruitment round for EPs and we’ve made several offers, so very, very conscious of the need to continue to recruit into the EP service and actually the Send service as well.”
Councillor Christine Townsend added: “So the thing I want to add about Educational Psychologists and this goes for Occupational Therapists and other specialists that every local authority needs. The courses that universities offer are prescribed in number by the government basically. And this has been an issue for a number of years. I know that my predecessor on People Scrutiny, Councillor Kent raised this because the numbers of university educational psychology courses in the city don’t match anywhere near the number of people we need coming through the pipe line.
“That is something that the One City Children and Young People’s Board is going to focus on. We’ve got a focus for workforce, children’s workforce this coming year. And I will be speaking with university representatives as to why those numbers are low and what they can do. Or therefore what we can do in order to try to increase the numbers of places that are offered for those who wish to train to be educational psychologists.
“There’s a shortage in Bristol, there’s a shortage at a national level. So it’s not just us. And I’m sure there’s many other local authorities that are also saying “we need more university courses so that we can get the workforce that is required for our next generation.”
Under a Freedom of Information Request made by a member of the public on What Do They Know, Bristol City Council revealed last week that it currently employed just 7 permanent Educational Psychologists.
The disclosure said Bristol currently employs 1 locum, 1 Assistant Educational Psychologist and has three Trainee Educational Psychologists currently on placement with the council.
The council also said that there are 15 vacancies for Educational Psychologists.
On X last week, Sally Kent of Bristol Send Justice questioned the low number of Educational Psychologists asking: ‘How did they lose 18 EPs in 2.5 years?’
Kent referred to a previous Tweet of hers made in March 2022. Back then, she questioned why Bristol City Council was unable to process enough EHCPs on a team of 32 Educational Psychologists in September 2022.

The staffing of the SEN team has also been an on-going situation in Bristol. Councillor Kerry Bailes asked in the meeting how recruitment around EHCP caseworkers was going.
Woodhouse replied: “We’re in discussion with the service which is about changing the way they work in terms of processing so that we can speed up assessments and continue to do that well. We have expanded the service, so we have invested more funding into the service which will increase the number of posts, which will bring the caseloads down. But I can’t tell you right now, because we’re in consultation, by how many.”
Councillor Townsend added: “And ultimately, everyone needs an ed psych to have the full assessment. I know it’s the ed psych service that we need to focus on equally as much as the Send caseworkers.”
Councillor Bailes replied that the private sector for educational psychologist assessments was about an 8 month wait.
Hundreds of Children Missing Education in Bristol
Other serious Send issues were also raised in the meeting.
There are currently 658 Children Missing Education (CME). The paper says there has been an ‘increase’ in the number of children affected by this. Children Missing Education means they are not on the roll of any school and are not receiving elective home education.
Councillor Townsend said: “Children missing education are children that we as a local authority are aware of, but they’re not on roll with any school. And this number did really fire out to me. So my question was why are they not going through the fair access protocol panels? Because that would be your usual route that the education welfare officer or whoever would take. It would be passed through the fair access panel and therefore the child will get allocated a place. So I suppose it’s about what is it about stopping those children going through that panel? Because it a really high number.”
She asked the council to look ‘hard’ at the data to find what the “blockages and barriers” are to the children and young people’s education.
The report also showed that there will still high numbers of children waiting for a place at a specialist setting – 180 of them as of 30 September 2024.
The Director went into details around school improvement work, saying that they are currently working with 38 maintained schools to implement a new school improvement framework.
Responding to a question on the Phonics Screening, Woodhouse said the rate of improvement in Bristol has been slower than that nationally.
She said: “Key stage 2 data, primary data is not strong across Bristol. We’ve got some brilliant primary schools but we’ve also got some schools that are really struggling. So we’ve implemented a framework with school improvement officers. It’s difficult to recruit school improvement officers anywhere. And so that has been work we want to make sure we get quality advice to those maintained schools. So that’s been a subject of focus for us this term.”
Exclusions
In an update around exclusions, data in the papers shows the suspension rate for the academic year 2024/25 had dropped. The number of permanent exclusions had risen. But the internal data in the table did not include that of four schools.
Hannah Woodhouse was keen to point out that although the number of permanent exclusions had risen, it matched a decline in the use of Managed Moves.
She said: “I think the headline as the report says. Whilst we have seen exclusions rising across Bristol the last five years, we’ve actually seen this year significant numbers of managed moves dropping. Which means that what we did have in Bristol is we had children moving between secondary schools without formal exclusions, which menas that you don’t have to legally talk to parents. You’re moving children between schools without that sort of transparency. So we’ve seen Managed Moves, dropping really significantly whilst exclusions at the moment are quite significantly lower than the same time last year. But it is a subject of concern to secondary schools – to us all. Particularly to make sure that those children at risk of exclusion are supported to remain in those schools”.

Managed Moves is something that we have looked into before here and here. It’s been used in Bristol as a way of moving pupils to other schools without it appearing on school exclusion data.
We were told by one family at the time we were looking at this data that their secondary aged child had been heading towards six Managed Moves. He did not have an EHCP and the parent was forced to buy a whole set of new school uniform for each move.
Bristol top up funding cuts by former Labour Cabinet see EHCNA requests increase
Councillor Freeman commented about the Send and EHCP update saying: “It’s great that obviously overall those waiting times are coming down. Is that because you’re taking a slightly different approach of triaging as plans come in so that’s more manageable rather than really trying to aim for that blanket 20 weeks target? So you sort of change your strategy slightly which appears to be working.”
Woodhouse said: “We do try to treat every child in the order in which they come in because that it’s difficult to identify different reasons why we would move other people further up. But the service I think have been focused on the longer waiting assessments which is why they’re completing more quicker. But it’s also why potentially the timeliness is coming down to 20 weeks because we’re looking, as we said last time, we’re looking at 30/40 weeks. We’re looking at those that have been in the system for longer wanting to deliver on those first. So we have shifted our approach very very very clearly towards that group of young people and again you know continuing to communicate with parents who are at all stages of that process as quickly as we can.”
Freeman replied: “I Just wondered whether you have a sense of where you think we might be in kind of one year, five years time. If you feel like that’s within reach, or just too many unknowns at this point.”
Woodhouse said they would go into the recovery plan in more detail when they bring the final Send Strategy.
She said: “I think it also depends on the level of need and the number children coming through with that level of need and obviously there’s a big impetus as well on our specialist placements and the realisation of those through the capital programme as well.”
Freeman questioned where the increase of EHCNAs were coming from, referencing the pandemic four years ago:
She asked: “Do you think that some of this hump that we’ve had and the increase that we’ve had is a result of Covid and might slowly tail off as those impacts kind of settle out? Or do you think it’s a kind of continuing trend that we as a country, city might just continue to see more children with more needs coming through?”
Hannah said: “I mean certainly it’s a national trend so, I think, I mean again as we’ve said before,I think it will be a combination of a lot of different things. We are seeing assessments being brought forward at very, very early stages. And certainly increased number of needs of very younger children. But we’re also seeing first time assessments coming into the secondary system as well. So it’s really difficult – and I wouldn’t want to hypothosise about why, why that pressure is coming.

“One of the reasons we’re seeing in Bristol more EHCP assessments is we think linked to the removal of top up funding. Which we consulted on two years ago, which we’re taking out of the system. We’re seeing a number of those children present for an EHCP whereas previously they would have had non-statutory top up funding. I think we’ve got a national pressure or rise in need of children but in Bristol, we’ve also got the removal of top up which has driven further pressure on the system.”
Former Labour Cabinet lead for education in Bristol, Councillor Asher Craig, was a driving force in the cutting of top up funding in Bristol.
She had told Bristol Schools Forum in January 2023 that if she believed there was no case to continue with top up funding in Bristol, it would be cut entirely.

Cuts to top up funding were approved at a Cabinet meeting on 06 February 2024. The recommendations for cutting the funding were made by Asher Craig, which were then fully supported by the former and last Mayor Marvin Rees.

Top up funding was eventually cut in Autumn 2024.
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