See the full series on managing SEND
‘Clear as mud’ is how one nursery owner describes new funding arrangements for special educational needs and disability. A key plank of the funding regime, the Disability Access Fund, has been widely criticised since its launch in April. This new ‘targeted’ fund of £12.5m, available for children in receipt of Disability Living Allowance (DLA), amounts to £615 per eligible child per year, to be paid directly to providers that are offering a free entitlement place for three- and four-year-olds. While its aim is to support children’s access to a free place, charities such as The Council for Disabled Children have said the money is not enough.
Providers agree. At Hopscotch Nursery in Liverpool, owner Sue Adamson calls it ‘disrespectful’ to early years providers. ‘If you think in terms of 15 hours over 38 weeks, that is an extra £1 an hour – which is not enough for dedicated interventions. Here we are able to fund many interventions ourselves, but the fact the Government thinks that £615 is enough – particularly when it is equated with the need for highly qualified staff – is ridiculous.’
Steve Taylor of Winchcombe Farm Day Nursery calls it a ‘drop in the ocean’. He wrote to his MP in August stating, ‘Depending on the level of disability, staffing ratios in these situations are generally one-to-one, so assuming the member of staff is on minimum wage of £7.50, at the current funding rate of £3.77 per hour, it would cost us £3.73 per hour in wage costs alone (let alone food, overheads, etc) to look after a disabled child on a full-time basis. This amounts to a minimum loss of £7,758.40 per annum – less of course the £615!’
WORKING THROUGH CHANGE
One of the biggest challenges for local authorities is using their existing experience to set up SEN inclusion funds, which target lower than DLA-level, or emerging, needs. Sue Robb, head of early years at Action for Children, says, ‘Some local authorities are better placed than others to adapt to the changes, but most are still working them through and many don’t know what money they have.
‘At the moment we are looking at a situation where the requirement to communicate the value of funds is a should, rather than a must.’
Gauging the number of SEN children in the local area, their level of need and the capacity of local providers to support them is a huge task for local authorities, and one in which the area SENCO is expected to be the lynchpin.
Kids Inc Nurseries operates 11 nurseries in nine boroughs in London and the home counties. Senior executive Hilda Miller says, ‘It is a mixed picture in terms of support from area SENCOs and their help with funding. I’ve always found Barking and Dagenham to be good, but there are others where we have no contact with an area SENCO, and others where we do but there is no follow-up or information.’
Consultant Janice Darkes-Sutcliffe believes that despite the SEND Code of Practice placing emphasis on the link between PVI settings and area SENCOs, their support is the exception rather than the rule. She says, ‘There seems to be no data with regards to which councils still have area SENCO teams. Meanwhile there are so many different approaches in place for universal services to access specialist advice and support that I am concerned many children and families are not getting the help they need.’
INCREASING CAPACITY TO MEET INDIVIDUAL NEEDS
Some councils have addressed the problem. In 2013, Liverpool City Council, with the help of NDNA, established Early Years Childcare Consortia, a network of eight PVI groups arranged around Children’s Centre footprint areas, chaired by a provider and dedicated to giving additional needs support. Local providers testify that healthy funding has been sustained this year, with some nursery groups being awarded more than £25,000. The money comes from a social inclusion budget, and the network collectively expects to get £200,000 for 2017-18.
Its primary purpose is to enable all children aged two, three and four to access their free entitlement, particularly those with developmental delay and/or SEND. It gives providers early access to financial support when they have exhausted their provision’s own resources. Meetings are an opportunity for professionals to have specific case-related discussions and share best practice and models of interventions that have had a positive impact. Experience shows this can often be the only additional support that is needed as professional confidence and capacity to make adjustments increases.
At Dukes and Duchesses in Liverpool, SENCO and Consortia 7 chair Laura Maguire says, ‘My role is to organise regular meetings for the settings within my consortia where we can get together and discuss any concerns we have about the children in our care. Obviously we have to have written consent from parents and if not we discuss it as a general case with no specific details given. Doing this as a group allows us to network while also gaining ideas and the experience of other professionals. It also enables us to submit applications for funding for numerous areas such as training, resources, dedicated interventions, seeking additional hours, venue costs and specialist nursing care.
‘We also have availability from an education psychologist and the Special Educational Needs Inclusion Support Service team. If an application for funding is approved and provided, we also ask the setting to complete an impact form to help us oversee how well the funding is being distributed. Inevitably there are strains on services to see children quickly and there are waiting lists, but our children are being reviewed or seen as soon as they can be.’
Hopscotch’s Ms Adamson agrees that the consortia are working well and reports she has used funding to buy sensory equipment, pay for physiotherapy sessions and even buy items such as children’s glasses.
However, she says, ‘The only problem I would like to flag up is that this funding only includes three- and four-year-olds who are receiving the free entitlement. This means that other young children are missing out, which really concerns us.
‘Where is the early intervention help for the families who are not in receipt of a free place? This does not represent fully inclusive practice and goes against the whole ethos of how I operate my nursery provision. It seems the Government has transferred the responsibility of the cost of early intervention to the individual childcare settings.’
FUNDING POTS
All local authorities are now required to establish SEN inclusion funds for three- and four-year-olds, but this need not include two-year-olds.
There are three main funding streams that providers can access:
The Disability Access Fund – targets support for children entitled to DLA who take up any of their early years entitlements.
The Inclusion Fund – targets support for lower-level or emerging needs.
High needs funding (pulled from the high needs block of the Dedicated Schools Grant) – for supporting complex needs or children with an Education and Health Care Plan.
Local authorities are expected to pass the majority of their SEN inclusion funds to providers in the form of top-up grants on a case-by-case basis. They can also use part of their SEN inclusion funds to support central specialist SEN services, but any funding used for this purpose will not count towards the 93 per cent/95 per cent pass-through. It will instead count within the seven per cent (in 2017-18 and the 5 per cent (from 2018-19) of early years funding that local authorities are able to retain centrally.
CASE STUDY: ACORN EARLY YEARS FOUNDATION
Laura Andrews is senior early years manager at the Acorn Early Years Foundation, which operates 10 nurseries in Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. She says, ‘The Disability Access Fund is mainly being spent on contributing to the cost of additional staff, particularly when it comes to helping children to access the indoor and outdoor environments. Where funding is not immediately available, we are lucky that as a relatively big nursery group, we have the staff resources to support children’s access.
‘We find the process of applying for the funding varies between the local authorities we deal with, and overall there is very little clarity. The £615 comes through as a lump sum, but there is always a wait for it. We also find that complications can arise when families do not always keep us updated with their home situations, particularly relating to the Disability Living Allowance.
‘We find that funding for SEND is called different things according to which local authority we’re dealing with. There seems to be very little consistency in how funding is awarded. For example, we recently applied for funding for a little boy with haemophilia, and were awarded £926. We are using the money to give him more space and help him to access the environment. On the other hand, we have a three-year-old girl with reduced mobility and higher-level needs whose application to the same authority was initially unsuccessful. However, the little girl is now receiving support.
‘One of the things we’ve found that seems most unfair about the system is that additional funding is only applicable for 15 hours a week, which effectively means that children who need additional support are barred from accessing the 30 hours.’
See also: Managing SEND: Part 1