The expert reviewing how Hertfordshire County Council supports children with special educational needs and disabilities has suggested officials “lost the bigger picture” by “problem-solving along the way”.
Dame Christine Lenehan told councillors she was confident that ongoing work to improve SEND provision was “on the right track”.
She has been working alongside county council and NHS officials since last year, in the wake of an inspection that found “systemic failures”.
That scrutiny – by OFSTED and the Care Quality Commission – highlighted issues that included delays in the education, health and care plan (EHCP) process and a shortage of specialist education places.
It also highlighted delays in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis and long wait times to access speech and language services.
In the wake of that inspection Dame Christine – a former director of the Council for Disabled Children – was brought in to oversee a county-wide “priority action plan”, specifically designed to address the issues raised by inspectors.
On Tuesday, June 18, Dame Christine told a meeting of the county council’s education, libraries and lifelong learning cabinet panel that the inspection results had been “traumatic” in Hertfordshire.
She said that many hard-working staff had struggled to understand why the judgement had been made.
But she said that after working in the county for a while the answer had become fairly clear – suggesting that “Hertfordshire is complex”.
She pointed to the county’s 524 schools, “a fairly complex map of health services”, huge increases in the number of children requiring support and “lessening” budgets.
And she told councillors: “So what had happened in Hertfordshire, I think, was that it problem-solved along the way.
“We’ll fix this bit, we’ll fix that bit, we’ll fix this bit, we’ll fix that bit – with the best intents. But in doing that it lost the bigger picture.”
Dame Christine told councillors it had been “shocking” to find that parents coming through the system were more often coming through complaints than anywhere else.
She said the map of SEND in the county was so complex that “actually people got lost in it”.
Over the past six months, she said, there had been “a lot of untangling”, to re-assemble that map in a way that answers the challenges.
At the meeting, Dame Christine also pointed to the “world-class” work done in the county in speech and language and the new SEND Academy, designed to address workforce issues.
She said she was “confident that we are on the right track, that we have done everything we can to date”.
But she said one of the next stages on the journey would be how to communicate this.
She highlighted the time it would take for parents and children to feel the difference from the ongoing detailed work at officer level.
And she said part of the challenge was now how to communicate the processes and the progress to date – and how to understand the impact of that change “on the ground”.
The county-wide priority action plan has been drawn up by officials from Hertfordshire County Council and the Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care Board.
In her role as independent chair, Dame Christine has been brought in to oversee the delivery of the plan, under the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Programme.
Dame Christine has also taken on a similar role in Nottinghamshire and Oldham.
At the meeting, council officers reported that “significant progress” had been made on commitments in the action plan.
But the report by officers also recognised that the experiences of children young people and families across the county would not improve immediately.
According to the officers’ report, the Department for Education will make a “stocktake visit” to the Hertfordshire SEND Partnership in September – with a “deep dive” into specific areas of the action plan in November.
Preliminary findings of an earlier monitoring visit in April, it was reported, suggest the SEND advisor commissioned by the DFE had been “encouraged by the progress made in delivery of the priority action plan”.