Followers of Oxfordshire politics may not have been surprised when, earlier this month, inspectors warned of widespread and systemic failings in the support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
It was not the first such report. In 2017, the county council and Oxfordshire NHS Clinical Commissioning Group were issued with a ‘statement of action’ by Ofsted, after inspectors found ‘significant weaknesses’ in its SEND provision.
Two years later, in 2019, a re-inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission said the council and NHS body had addressed three of five areas of weakness.
But the inspectors said improvements were still required on education, health and care (EHC) plans, which are used to identify a child’s educational, health and social needs and how to support them, and the quality of ‘self-evaluation’.
So how, four years on, had Oxfordshire gone backwards; having so angered parents and carers that Ofsted inspectors that around 2,000 responded to a survey to share their ‘tangible sense of helplessness’?
We look at the timeline, starting in 2021 with the election of the ‘Fair Deal Alliance’ of Liberal Democrats, Labour and Green councillors.
TIMELINE
A year after the re-inspection, in 2018, the Conservative councillors then in charge of the county council voted through plans to start charging for school transport for over-16s with special educational needs and disabilities. It was claimed the change was in line with national guidelines and would save £330,000.
Parents made an impassioned plea to councillors to vote down the ‘punitive’ plans. Cabinet member for education, Hilary Hibbert-Biles, was reportedly reduced to tears by testimony from parents and later voted against her party’s proposal. It was passed by a majority.
May 2021 – Lib Dems, Green and Labour parties went into coalition as the ‘Fair Deal Alliance’, with 39 seats compared to the Conservatives’ 22. The new council’s deputy leader – and head of the Labour group – Liz Brighouse noted among her priorities: “There are serious issues around SEND needs and children’s care.”
A governor at Wood Farm Primary School for 40 years, Cllr Brighouse spoke of the importance of addressing SEND performance in an interview with the Oxford Mail shortly after the formation of the coalition.
“Special educational needs will be one of the most important things to look at, and Early Years too, and children in care, and how we’re able to support these children,” she said.
July 2021 – Problems funding special educational needs provision had already been crystal clear.
In late July, the ruling cabinet heard the council’s SEND budget already stood at a deficit of £11.7m, with Cllr Brighouse warning that the deficit could rise to £20m by spring 2022. “We really need to get beyond where we are now,” she said.
Councillors agreed to top-up the budget by £3.2m.
September 2021 – Specialist SEND school, the Orion Academy, opened its doors in Blackbird Leys following a building project that cost £12m.
Prior to becoming an academy in 2020, it was known as Northfield School – and had received an inadequate rating in 2018.
May 2022 – The council said in a press release still on its website that children with SEND ‘are at the heart of major proposals’ debated by its cabinet, with detailed plans to be developed with partner organisations.
Cllr Brighouse was quoted saying that it was a shared ambition that ‘our county will be a place where every young person has the opportunity to become everything they want to be’.
June 2022 – Cabinet agreed at a meeting in June to top up funding for SEND pupils by £4.1m.
A report by the director of children’s services and education, Kevin Gordon, recognised that ‘the outcomes for children and young people with SEND in Oxfordshire are not good enough’.
For the past five years, spending on children and young people in Oxfordshire with SEND had exceeded its budget, he said.
Cllr Brighouse told her colleagues on the cabinet: “We’ve got a massive problem in relation to special educational needs and disabilities, and we have consulted widely on a new strategy – involving our schools and various other bodies, talking to parents, talking to children and coming up with a strategy which we hope will encourage and support schools.”
In the same month, the county became one of the first local authorities to sign up to the government’s Delivering Better Value in SEND programme (DBV), according to reports.
The scheme currently supports 55 councils to bring down their large SEND budget deficits through measures such as early intervention and teaching children with special needs in mainstream schools.
The assistant head teacher at the Unicorn School, a special school in Abingdon, told the BBC in June the school had 108 places but receives 250 requests a year.
Assistant head Alexandra Foster said of SEND provision in the county: "It seems to be a particular problem in Oxfordshire.
"There aren't enough places in special schools, but also the provision in mainstream [schools] is not really supporting the children adequately.”
July 1, 2022 – Changes in NHS structures meant that responsibility for commissioning health services passed from the clinical commissioning groups to new, larger, ‘integrated care board’. In Oxfordshire, that is the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West (BOB) Integrated Care Board.
November 1, 2022 – Parents staged an impassioned demonstration outside County Hall ahead of a meeting of the full county council.
Among those at the demonstration, parent Olivia Johnson accused the council of presiding over a ‘complete breakdown of care’.
“Families are fed up of being ghosted while our children are abandoned by Oxfordshire County Council without adequate care or support,” she said, warning that parents were at 'breaking point'.
A petition to the council claimed that children were being left without adequate provision and parents were not being communicated with by the council’s SEND team.
At the end of November, children’s services chief Kevin Gordon – who has since left the council - asked members of the county’s overview and scrutiny committee not to organise any ‘special meetings about SEND’.
December 2022 – Cllr Sally Povolotsky claimed in a meeting discussing the SEND service problems that one parent was subjected to a ‘bare-faced intimidation tactic’.
The parent was told that her disabled child would ‘need to become a looked-after child in order to secure funding for much-needed residential placements’, the councillor said.
The council later said in a statement that it ‘did not recognise the circumstances’ described by Cllr Povolotsky.
Later in the month, four Oxfordshire MPs – Victoria Prentis, Robert Courts, David Johnston and John Howell – branded improvements at the county council ‘glacial’ and called for ‘adequate funding’ to improve the council’s SEND provision, the BBC reported.
January 2023 – A new year, and the county council said it would cut funding for all school pupils so it can direct £2.38m towards SEND provision.
Cllr Brighouse told the BBC the money raised by the move – which was objected to by nine in 10 schools that responded to the proposal – would still be a ‘pittance’.
There was an anticipated £20m shortfall in 2023/24 for SEND. The council was expected to spend £92m on SEND in 2022/23, with £29m of that going to private providers.
March 2023 – Parents of children with SEND complained that they are still waiting to hear about school places for the coming September.
The county council’s deadline, set by law, to name a school for pupils ran out on February 15.
Responding to reports that one parent was told her daughter would receive a ‘mainstream’ education in the following academic year but not told which school she would attend, SEN Consultancy’s Miranda Cooper told broadcasters: “They should have heard by now. There’s a legal criteria that local authorities all around the country have to name the provision that the child will be attending by February 15.
“It’s very unusual to have written in the plan just a ‘mainstream education’. There’s definitely a clear error that has occurred.”
Later in the same month, Oxfordshire MPs met the minister for children, families and wellbeing to share their constituents' and their own ‘frustration’ with the council’s SEND service.
Victoria Prentis, Banbury’s MP, said: “The minister reassured us that the Department for Education are aware of parents’ concerns with issues, including SEN officer retention, compliance with education, health and care plans, and the number of specialist school places across Oxfordshire.
“To ensure the county council [is] meeting [its] statutory obligations, DfE will be taking action to assist them to make the necessary improvements.”
July 2023 – Ofsted’s inspection of SEND provision in Oxfordshire began. The council asked parents, young people and ‘practitioners’ to share their experiences in a form on Ofsted’s website; around 2,000 parents and carers would share their views.
September 15
Damning report
Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission published its joint report into SEND provision on September 15.
Inspectors probed the ‘Oxfordshire Local Area Partnership’, made up of Oxfordshire County Council and NHS body Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board, the two authorities jointly responsible for planning and commissioning services for SEND children in the county.
The report, written after an inspection between July 13 and 21, was damning.
Inspectors found ‘widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people’.
Ofsted said a monitoring inspection would be carried out within 18 months, and ordered the council and integrated care board to submit a priority action plan.
Calls to Quit
Within hours, campaign group Oxfordshire SEND Parent Action had for Liz Brighouse to go.
A spokesperson told the Oxford Mail in a report published on September 15: “This Ofsted report confirms what we sadly know through bitter experience - that Oxfordshire is possibly the worst place in the UK to be a disabled child.
“We tried to tell Cllr Brighouse about these failings for years but she refused to listen and instead dismissed and disagreed with us at every opportunity.”
Refusing to step aside, the cabinet member for children said: "I care very deeply about improving the lives of children and young people and I am absolutely determined to see through the significant changes that are needed to provide families with the high quality of services that they need and deserve.”
A week in politics
The cracks were there for all to see on Thursday, as councillors discussed the Ofsted report at the county’s Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee at County Hall.
Cllr Brighouse told the meeting (reported the Oxfordshire Independent) that she wouldn’t resign because she understood ‘what the issues are, particularly around children who are neurodiverse’.
“I suppose the thing I have to apologise for was perhaps my arrogance in believing, when I took it on, that I really thought I could make a difference to what was happening with our children. It is a systemic failure across the whole country; it’s a systemic failure that started a long time ago,” she told the meeting, adding that she ‘could not be sorrier’ and was ‘fighting on all fronts’.
But council leader Liz Leffman hit back: “I don’t agree with Cllr Brighouse that there is not much we can do to change this. I think there’s a lot that we can do to change this even though we’re working against this background nationally, which is very difficult.”
The Labour group released its statement on Sunday afternoon at around 4pm, accusing the Lib Dems of seeking only to ‘score points and pass blame’. They later claimed the council leader, who 'sits at the head of the system', was 'asleep at the wheel'.
In her own statement released around an hour after Labour's bombshell announcement, Lib Dem leader Liz Leffman said she asked Cllr Brighouse to step down as cabinet member with responsibility for SEND following the publication of the Ofsted report.
She claimed that the Lib Dems and Green parties proposed a cabinet reshuffle, proposing that Cllr Brighouse took a different cabinet post.
“Labour have instead chosen to pull out of the Oxfordshire Fair Deal Alliance,” a press notice from the Lib Dems and Greens said on Sunday (September 24).
Two days earlier, on Friday (September 22), Labour councillor Damian Haywood resigned from the party in protest – and, speaking to the Oxford Mail on Saturday, called on Cllr Brighouse to step down.
In her statement about Cllr Haywood’s resignation from the party, council leader Liz Leffman said she ‘applauded his brave and principled stand on behalf of children with SEND and their parents’.
She added: “We will address the failings in SEND services which, over many years, have let down children and families in Oxfordshire.
“As leader, I will ensure we make the changes which will allow us to focus on this as a priority.”
Cllr Leffman made no mention of her Labour colleague and the cabinet member responsible for the special educational needs brief since the Fair Deal Alliance’s formation two-and-a-half years earlier.
What now?
By law, the Local Area Partnership had 35 working days from receiving the Ofsted report to produce a priority action plan detailing what measures it is proposing to address the concerns raised in the inspection.
The Oxford Mail understands that a decision will be made on Monday evening (September 25) about who will take over the children and young people brief on the county council’s ruling cabinet.
Cllr Leffman said a cabinet member would be appointed ‘dedicated to SEND improvement’. She promised a ‘completely new approach’, working ‘collaboratively’ with parents, councillors and those in the health and education sectors.
The job of director of children’s services is currently vacant. The previous incumbent, Kevin Gordon, left in May after less than two years in the job – having joined Oxfordshire from Hammersmith and Fulham Council. A job advertisement on website LocalGovJobs puts the salary at £141,181 a year. The closing date for applications is October 8.
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