Bristol Teachers Struggle With New Digital Send Tool
The lengthy tool was developed as part of the replacement to culled Top-Up funding
Teachers in Bristol who work with children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) are finding a new online tool to access Send funding ‘heavy’ on the amount of time it takes to complete.
The new Early Intervention Fund (EIF) and SEND Support Tool was launched in September last year. It was developed from recommendations made through the Delivering Better Value in SEND (DBV) programme – prior to the council signing up to the Safety Valve Agreement.
It replaced the non-statutory Top Up funding process, which was cut by former Cabinet Lead for Education Asher Craig before the abolition of the Mayoral system. This has caused a significant temporary rise in the number of Education Health Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) requests made in Bristol recently.
The EIF is additional funding specifically for mainstream settings to support children and young people with early emerging needs. Grants of up to £2,500 are available per pupil to support them to access education alongside their peers.
Sendcos must evidence that a graduated response, reasonable adjustments and ‘evidence-based’ intervention has taken place.
Applications for the EIF must be made through a digital tool, but Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Co-ordinators (Sendco) say it takes too long to get through.
Bristol City Council says that to be able to make an application to the EIF, Sendcos ‘must first attend an in-person training event in City Hall.’
The council also says that a ‘comprehensive training programme’ was delivered to 111 schools around EIF applications. This saw 150 attendees over 12 sessions.
A 23 page handbook to The SEND Support Tool by Senior Educational Psychologist Dr Jude Liberman and Bristol SEND School Improvement Officer Alison Hendy is available on the council’s website, alongside extensive support documents.
At Bristol Schools Forum this week, Primary Headteacher for Academy Settings representative Esther Messinger, raised collective concerns of Bristol Sendcos to Director of Education and Skills Vik Verma.
Messinger said: “Sendcos have found that the Send support tool took quite a lot of time to complete. It was heavy on demand of time and therefore I know that there was a question about how useful it was going to be, because the money that you could receive after completing that wasn’t quite as expected to what we thought to begin with.”
She asked Verma how many Sendcos across the city had applied for the Early Intervention Fund via the digital tool and how many had been successful?
Verma did not have the answer to the question although promised to drop it into the off-screen Zoom chat during the meeting if he could find it.
He said: “So first of all, I think the Send Support Tool does take time to complete because it tries to capture the different types of needs that that children will have – which can can be for a multitude of reasons. So it is part of that kind of diagnostic tool and it also should give schools a return as well that’s useful for them in terms of a benchmark of how to assess need.
“It’s been very positively received by the DFE [Department for Education] who want to use it as a model for other local authorities as well. They can see that the innovation that we’ve put into having that Send Support Tool does create a really useful diagnostic for that Send support cohort. So I think first and foremost it’s a really valuable tool.
“Yes it does take time because every child’s needs are going to be different and varying in complexity.
“It’s in its first year so there’s one million pounds that’s been allocated to the fund and that was as part of this pilot for this first year to see how we get on you know, how the schools experience it. If it’s hugely successful and we start to see some really good positive early intervention taking effect then there’s no reason why we wouldn’t want to come back to Forum and suggest that we increase the pot further.”
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