Sheffield SEND Manifesto

SEND Manifesto

Executive Summary
better lives for Sheffield children with additional needs: a manifesto.

Our strategy for improving the lives of all Sheffield children, especially those with additional needs, is summarised in this manifesto.

The case for change

Like other core cities, in September 2024 almost 4 in every 10 Sheffield children started Year 1 without having achieved a Good Level of Development at age 5. In some schools in the city, 7 in every 10 children did not achieve GLD and started Year 1 without the knowledge and skills they need to learn and make progress.

We also know that 1 in every 10 school-age children in Sheffield has a long-term, persistent speech, language and communication need [many with developmental or complex language disorders]. In the most disadvantaged communities in the city, children are twice as likely to have language difficulties and as many as half will start school without the language they need.

Nationally and in Sheffield, the number of school-age children requiring SEND support and EHC plans has increased year on year for almost a decade. During this time, improvement activity has focused more on strengthening the arrangements for identifying, assessing and meeting children’s special educational needs than on understanding why the number of children needing something additional or different has increased significantly.

We are therefore aiming to increase the number of children who have positive experiences and achieve good outcomes without requiring additional or different provision at the same time as transforming the arrangements for identifying, assessing and meeting the needs of those who do. We see these goals as connected and inter-dependent. They are the core ambitions of our strategy.

Healthy child development

The strong consensus on the importance of healthy child development is summarised well in the introduction to Harvard University Center on Child Development report, ‘The foundations of lifelong health are built in early childhood’.

‘A vital and productive society with a prosperous and sustainable future is built on a foundation of healthy child development. Health in the earliest years—actually beginning with the future mother’s health before she becomes pregnant—lays the groundwork for a lifetime of wellbeing. When developing biological systems are strengthened by positive early experiences, healthy children are more likely to grow into healthy adults. Sound health also provides a foundation for the construction of sturdy brain architecture and the associated achievement of a broad range of abilities and learning capacities.

Health is more than merely the absence of disease—it is an evolving human resource that helps children and adults adapt to the challenges of everyday life, resist infections, cope with adversity, feel a sense of personal wellbeing, and interact with their surroundings in ways that promote successful development. Nations with the most positive indicators of population health, such as longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality, typically have higher levels of wealth and lower levels of income inequality. In short, children’s health is a nation’s wealth, as a sound body and mind enhance the capacity of children to develop a wide range of competencies that are necessary to become contributing members of a successful society.

But we know that more and more Sheffield children do not have the healthy childhood experiences that cause them to learn and develop well and achieve good outcomes. Too many do not acquire and develop the assets that help them to be healthy and successful. They have things missing from the ‘toolkit’ we all need to improve our health [or retain good health], learn well and make good progress. While caused in part by poverty, this is also a cause of poverty; a cycle that repeats destructively in the lives of too many children, families and communities in our city.

We know that small problems become big problems in children’s lives but we have no means of moving from a reactive [fail first] to a proactive [succeed first] approach. The strong correlation between children’s outcomes at age 5 and their future successes and life chances is a sobering mark of this whole-system failure. So, what can we do? The essential starting point is creating a holistic and connected description of the features of healthy child development from the perinatal period into early childhood and through the primary and secondary school phases. Why? If we can describe the features of healthy child development and environments that enable healthy child development:

• We can direct attention and action in the education, health and care system towards improving these features.
• We will have an early warning system that will help us to identify children with increased likelihood of needing something additional or different to learn and develop well.
• We will have a reference point that connects thinking and practice in the education, health and care system and facilitates better multi-agency working.

Crucially, without this holistic and connected description of healthy child development we cannot build up a picture of what it’s like to be a child growing up in Sheffield or make good child and family centred decisions about what to do differently and better in the education, health and care system.

A whole-system approach to improving children’s learning and development

Public service reform in recent years has focused too much on organisations and services and not enough on the way they work together to help and support children, families and communities. We know that children’s experiences and outcomes are the product of our collective actions so we cannot be content with developing fantastic practice in parts of the education, health and care system while knowing that terrible practice persists elsewhere. Whole-system change to a position that is far from current practice requires a long-term strategic approach that deliberately builds the capacity [or growth potential] needed for this transformation. David Hargreaves describes capacity as existing in four forms of capital:

• Intellectual capital: the education and training of individuals as well as their knowledge, skills, capabilities, competencies, talents, expertise, practices and routines.
• Social capital: the character and quality of social relationships; culturally, social capital is the level of trust and structurally it is the extent and quality of internal and external networks.
• Organisational capital: the knowledge of how to deploy material, intellectual and social capital; organisational know-how or the knowledge of how to get what is needed done.
• Material capital: financial capital and physical capital such as buildings and equipment.

Creating high capacity by thoughtfully developing and deploying these forms of capital will be a core feature of our approach to whole-system transformation and will underpin the graduated approach to identifying, a ssessing and meeting children’s additional needs. The graduated approach is a repeated cycle of assess, plan, do and review that matches the continuum of education, health and care provision to the continuum of children’s additional needs. It should be collaborative and person-centred and was intended to be dialogic; bringing the right expert knowledge and resources together at the right time for children and families. Despite being one of the main constructs of local area SEND arrangements for almost three decades, it has become an over-bureaucratic resource allocation system. We plan to re-engineer the graduated approach so that it is underpinned by:

• Strong person-centred values and practices.
• Dialogic processes that mobilise the right forms of intellectual, social, organisational and material capital in the rights ways and at the right time for children and families.

This will require new arrangements for commissioning and providing universal, targeted and specialist services that facilitate a social ecological approach to helping and supporting children and families in an early, effective and graduated way.

This work will connect to Sheffield’s involvement in the Cabinet Office’s Public Service Reform test and learn, which focusses on Family Hubs and improving delivery and impact for children under five and their families.

The features of an effective local area SEND system

The special educational needs and disability [SEND] code of practice provides statutory guidance for organisations that work with and support children with SEND. It first came into effect in September 1994 and has been revised and updated several times, most recently in January 2015. Inspections of local area SEND arrangements have revealed widespread failings characterised by ineffective leadership and children’s poor experiences and outcomes. The SEND system in local areas and nationally is frequently described as ‘broken’ and ‘out of control’. The discourse is rarely positive.

Although the ontology of SEND arrangements is complex and cannot be separated from wider political and public policy influences, we believe that it is helpful to describe the features of an effective local area system. We see this being used to support self-evaluation and improvement planning and not as a checklist or scorecard.

Send system features

Alongside better understanding what it is like to be a child growing up in Sheffield we will build up an evidence-based picture of these SEND system features through dialogue and rapid self-evaluation. This will be facilitated by a small team of education, health and care practitioners and stakeholders.

Working together

Co-production is a way of working where children, families and those that provide services work together to create a decision or service that works for everyone. Individually, it means working in a person-centred way and strategically it means ‘developing, designing and doing’ together. We will work together to inform, consult, involve and co-produce using five dialogic principles:

• Mutuality: a collaborative orientation and a spirit of mutual equality.
• Kinship: always involving others in the dialogue and decisions that affect them.
• Empathy: an atmosphere of respect, trust and supportiveness and an inclusive orientation.
• Risk: the willingness to take relational risks in always doing the right thing.
• Commitment: genuineness, authenticity and a commitment to our collective goals.

To be successful we will need to prioritise networked and participative forms of accountability [the ways we are accountable to children and families and to each other] over hierarchical and contractual forms of accountability [the ways we are held to account through inspection, regulation, contacts and commissioning]. Governance arrangements will assure fidelity to this commitment in all our decisions and actions.

Children’s experiences, progress and outcomes

he measures and datasets most widely used by local areas provide poor insights into strategic leadership, practice and children’s experience, progress and outcomes. Too much weight is given to quantitative measures and the views and experiences of children and families feature minimally in local area self-evaluation. We focus too much on measuring the performance of each part of the education, health and care system at the expense of understanding how these parts interact. We value the things that can be measured instead of measuring the things we value. We will use an outcomes-based accountability approach based on three types of measures:

• Task and process measures: how much of what we said we would do have we done?
• Quality and impact measures: how well was it done and what difference did it make to capacity and practice in the education, health and care system?
• Outcome measures: how much are children’s lives improving as a result of what we have done?

The quality, impact and outcome measures will be both quantitative and qualitative [narrative]. The outcome measures will be our high-level goals and ambitions; the co-produced measures that describe a generational change in the experiences, progress and outcomes of Sheffield children and their families.

Priorities for 2025

To support the development of the manifesto further we will:

• Create a holistic and connected description of healthy child development.
• Re-engineer the graduated approach to identifying, assessing and meeting children’s needs.
• Use SenseMaker to better understand what it’s like to be a child growing up in Sheffield.
• Create an evidence-based self-evaluation using our description of SEND system features.

These priorities are the key workstreams in the development of the manifesto in the spring term of 2025. We will use the outcomes from this work to inform our thinking about the strategic commissioning of universal, targeted and special education, health and care services.