My Lords, this group of amendments relates to Clauses 25 and 26, which deal with promoting integration and joint commissioning. These provisions are at the centre of our reforms and I am grateful to noble Lords for their careful consideration of these issues. Children and young people with special educational needs need integrated services. Too often they have to tell their story over and again, and too often they or their parents struggle to navigate a system that makes no sense either to them or to the professionals who are supposed to be helping them. In this mini-debate we have had an echo of the discussions we had on both the Health Bill and the Care Bill, where noble Lords were very keen, as were the Government, to take forward better integration and working together across these areas. Noble Lords who have just come from the Care Bill will be extremely well aware of how the Government have sought to take this forward, addressing how people have so often fallen between the cracks. This, too, is part of the attempt to ensure that those with special educational needs are better supported and that the authorities responsible for them work more closely together.
These clauses seek to tackle those issues head on. The integration duty sits alongside duties for a local authority and its local partners to co-operate with each other. I remember extremely clearly, as other noble Lords no doubt will, how integration, as debated in the Health Bill, had to be part of the new arrangements for the health service. This echoes much of that. It links closely to the joint commissioning clause that provides the statutory framework to enable partners to work together effectively to deliver a better experience for the child or young person and their families, and support improved outcomes. Joint commissioning sets out the framework for key elements, such as the local offer, education, health and care plan assessments, and personal budgets. It seeks to improve both the working relationships between local authorities and health bodies, and the provision to children and young people with special educational needs. It requires the local authority and health bodies to establish clear procedures for making decisions and, in particular, to agree what support is needed locally and which agency will deliver it. Crucially, they must agree how they will resolve disputes between partners, as well as how they will deal collectively with complaints concerning education, health and care provision.
The new draft SEN code of practice’s chapter on joint commissioning has developed a great deal, and I hope it may help to reassure noble Lords to know that it puts great store on the importance of making decisions in joint commissioning arrangements—an issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has just referred. It specifies that the arrangements should be robust enough to ensure that all partners are clear about who is responsible for what, who the decision-makers are across education, health and care and how partners will hold each other to account where there is a dispute. It recognises the importance of getting elected members and chief executives across education, health and social care on board, and recommends that the arrangements for children and young people with SEN should be specifically accountable to councillors and senior commissioners. It recognises that local accountability can take the form of a programme board, acting as a bridge between the local authority’s education and social care leadership and health partners.
It also reflects that health bodies must work with the local authority in commissioning integrated, personalised services and designing the local offer, including ensuring that relevant contracts with providers reflect the needs of the local population. Local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and NHS England should develop effective ways of harnessing the views of their local communities so that commissioning decisions on services for those with SEN are shaped by people’s experiences and aspirations. The dovetailing of the SEN reform clauses with the NHS reforms is central. The NHS mandate requires clinical commissioning groups to consider the needs of children and young people with SEN and disabilities, so we see immediately the crossover. The Health and Social Care Act reforms require local authorities and clinical commissioning groups to participate in the health and well-being board and to produce a joint strategic needs assessment and a joint health and well-being strategy that sets out how local needs will be met. So the needs are to be identified, and plans have to be put in place as to how they are met.
The health and well-being board has a duty—and I well remember it—to encourage integrated working. For the purpose of advancing the health and well-being of the people in its area, it must encourage people who arrange for the provision of health or social care services in the area to work in an integrated manner. As I said, the Care Bill has been taking that further forward and making it a reality. I hope that that context helps when looking at how we are trying to tackle the needs of these particularly vulnerable children.
I heard what my noble friend Lady Sharp said about the probing nature of her amendment. As ever, she probes extremely effectively. She is seeking to explore how these new arrangements will work in practice, and obviously she is absolutely right to do that.
My noble friend wondered whether SENCOs would have too much on their plate. Since 2009, the Government have funded more than 10,000 new SENCOs to study for the National Award for SEN Coordination. We will support a further 800 places in 2013-14 and this
will help them in their important role in linking with other agencies, such as health and social care. I hope that that helps to take this matter forward.
Many of the amendments in this group reflect an apparent desire to puts lots of detail in the Bill. This is an argument with which everyone here will be very familiar—whether it is necessary to specify certain things in the Bill in order to make sure that certain things happen. I am sure that we are all seeking to go in the same direction, which is to achieve what the Bill sets out to do. From noble Lords’ probing as to whether it is going to be delivered by the Bill as it is, I certainly sense that there is agreement on that.
However, noble Lords will also be familiar with the fact that if you specify in great detail in a Bill, you can inadvertently exclude things that you have not included. That is why there is always discussion about what happens in guidance and secondary legislation and so on, and that is why I am so pleased that we have the SEN guidance. It is comprehensive and, I hope, addresses a number of issues that noble Lords are concerned about. From that guidance, your Lordships can see how the Bill translates into what we intend in practice.
As noble Lords will appreciate, we feel that there is a danger that if too much is specified in the Bill, that will then hinder the kind of flexibility that may also be required at a local level. Noble Lords who heard the pathfinder organisations, which came to address us the other day, probably share my feeling that the often very imaginative and creative ways in which they were going about their work and the way they were working with other organisations in their local areas to address the needs of the children were very impressive. One would not wish to do anything that stifled that. One would wish to support them in taking that forward. The aims of what one is seeking to achieve and the details being spelt out in the guidance—