My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 100. Its purpose is to provide encouragement to local authorities to work together to commission services for children and young people with low-incidence needs. For very low-incidence conditions, such as sensory impairment, it may not be appropriate to expect that specialist provision is made available in every local authority area. For that reason, there should be regional support services co-funded by a number of local authorities across the geographical area. The department’s Green Paper on special educational needs and disability stated:
“We know that greater collaboration between local areas can also help local professionals to plan, commission and deliver the best services for children and young people with SEN or who are disabled and their families, as well as helping to secure best value for money … we will explore how we can encourage greater collaboration between local areas”.
The Bill creates new duties on health and education services to work together and collaborate. However, it says little about the importance of joint working across local authority boundaries, despite the obvious potential benefits to services to children with special educational needs. Children with sensory impairments have a low-incidence special educational need and disability, or LISEND. The National Sensory Impairment Partnership, NatSIP, has defined a LISEND as,
“A need which has the potential to have an adverse impact on learning and development unless additional measures are taken to support the child/young person … The prevalence rate is so low that a mainstream setting is unlikely to have sufficient knowledge and experience to meet these requirements. Settings will need to obtain specialist support and advice on how to ensure equitable
access and progression (against national standards) … The prevalence rate is so low that any formula for allocating specialist resources for additional needs, which is based on proxy indicators of need, will not reflect the true distribution of children and young people identified as having low incidence SEND”.
Children with a LISEND are a diverse group in terms of their needs and the nature of the support they require. There is often a lack of expertise in those needs in local authorities and/or insufficient capacity. Indeed, although local authorities are required by section 7 of the 2006 Department of Health deafblind guidance to identify and provide specialist assessments for deafblind children, the identification rate is only three MSI children per 100,000, but Sense figures suggest that the rate should be 31 per 100,000. These figures indicate that local authorities do not have sufficiently qualified assessors, and that deafblind children and young people are receiving generic assessments that fail to address their specific needs. Deafblind children are also not receiving adequate specialist support in many areas. The Consortium for Research into Deaf Education—CRIDE—found that 18% of services employed two or fewer teachers of the deaf, and 8% employed one or fewer teachers of the deaf. Fifteen per cent of services reported that each visiting teacher of the deaf was supporting, on average, 80 or more deaf children, and 7% had a ratio in excess of one to a hundred.
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Sense, NDCS and RNID understand that it may not always be realistic for a local authority to provide services to children with sensory impairments and low-incidence needs on its own account when the numbers of children with such needs in the area is very small. However, they state that they believe it is possible for such a local authority, by collaborating with other local authorities, to meet its responsibilities for these children. Although we welcome the endorsement of this approach within the revised SEN code of practice—which is currently out for consultation—we would like the Government to go further to encourage such collaboration in the Bill.