Free fall

  • By Brian Leveson
  • •
  • 03 Oct, 2021
  • •

Another week and another system fail from Haringey SEND department begs the question, is this a department in absolute free fall?

Since the new term started its been endless problems for SEND families in Haringey who are contacting us in despair when there is not help forthcoming from the department - here is our story

Given the degree of my child's complex and life limiting disabilities, we are in receipt of quite a number of services from Haringey children's department, but do not have an allocated social worker.  These include:
  1. Special educational needs support via an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP)
  2. Special educational needs transport
  3. Short breaks or respite in the form of direct payments as Haringey are unable to offer us respite in the form of respite
Being frequent users of Haringey SEND services and, after 16 years navigating a complex and covert web of secret systems that lack transparency and therefore are not easy to scrutinise, we are big fans of co-production in order for services to meet the needs of the people that they serve.

EHCP caseworker - disappeared!

Having never turned up to one single annual review, we finally met our caseworker this year, presumably as we are now entering a period of transition to adult services, but maybe not.

So when we contacted them in early September, you can imagine our surprise that they have left the local authority and the new system is for us to now contact a generic email to which nobody can be held to account for.

This system was not designed with parents, rather it was imposed on all of us as a done deal and announced in the September Haringey SEND newsletter.

"There will be oversight of all stages of the SEND process so that children and young people with SEND receive quality service, there will be less reliance on individual case officers and, instead, a focus on a whole team approach to ensure that families can be supported regardless of the availability of individual officers. Case officers will retain pieces of work to ensure minimum disruption to children."

THIS IS A NEW SYSTEM IMPOSED ON PARENTS WITH NO CONSIDERATION OF WHAT WORKS FOR PARENTS, NOT COMMUNICATED WITH PARENTS UNTIL IT WAS COMPLETED.

Data breaches and specially trained escort removed from SEND transport

"Many of you will be aware that we have experienced issues with our transport arrangements to support your children in travelling to their place of learning at the start of term. These issues were caused by internal and external factors which included implementation of new technology and vehicle breakdowns."

For our family this included
  1. Multiple data breaches with information being sent to us about another vulnerable child and all their contact details
  2. The escort trained for our child's epilepsy needs being not allocated to their bus
  3. Our information being sent to another address and being delivered by hand, opened.
Parent's have been promised by the Assistant Director that I will be personally undertaking a comprehensive learning review to investigate why so many errors happened and will implement an action plan that I will manage to ensure this does not happen again.

Surely lesson number one is work with parents to codesign services (not done) to understand the impact of service failure on families before service fail (not done) and to actually do what we have been promised by Cllr Brabazon in September 2019 and Cllr Ahmet in May 2021 to coproduce service

Direct payments for short breaks (respite) not paid in full

This month we received £250 bank transfer from Haringey instead of the usual £650 direct payments for short breaks.  

Short Breaks are supposed to give parents a few hours respite so that they can continue to care for their child.

Direct payments are given instead of actual respite because Haringey are unable to offer that service to meet need. 

We spend our money on a holiday club at our child's school. This costs £110 per day. We also use them to pay fro the transport and an escort to and from the club.

For 10 days in July this year this cost over £2000.

We owe money.

We were paying in instalments.

We can't pay that now.

Unless we use money that we normally spend on food and fuel at a time of increasing costs of both in the run up to Christmas.

No coproduction

We are endlessly promised 'coproduction' and yet all of the above have been imposed on us and have neither been 'helpful' not 'supportive' rather they have been 'alarming', 'unhelpful' and are now putting us in a worse position than if we did not receive this 'statutory help'.

New SEND strategy - they say

The draft 'SEND Strategy' is now being consulted on. https://www.haringey.gov.uk/children-and-families/local-offer/about-local-offer/haringey-send-strate...

The consultation runs from Monday 20 September 2021 to Sunday 7 November 2021. Please share your views with us by completing the online survey below.

The priorities within the SEND Strategy have been informed by:

  • a self-assessment across the SEND partnership
  • a review of current service provision within the local authority SEND service
  • a series of informal conversation events with parents and carers that took place across June and August 2021
  • findings from the Ofsted and CQC inspection of SEND services in Haringey (5 to 9 July 2021)

We would like to:

  • clarify if the priorities are clear to you
  • find out what priorities are the most and least important to you
  • understand what you like about the strategy
  • understand in what ways the strategy could be improved
  • understand if there is anything missing from the strategy that should be included
  • understand what impact you think the strategy will have on you, your children, family and our wider community and partnerships

New SEND Strategy - we say, same old problems

Given that the OFSTED report, upon whose finding this strategy is base, is still not published, will the consultation that runs from Monday 20 September 2021 to Sunday 7 November 2021 be expended?

It is not clear what learning is from where:

  • a self-assessment across the SEND partnership - please publish this document so that it can be read alongside the strategy for scrutiny and transparency
  • a review of current service provision within the local authority SEND service- please publish this document so that it can be read alongside the strategy for scrutiny and transparency
  • a series of informal conversation events with parents and carers that took place across June and August 2021 - please publish the summary reports from these meetings (there HAS TO BE a summary document, otherwise what are you basing this assertion on?), including the number of parents who attend these 6 informal events.  
  • findings from the Ofsted and CQC inspection of SEND services in Haringey (5 to 9 July 2021) still not published(!), so, how can ANYBODY KNOW if the finding are reflected in the strategy. 

We would like to:

  • clarify if the priorities are clear to you - transparency and scrutiny
  • find out what priorities are the most and least important to you - service design that meets the needs of families, rather than the needs of the SEND teams
  • understand what you like about the strategy - hmmm ... 
  • understand in what ways the strategy could be improved - clear references to what documents have been used and where in the strategy 
  • understand if there is anything missing from the strategy that should be included - learning from Local Government Ombudsman decisions and complaints and a clarity about which 'ombudsman' and which decision and which complaints
  • understand what impact you think the strategy will have on you, your children, family and our wider community and partnerships - There is NOTHING in the 'SEND strategy consultation survey' that asks about impact of the strategy on families

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