My Lords, Clause 25 is about promoting integration. My amendment is about effecting that integration and,
“co-operation between local authorities, schools, other educational providers and providers of health care and social care”,
but also ensuring that there are sufficient resources for that integration to take place. It is a probing amendment intended to explore issues relating to multiagency working and the local offer. Integration of services, the alignment of assessment processes and co-operation among groups of professionals works only if those same professionals, especially at the early stages of such integration, have time to get together to talk things through.
The pathfinders, which were evaluated in the June document that we have all seen, suggested that attendance by the professionals involved—the teachers, healthcare and social work professionals—was highly variable, many of them pleading that their loads were so great that they had no time to attend the meetings required. However, the reforms will not work unless a realistic approach is taken to recognise those time constraints on the professionals involved, deliberately programming in time for them to build the relationships required. Of course, that means more resources, especially in the early phases of the development of the programme—not an easy prescription at a time when budget cuts are impinging so strongly on local authorities.
The pathfinder evidence also highlights the need to develop a targeted learning and development programme for school lead professionals and/or other key workers. If the unspoken assumption is that all the new expectations will be possible because they can be discharged by school special educational needs co-ordinators, Members of Parliament need to visit SENCOs in their constituencies to ask them about their already unrealistic workloads. It is likely that far fewer teachers will opt to take on the additional responsibilities of being SENCOs if the new reforms are implemented without sufficient resources being allocated.
The question of which agency should take on the role of key workers and lead professionals needs much further explanation. The existing DfE advice about when schools should or should not be the lead professionals is very inadequate. It does not guide schools in how to decide whether they are the most appropriate agency to take on the lead. Teachers report that schools are often inappropriately named as being lead professionals because other agencies cite budget cuts as precluding them from taking the lead. Those
nuances currently seem to be ignored in the Bill but could cause a considerable amount of trouble. I beg to move.