Annual Family Impact Survey 2020 Essex Family Forum Full Report January 2021
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Annual Family Impact Survey 2020 Essex Family Forum Full Report January 2021 1 Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3 Methodology ........................................................................................................................................ 4 Participants .......................................................................................................................................... 4 Consent ................................................................................................................................................ 5 Disclaimer ............................................................................................................................................. 5 General Information ............................................................................................................................ 6 Identifying your Child/Young Person’s needs? .................................................................................... 8 Statutory Process ................................................................................................................................. 9 Education, Health and Care Plan Needs Assessments ..................................................................... 9 Support received during the EHC Plan process ................................................................................. 10 Appeals and Tribunals ........................................................................................................................ 12 EHCP Support your Child/Young Person receives .............................................................................. 13 Annual Reviews .................................................................................................................................. 15 SEN Support your Child/Young Person receives ................................................................................ 16 Communication and Support with your child/young person’s educational setting. ........................ 18 Other sources of Information and Support ....................................................................................... 19 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 22 Significant Areas of Weakness identified in the OFSTED/CQC Local Area Inspection ................... 22 Identification of Need ................................................................................................................. 22 Quality of EHC Plans and Joint Commissioning .......................................................................... 23 Overriding Themes ......................................................................................................................... 23 Exceptional Concerns ..................................................................................................................... 25 Children & Young People not in Education, Employment or Training ....................................... 25 Appeals and Tribunals................................................................................................................. 25 Next Steps .......................................................................................................................................... 26 List of Appendices .............................................................................................................................. 27 Appendix A - List of Individual Comments .................................................................................. 27 Appendix B - Named Education Settings .................................................................................... 27 Appendix C - Distribution List ..................................................................................................... 27 Appendix D - Support Groups Survey Data ................................................................................ 27 Appendix E - Learning Points from Survey ................................................................................. 27 2 Introduction Essex Family Forum is the appointed Parent Carer Forum for Essex and it is our responsibility to represent the views and experiences of SEND families living in Essex. We conducted this survey to measure the current levels of parental satisfaction with local services for SEND Families and to gather data on their lived experiences. During the next year we will be expanding the topics we include in this survey to ensure that we capture the full experience of SEND Families. Funding permitting, we will reproduce the full survey annually so we can compare the baseline data gathered in this survey and any other surveys we carry out during the forthcoming year. In particular, Essex Family Forum will strive to ensure that findings from this survey inform the improvement work outlined in the Written Statement of Action. This is the plan that the local area was required to produce to address the areas of significant weakness that were identified by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission during the local area’s SEND Inspection in October 2019. The Inspectors identified three key areas of significant weakness: 1. The potential over-identification of children and young people with Moderate Learning Difficulties and the need to understand the reasons behind this and the accuracy of the identification figures. 2. The quality of EHC Plans – with particular concern around securing the right advice and providing the right information within the plans to enable high-quality outcomes for children and young people. This led to Inspectors concluding that the strategic oversight of plans is not effective. 3. There is poor joint commissioning of services between the Local Authority and their health colleagues in the various NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). Certain sections of this survey will be repeated periodically to monitor progress and impact for SEND Families of the improvement work. We also sent a separate brief survey to a number of Support Groups in Essex to understand the priority concerns of the parents that they support. The number of responses to this was lower than we hoped, but we appreciate that these groups are under tremendous pressure during the current pandemic and are therefore having to prioritise their services in supporting parents. This data does not form part of the Annual Family Impact Survey but is included in Appendix D, for information purposes. 3 Methodology The Survey was open from 5th October 2020 to 2nd November 2020. The survey was conducted via Survey Monkey and was designed with both qualitative and quantitative questions. We have included within the main body of this report a sample of the individual comments received in response to specific questions with the survey; the full list of comments are included in Appendix A. In some sections of this report we have presented the data by “quadrant” area, based on the district or borough council area that survey respondents’ selected as the area they live. The survey was sent to all members of the Forum, advertised on our Facebook page and through our Family Champion network. In addition, as we do not hold the names, addresses and contact details of all registered SEND families within Essex, we asked our various contacts within Essex County Council’s education and social care teams, along with contacts within the CCGs to circulate families. We contacted all special schools and alternative provision within Essex separately, along with a number of the SEND support groups in Essex for sharing with their networks.* The link to our survey was not included in the Essex Schools Infolink newsletter until week beginning 19th October 2020 (just before half-term) and, based on anecdotal evidence from parents, we believe a large proportion of mainstream schools did not share details of the survey with their parents. We shared 15 posts regarding the survey on our Facebook page throughout the open survey period. Posts were published at different times of the day to reach a maximum number of people. In total our reach was 20,269 people. We accept that this will include some duplication with some people seeing multiple posts. Our posts attracted 1,210 engagements (reactions, comments, shares and post clicks) on our posts. It should be noted that we had to change the question order after 10 days. We asked participants if they would like to name their child/young person’s school/setting in the General Information section and found that a significant proportion left the survey at that point. We then moved the question to the end of the survey and made it clearer that this was purely optional.# Participants The survey reports 655 participants clicked to participate in survey. It should be noted that there will be some participants who have two or more children with SEND and as such were invited to complete one survey per child. Therefore for the purposes of this survey they are counted as separate participants. Participants were not required to answer every question and, depending on their responses to certain questions, would have “skipped” questions that would not have been relevant. There were very few “forced” questions which inadvertently allowed parents to skip question but still respond to subsequently related questions.