Early years staff looking to specialise in supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) will soon be able to access a qualification specifically designed for them.
The development of such a qualification by 2018 was a Government commitment in the early years Workforce Strategy, published last April. The criteria for the Level 3 early years SENCO qualification have now been developed by a working group convened by the Department for Education. Members included nasen, Action for Children, and SEND consultants and training organisations.
Early years SENCOs will not be required to hold the qualification; it has been developed to support settings and staff who want to improve their practice, says Alex Grady, education development officer at nasen. ‘It was a deliberate decision to set it at Level 3 rather than Level 5, because you don’t have to be at graduate level to work in early years,’ she explains.
The qualification will cover:
- identification of SEND in early years
- developing an understanding of the specialist needs of that age group and the legal obligations
- the graduated approach to SEND
- understanding of the role of the early years SENCO
- how to support colleagues working with children with SEND
- liaising with other agencies and professions.
The criteria will shortly be published on nasen’s SEND Gateway (www.sendgateway.org.uk). The group envisages the qualification being available for students from September, but the timing, structure and delivery depends on awarding bodies that will now take on the mantle of designing a qualification around the criteria.
Content
Nicola Gibson, inclusion manager at the Pre-school Learning Alliance, believes the content of the qualification should be broad. ‘The expertise of area SENCOs varies considerably and their coverage is patchy, so I would like to see the qualification at least cover elements of their skills and expertise – portage, augmentative communication methods such as Picture Exchange Communication System, behaviour training, law and policy, and differentiation,’ she says.
Ms Gibson accepts that the qualification has to be at Level 3 given the profile of the early years workforce, but says she would prefer to see a Level 4 qualification. ‘At the moment people tend to take on a role as SENCO reluctantly, but it is actually a fantastic opportunity, and a Level 4 qualification would give them the right support and training, when we are asking them to take on a lot in their role,’ she says.
According to the Government’s annual NQT survey, more than half of primary school teachers do not feel their initial training prepared them well for teaching children with SEND. SEND support is also one of the top three training requests from early years settings to local authorities, according to the Children’s Services Omnibus, published by the Government last November. It found that 91 per cent of local authorities that received training requests from Good and Outstanding settings in 2016/17 were asked to provide SEND training.
Funding squeeze
Councils are feeling the squeeze when it comes to supporting children with SEND: while the time spent by some children with SEND in early years settings is increasing because of the 30 hours, some settings are receiving no extra 30-hours-related funding for supporting these children. While almost all local authorities provided SEND training on request to Good and Outstanding settings, 70 per cent of them levied a charge.
For settings, this means finding money from a limited pot. There are three main funding streams that providers can access: the Disability Access Fund (DAF), launched in April 2017 to support three- and four-year-olds accessing funded provision and entitled to Disability Living Allowance; the SEN Inclusion Fund, which settings can apply to for children with lower-level SEN; and high-needs funding, for children with an Education and Health Care plan and those the council decides require extra support.
The DAF offers £615 per child per year, and local authorities are obliged to offer a SEN Inclusion Fund as part of the local offer, making their own decision on how much to set aside from the early years block and the high-needs block, and how it will be allocated. From April, though, the schools block has been ringfenced, and no money can now be transferred from it into the high-needs funding pot, as had traditionally been the case.
These streams are not just to fund training but also other support such as extra staffing or equipment, and settings say the funding is confusing and rates are too low. ‘The SEN Inclusion Fund appears to be working very much like the old top-up funding did, but the new DAF is more problematic because parents need to be in receipt of Disability Living Allowance,’ says Ms Gibson.
In the Workforce Strategy, the Government said it would issue guidance to settings and local authorities on how the SEN Inclusion Fund and the DAF could be spent on training. The DfE says this guidance was published in July 2017 as part of the Early Years Entitlements: Operational Guidancedocument. The document has a section on SEND which contains three short case studies, only one of which directly covers training.
Ms Gibson says criteria on how the funding should be spent varies from place to place. ‘Some local authorities are just providing the money and leaving it up to the setting to decide,’ she says. ‘This is problematic because settings need specialist advice to buy equipment such as standing frames. I have advised settings to utilise the DAF for training as well as equipment. For example, staff need specialist training for children who have specific medical needs – without this training they can place a child at risk and their insurance can be void.’
Kelly Garofalo, nursery manager at Doddington Green Nursery in Birmingham, is in the process of completing a referral form to gain funding from her SEN Inclusion Fund, known locally as Inclusion Support in Early Years (ISEY) funding. She hopes to use the money to help support a child with spina bifida. ‘We are looking to use the funding to support staff with training such as shunt awareness, although this is still in the early stages,’ she says. A shunt is a surgically inserted tube that helps manage a child’s condition, and training would raise staff awareness of how it works and what to look for in case of malfunction.
Training
The Government’s third commitment on SEND training was ‘funding a range of training and development opportunities through VCS grants’. The DfE says this refers to the free online resources developed by nasen with DfE funding (www.nasen.org.uk/early-years-send-resources). These include miniguides, webcasts, and face-to-face training materials for leaders and managers to use in direct delivery with their staff.
By March 2018, nasen had received 15,834 page views of its online resources pages, and 1,778 page views of the face-to-face training resources. An independent evaluation found that the resources filled a training gap, particularly regarding face-to-face training, with few visitors to the site having accessed such training in the past.
Four in 10 (41 per cent) respondents to the evaluation said capacity and funding were a barrier to effective provision for children with SEN. The evaluation calls for the early years and SEND sectors to lobby the Government to provide settings with funding to buy in additional staff.
While training is welcome, Dr Chandrika Devarakonda, senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Children’s services at the University of Chester, warns against a blinkered focus on a child’s SEND which does not take into account the child as a whole. ‘There is a lot of information around SEND, but the needs of the individual child seem to be slipping through the net,’ she says. ‘You might teach trainees everything about a SEND diagnosis, but they need to look at SEND as part of a whole child.’
The PLA’s Ms Gibson says there is still work to be done on the development of SEND training for the sector. ‘Some of the training that settings are accessing is ill-informed and not appropriate – online training for invasive procedures such as using injector pens, for example,’ she says. ‘We also come across training which tackles issues such as behaviour with conflict resolution alone and no preventative guidance, which is problematic because it doesn’t deal with root causes. Ideally there would be some type of kitemark that all SEND training had to meet which allowed for a broad range of training from a range of sources.’