The Department for Education (DfE) and NHS England met with Medway partners on Monday 20 September 2021. This was to review the progress made in the area’s special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision in addressing 2 areas:
- improving joint strategic leadership between the council, clinical commissioning group (CCG) and education providers
- lack of a clearly communicated strategy understood and shared by leaders across the area.
Following the visit, we’re delighted to announce that we were released from the remaining 2 areas of significant weakness on Tuesday 5 October 2021.
The clear and sustained progress we have made since setting up a focused action plan means that we no longer require formal DfE monitoring for our SEND services.
Our SEND strategy 2019 to 2022 has seen us make several improvements to the SEND service across Medway over the last 3 years.
From improving our Local Offer website to providing more opportunities for internships. We’re committed to providing children and young people with the local SEND services they deserve.
With a new 3 year strategy set to be published next year, we’re on the right path to a brighter future for:
- parents and carers
- children and young people with SEND.
We’ll provide more details on the new strategy soon.
Find out more about what we’ve achieved in the last 3 years
Timeline: Our journey to improving the Medway SEND service
December 2017:
The Ofsted and NHS England Local Area SEND Inspection found 8 areas of weakness among our SEND services:
- the lack of joint strategic leadership across the area between us, the CCG and education providers
- the lack of a clearly communicated strategy that is understood and shared by leaders across the area
- the extent to which providers in the area take suitable responsibility for ensuring the effective implementation of the reforms
- the lack of clearly understood and effective lines of accountability
- the quality and rigour of self-evaluation and monitoring and its effectiveness in driving improvement
- the sufficiency of information to inform accurate evaluation
- the quality of education health and care plans
- the lack of effective co-production at all levels.
We got to work quickly, publishing a Written Statement of Action to tackle each of these areas.
December 2019
The Ofsted and NHS England SEND Revisit found that we had achieved significant progress in 5 of the 8 areas of concern. We still needed to work on:
- the lack of joint strategic leadership across the area between us, the CCG and education providers
- the lack of a clearly communicated strategy that is understood and shared by leaders across the area
- the quality of education health and care (EHC) plans.
February 2020
To tackle these remaining 3 areas of concern, we published an Accelerated Progress Plan (APP).
The DfE and NHS England committed to running 3 monitoring visits over an 18 month period to review our progress against the APP.
February 2021
The February monitoring visit from DfE and NHS England found we had made sufficient progress in addressing the third area of weakness about the quality of our EHC plans.
We still needed to do further work in the remaining 2 areas of concern.
October 2021
Following September’s monitoring visit from DfE and NHS England, we have now completed the final 2 areas on our APP plan. We now no longer require formal monitoring from DfE and NHS England.