Devon’s SEND Strategic Partnership Board brings together leaders from education, health, and care services across Devon, along with representative voices of parents and carers and children and young people. Its role is to oversee and drive improvements in how we support children and young people with SEND.
At their meeting earlier this month they discussed the efforts to reshape services, strengthen communication, and expand local provision. Here are some of the key milestones we’ve achieved recently:
Better Support Through New Systems: We’ve launched a new Provision Management System to help us make more consistent and transparent decisions about support and placements. This means better tracking of services and quicker responses to your child’s needs.
Improving the timeliness and quality of EHCPs: A new Quality Assurance Framework for EHCPs is now in place. We’ve also split our assessment team to focus on both new requests and backlog cases—this should help reduce delays and improve the quality of plans.
Listening to families: We’ve started co-producing Communication Standards with parent volunteers to improve how we communicate with families and ensure our messages are clear, timely, and supportive.
Expanding local provision: We’ve secured funding for new special school places and resource bases, including 16 new places at Lampard and progress on new sites in Totnes and Castlebridge. This means more children can access the right support closer to home.
What’s coming next?
- Continued improvements to EHCP processes, including reducing the number of plans over the 20-week statutory timeframe.
- More outreach support for children transitioning to secondary school.
- Recruitment of new staff and redesign of services to better meet family needs.
- Planning for additional places in special schools and colleges from September onwards.
How this helps you and your child
- Faster decisions and better communication.
- More local options for education and support.
- Higher quality EHCPs tailored to your child’s needs.
- Greater involvement of families in shaping services.