An essential component of any strategy is to be clear on your destination. Sadly nobody seems to have thought about that for special schools and alternative provision (AP) schools for a very long time, though.
But what would a strategy for the specialist sector look like, if we valued it on its own terms rather than just seeing its fate as an inconsequential by-product of mainstream policy?
Here are four areas where things need improving.
A strategy for special schools and AP
1. Admissions
No state special school is in charge of its admissions. A child’s responsible local authority can name whatever setting it wants on an education, health and care plan (EHCP), and from that moment the school has a legal duty for that child.
No pupil can be removed from roll until the council changes the school’s name on the EHCP either, which can cause issues. For example, a council once refused to remove one of our schools from an EHCP even though it had placed a child in a care setting 100 miles away. It took more than six months to resolve.
Furthermore, the only appeal process open to a school is a section 496 referral to the secretary of state - yes, the only appeal option is direct to the education secretary.
Meanwhile, through the tribunal process, a special school is only involved if the legal team representing the local authority asks it for evidence or for it to attend the hearing. Often headteachers aren’t invited and only discover that a tribunal has taken place when the direction to admit a child is relayed to them.
If they are involved, they are usually given less than 48 hours’ notice of a hearing and are often left waiting all day at court - and still not even called upon for evidence. If they are called for evidence, it is usually for something procedural. Whether involved or not, the outcome is almost always to place the young person.
Yet these are the professionals who have the deepest understanding about why a placement in their school is not in that child’s best interests or incompatible with the pupils already on roll. They should be the expert witness.
2. Special schools and AP overlap
Currently special schools and AP settings overlap more than anyone wants - which conflates the two into one homogenous sector, leaving AP lost in the world of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and special schools. But AP often occupies the space between special and mainstream and needs to be valued on its own terms.
So if we want to improve this, local authorities - or whoever holds the sufficiency duty in future - should have a SEND sufficiency plan and a separate one for AP.
There should be AP funding arrangements and commissions that allow for a viable and sustainable local offer with a clearer statutory remit, and there should be legal limits on how this can be grown in-year, to stop institutions being overwhelmed.
All growth should come with funding guarantees, which the high-needs operational guidance currently stipulates. The same please, too, for special schools.
3. Performance
If we are to understand the role of special settings, we need a clear outcomes framework for special schools and AP pupils.
Currently many learners leave specialist settings with successful outcomes for them - but that are demeaned as “not good enough” by politicians when measured against mainstream expectations.
The “preparing for adulthood” framework is a solid starting point and one that we should build on so we have an explicitly defined set of outcomes for special-school pupils.
The framework was introduced to help define what good outcomes look like for our most vulnerable learners, yet has largely been ignored by successive governments when shaping the narrative on SEND outcomes. This needs to change.
4. Funding
The absence of health funding in the SEND system should be considered a national scandal, especially when child and adolescent mental health services are in such a state of disrepair.
Yet in the current system schools are all too often in receipt of zero health funding or are sent down the healthcare rabbit hole. The system feels like it’s designed to obfuscate and confuse.
Over time, we may very well see fewer children needing a place in specialist settings, and special and AP schools can dream of the day when they aren’t over-saturated and under-funded. Yet there will always be an essential purpose for these schools.
As such, high-needs budgets should come with health funding, defined by the government and directed from the Department for Health and Social Care, so it features at the point of commission.
It should also be a point of national shame that our most vulnerable learners are often in our worst public buildings, so let’s channel some of the capital investment that the chancellor has promised to our society’s most vulnerable children.
Warren Carratt is the CEO of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust
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