Section 3 - priority projects
Improving services for children with special needs and support for parents, carers and young carers
Lead Officer - John Shaw
Programme Board - CYPS Strategic Leadership Group
Reference Group - Children with Special Needs Partnership Programme Board
Key Links - parenting, enjoy and achieve
What’s the story?
There are:
- 6,500 children and young people identified with some form of special educational need (SEN) or learning difficulty or disability (LDD)
- 2,500 are identified as having receiving ‘School Action Plus’ support
- 2,000 with identified mental health needs
- 4,000 children have
a Statement of Special
Educational Needs, or are
known to the Joint Agency Team as a child with special needs, this includes:- physical, sensory and learning difficulties or disabilities
- behaviour, emotional and social difficulties
- mental health difficulties.
Based on national statistics this is probably an underestimate. Parents have expressed concerns and they perceive:
- a lack of equitable access to respite care and carers’ breaks
- variation in the quality of support provided by schools.
The majority of these
children attend mainstream
schools. Six hundred attend
special schools, some in the
independent sector. We need
to review the way we currently
manage our funding, making
sure that there is effective joint
commissioning. We currently
spend £42 million a year on
meeting the needs of children
and young people with SEN,
LDD or mental health difficulties.
There is still inconsistency in support for young carers, with many receiving an excellent service while some get very little.