Bristol Send Strategy – Education Officers Distance Themselves From Former Chaos

‘Poignant’ moment for Director of Education as he discusses Bristol’s Send chaos

Parent carers in Bristol should expect Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) support to get better under the council’s ‘new way’ of working.

The message was given by the current Director of Education – Vik Verma – at a meeting with the city’s Send community earlier this month.

Verma was recently announced as the new permanent Director after holding the position for an interim period. He is the fifth person to hold the position since the middle of 2018.

During a session discussing the Bristol SEND and Inclusion Strategy 2024 – 2028, Verma distanced himself from Bristol’s failure to get to grips with the Send reforms of 2014.

The contentious period saw the council fail its Ofsted and CQC Send inspection. Timeliness of Education Health Care Plans fell to zero. There were allegations against Bristol City Council of spying on families. The former Cabinet lead for Education, Asher Craig even caused political upset by cutting funding to the city’s Parent Carer Forum.

Vik Verma said: “It’s quite poignant because I think when I arrived in Bristol almost a year ago, there were lots of challenges. It was very visible what some of those challenges were and one of things we spoke a lot about as a service both in designing the new strategy but also in reflecting on where the service was, we needed to let go of some of the older ways of working – which were not driving good outcomes which were some of the challenges around working very procedurally. And actually, what we want to see our services doing is working much more relationally. So they’re putting themselves in the shoes of families, thinking about the challenging roles of schools and SendCos and working within that context.

“Yes there are lots of challenges in the Send system and some of those are part of national challenges. But actually, we can do good work within that and we do do good work within that. There’s brilliant case studies that I’ve seen within our services where they’ve been doing absolutely fantastic work with children and we want to see more of that and we want to bottle more of the ways that are working.

“We made a very conscious decision with our internal services to talk a lot about what is the future way of working. What is a new way and what do we need to let go of in order to move forward.”

Issues created by the previous Labour administration under Marvin Rees were discussed at this month’s Children and Young People Policy Committee.

Councillor Christine Townsend asked Verma to expand on issues surrounding the ending of top-up funding.

Vermer said that from March 2024 to March 2025, there had been a “sustained increase” in requests for Education Health Care Needs Assessments (EHCNA).

He said: “If you take for example that the south west average was somewhere between 09 and 11 per cent on various local authorities, what we were experiencing was about 32/33 per cent increase in that time. That obviously would be alarming if that was a kind of organic demand, an organic kind of increase in demand. But actually, what we know that relates to is it’s almost entirely attributed to the decision to remove high needs top up funding which is been a feature of the Send service in Bristol for some time.

“I suppose in a nutshell what that funding offered was early intervention funding for about a thousand children to to the tune of around 8 to 9 million pounds with small grants to schools to support individual children.

“A decision was made in February of 2024 and this would have been under the previous administration, to remove that top up funding. And that then set off a wave of schools requesting Education Health and Care Plans. And that’s essentially why we see that that increase.”

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