Direct Award for Temporary Specialist Special Educational Needs & Disabilities (SEND) Workers

Torbay Council is currently not able to meet current demand for the requests for new Education, Health & Care Plan (EHCP)assessments and annual reviews with the capacity available. There is also a national increase in Request for Statutory Assessment (RSA) requests, Torbay is currently sitting at 40% decision ‘no to assess’, which is higher than the National Average.

The purpose of the project would be to clear the backlog (149 EHCP amendments significantly overdue) and then accurately assess demand vs capacity. Legally, the Council should be making the decision to amend the EHCP within 2 weeks of receiving the Annual Review paperwork and sending out the Amended plan with that decision. This was evidence in case law in 2022.

Therefore, the Council needs to appoint temporary specialist SEND Workers to undertake this work during the next 12 months.

The risks of not commissioning a project team would be:

i. Failing to deliver on the safety valve commitment due to not amending EHCP in a timely manner.

ii. Due to the Safety Valve work, there have been an increase in appeals to the Tribunal. If the Tribunal decide that the Council’s Childrens Services ceased an out-of-date plan – it is highly likely that an order is made for a costly reassessment and maintaining of the EHCP.

iii. Failing to make the improvements required for the Written Statement of Action, which could lead to Secretary of State intervention. In our Childrens Services’ OfSTED reinspection it will be paramount that we show improvement in both the quality of our EHCP’s and the meeting of statutory deadlines.

iv. We are not meeting our legal obligations on amendments leaving us vulnerable to financial compensation through Ombudsman complaints.

v. We may not meet our projected EHCP targets for our Safety Valve agreement placing the12.9 million Safety Valve funding at risk.

vi. Children and young people will not have well identified needs and accurately costed provision or ceased when they have met their outcomes.

The Council has advertised to its contracted Standing List temporary agency providers, on numerous occasions, with no response. Therefore, the Council wishes to source the four required specialist education/SEND staff directly, via an agency provider, not on the Council’s Standing List. There is an urgency to sourcing these staff due to the services’ task being statutory, and therefore there is no time available to conduct an appropriate procurement process for these temporary appointments.