Agenda item

To receive a report from Clara Seery, Assistant Director, Education, Schools & Children’s Services on the Speech & Language Therapy (SLT) Service.

Clara Seery, Assistant Director, Education, Schools and Children’s Services presented this report which provided updated information regarding the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) Service for school-aged children in Enfield. It sets out the progress to date in improving the customer experience for responsive repairs and a timeline for a full options appraisal of future delivery models, and a recommendation to Cabinet based on the outcome of that analysis.

The Overview & Scrutiny Committee were asked to note the report and comments were welcomed.

The following was highlighted:

i)             Local Authorities have a statutory duty to work with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in their local area to deliver the SEND Reforms. This includes Speech and language Therapy.

ii)            Provision of the Speech and Language Therapy Service for Enfield’s school-age children and young people is primarily provided by Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust (BEH-MHT). Enfield Council and Enfield CCG fund this provision jointly.

iii)           The latest (December 2018) figures from BEH-MHT show a caseload of 694 children accessing SLT services as part of their Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) provision. This is a 56% increase on caseload data from 2015 (445 children).

iv)           This caseload is covered by 7.3 FTE therapists for mainstream schools, and 6 FTE therapists for special schools. In addition, there are 4.8 FTE specialist Clinical Leads. Provision is also provided within six Additional Resource Provision (ARP) settings (a total of 0.6FTE) and four Speech and Language Resources Bases (SLRBs) (a total of 2 FTE).

v)            Further provision in Enfield includes the following: Youth Offending Unit, LAC Virtual School, Orchardside School, Early Years Social Inclusion and West Lea School. These are commissioned separately to the local authority/CCG partnership, by the organisations themselves.

vi)           As of September 2018, referrals to the Speech and Language Service provided by BEH-MHT have been accepted for children who meet one of the following criteria:

·         The child or young person has a primary health, speech and language need.

·         A request for a statutory needs assessment has been agreed by the SEN Panel.

·         The child already has an EHCP and has/is suspected to have a significant speech and language need, but no speech and language assessment was carried out when the EHCP was issued.

vii)          In order to support them in continuing to support speech, language and communication needs, BEH-MHT also offers schools a purchasable range of support packages. These may include staff training, support and additional assessments, and are tailor made to the school’s requirements.

viii)        Clara said that they believe there are children who would benefit from the service who don’t meet of the three criteria (please see above). Parents are also frustrated at not being able to access Speech and Language Services.

ix)           She felt that the service was now in a position to know where the pressures are and now need to go back to the CCG and Health Services to look at different ways of working and possible changes to the service.

x)            Overall there has been an increase in caseloads but a decrease in resources. Enfield Council’s available funding for school-aged SLT was reduced by £52,191 in 2016 due to reduction in Dedicated Schools Grant funding; the available funding has since remained static at £693,389. The CCG provides approximately £1.25M. This means a total of circa £1.95M is available each year to provide the SLT service, for a current estimate of 700 school-aged children and young people.

xi)           It is therefore proving a challenge to provide the SLT service in the same way it has been delivered in the past.

xii)          The total number of children and young people aged 0-25 with EHCPs reported as being supported at the end of 2017 was 2,187. At the end of the financial year 2017/18, there was 2243 pupils supported.

Following Clara’s update the following questions/comments were made:

Q.        What is driving the increase in referrals?

A.        The numbers of children diagnosed with autism is increasing. The age for accessing support has also increased from school age only to 0-25 years, which has subsequently had an impact on the number of referrals.

The Chair thanked Clara for her informative update and said that the report leaves very little room for manoeuvre as clearly the service is doing all the right things which was very much applauded and appreciated.