This month’s Devon’s special educational needs and disability (SEND) Improvement Partnership Board news update has been published. Devon SEND Improvement news is for children, young people, parents, carers and professionals.
Read some highlights below, or read the full newsletter online.
If you’d like to receive the newsletter by email, you can subscribe to Devon SEND Improvement news.
Thank you for your views
Julian Wooster, Interim Director of Children and Young People’s Futures at Devon County Council, and Jo Turl, Director of Commissioning Primary, Community and Mental Health Care at NHS Devon, would like to thank all the parents, carers and young people across the county who took part in a recent survey about services for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
Read their joint statement in full.
July SEND Improvement Partnership Board update
The Devon SEND Improvement Partnership Board met on Wednesday 19 July. You can read the minutes online.
The Board is not meeting in August, but will start again in September with a longer than usual meeting.
SEND performance data
NHS Devon and Devon County Council are working to build a joint data dashboard and will be bringing back detailed plans in September. This is part of the Improvement Plan’s focus on the delivery partners working together more closely and being able to report on key performance indicators.
The Board also reviewed data showing how the Devon local area has been performing against our statistical neighbours – other areas who have a similar population – and the average across England.
Devon County Council SEND services
The Board received an update from the Quality Performance Review Meetings set up by Devon County Council. These meetings look at how a range of teams across the council are working to improve the experiences of families, children and young people with SEND. As well priorities from the SEN Statutory team (often known as the 0-25 team) and Disabled Children’s Services, there were reports from Schools Transport, Public Health Nursing, Adult Social Care Transition, Inclusion and Wellbeing and more.
Communications
The Board is asking for presentations about progress on each of the four areas of weakness identified by Ofsted: this month the presentation covered communications. This ranges from high level communications about the service down to how individual families feel they are communicated with about their child or young person’s needs. Progress was reported on:
- How young people and parent carers need to be involved in co-production as part of everyday working across the partnership.
- How a set of core competencies can be updated following the pandemic, and how staff can be trained and coached to improve individual communications with families.
- How work on the SEND Local Offer website needs to be accelerated.
Get involved
Champions for Change round-up
The Champions for Change network provides a range of ways for children and young people with SEND to have their say on SEND. We’ve rounded up some of the work from the last term: read the round-up in full.
Also in this month’s newsletter
- Devon Information Advice and Support summer newsletter out now
- Let’s Get Chatting from Livewell SouthWest
- Secondary school admissions reminder service changes
- Grants available to groups giving their community a helping hand
- Autism Central’s South West regional hub
- North Devon Academy praised for Outstanding SEND provision
You can read the full newsletter online.
If you’d like to receive the newsletter by email, you can subscribe to Devon SEND Improvement news.