Action plan to drive improvements after Nottinghamshire Council’s special needs failings revealed

An inspection of services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities found some children with complex needs are waiting as long as 37 weeks for vital assessments.

The failings of the service – run by Nottinghamshire Council and the NHS Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board – were uncovered in an unannounced visit by education watchdog Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission health watchdog earlier this year.

The council and ICB are now required to develop a “priority action plan” outlining how it will improve, which must be submitted to Ofsted and the CQC within 35 working days of receiving the inspection report.

The plan must also be published within 70 working days.

The council’s cabinet will discuss the report at its meeting on May 25.

Coun Ben Bradley, Mansfield MP and council leader, said the inspection report was “obviously really disappointing”.

He said: “It speaks to both a number of national challenges in terms of waiting lists [for education and health care plans] and a lack of staffing, but also there are a number of things in that report we need to do better and we need to hold our hands up to that.

“We can’t just fob it off on national problems and we’ve apologised to those people who have had a bad experience.

“We’re going to improve and we’ve started with that already, we’ve hired Dame Christine Lenehan who is massively well-respected nationally in the SEND space to help us with this journey.

“The good thing, I think, that comes out of this is we could have scraped a better grading from Ofsted, moved on and not looked at this again.

“What this means is there’ll be a real focus on improvement in this space, which will hopefully be good news for the outcomes of those children.”

The inspection found children and young people are waiting too long to receive specialist educational healthcare assessments and specialist help such as speech and language therapy.

Documents published ahead of the cabinet meeting state: “The inspection concluded there are two priority areas for action, meaning a judgement of widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND, which the local area partnership must address urgently.

“The local area partnership is committed to improving the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with SEND and this commitment is recognised within the inspection report.

“Leaders recognise there are improvements that urgently need to be made and have therefore begun to develop a strengthened approach to achieving this.”

Following the publication of the damning report, the Labour group at County Hall said the Conservative cabinet should take responsibility for the findings and Coun Tracey Taylor, Conservative cabinet member for children and young people, should stand down.

However, she said the council was “well under way” with making improvements under the guidance of a new improvement board.

Coun Bradley said: “It’s a shame if this becomes a political back and forth and it’s really important we improve.

“Nobody understands this space within the council more so than Coun Taylor so it would seem daft for her to resign.”