Memorandum submitted by The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
1. We think it important that local authorities should continue to make the assessments of the special educational needs of individual children, and that the decisions about provision should continue to be made with a view to cost-effectiveness. This is for the following reasons.
2. Local authorities are increasingly assuming the role of safeguarding children (and others) who are felt to be vulnerable, and it remains appropriate that the identification and assessment of such persons should lie with those authorities.
3. Finance will always be limited, and local authorities, with their view of the system in the round will more reliably prescribe provision that is cost-effective to the public purse than an independent quango or other such independent body.
4. Local authorities are in a more informed position than an independent body to know of the provision already being made, and capable of being made, by community and other schools for pupils with special educational needs. They will better know whether it is indeed necessary for the needs of a particular child to be determined and funded individually by the public purse.
5. Local authorities are also in a suitable position to influence the development of provision for pupils with special educational needs within schools in their area.
6. For the provision to be specified by an independent body would reduce the role of local authorities and indeed schools to a purely reactive role in which overall planning and strategy would be overtaken by piecemeal and ad hoc provision for individual children. This already happens to a very small extent by the decisions of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal. The substitution of an independent quango would run the risk of allowing expenditure to run out of control by unrelated decisions about assessment and provision.
7. For these reasons, we support the stance that assessment should remain within the local authority.
8. If it is felt that an inherent conflict of interest exists, which we do not admit, then we recommend that the funding be detached from the local authority, not the assessment. This may be done in one of two ways, as follows.
9. Either, funding for individual children should be available from national funds voted centrally for England as a whole by Parliament. Local authorities would remain under a duty to make suitable provision within their area for a wide range of special educational needs. In addition, in allocating that fund, local government officers and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal would remain under the duty to have an eye to cost-effectiveness.
10. Alternatively, the responsibility for arranging and funding provision could be transferred by legislation directly to schools. Local authority schemes of delegation would need to take account of the need to fund a higher level of need at present. Schools could apply to the Schools Forum for additional funds for pupils with exceptionally high levels of need. Parents would then seek judicial review of schools rather than of local authorities when their child's needs were unmet.
11. However, we are not convinced that there is an inherent conflict of interest between the assessment and funding of provision. Parliament and the courts have specifically laid upon local authorities the duty to view the needs of the individual child in the local context. We are of the view that in this authority at least, this duty is discharged honourably and without dissimulation. There will always be a tension between catering for the needs of the individual child as against the needs of all children. To remove this tension would result in uncontrolled expenditure on individual children at the expense of the dedicated schools budget. This would be an undesirable outcome.
July 2007 |