The Government has ordered Bristol City Council to fix its “fractured relationship” with parents of children with special educational needs (SEND). City Hall bosses are finalising an “accelerated progress plan”, which needs to be submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) by February 1, following a re-inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in October.
The government officials referred the local authority’s education department to Whitehall for “further action” after concluding it had failed to reverse years of mistrust, a situation exacerbated by last year’s SEND spying scandal. Leaked documents revealed city council staff monitored social media posts and photos of SEND parents critical of the service’s poor quality and massive delays to education, health and care plans (EHCPs).
Then it emerged that the authority had blocked DfE funding to Bristol Parent Carer Forum, the charity that had been liaising with it on improving SEND provision but whose members were subject to the surveillance, although the council insisted the two issues were unrelated. Ofsted and the CQC revisited the city three months ago to check progress in five areas of “significant weakness” identified by the original inspection in 2019 and found sufficient improvements had been made in four of them.
Read more: Bristol City Council 'making sufficient progress' on SEND children but still failing parents
But the fifth – “the fractured relationships with parents and carers, lack of co-production and variable engagement and collaboration” – had not been sorted and “continues to affect the quality of co-production that takes place between area leaders and parents and carers”. City council interim director of education and skills Richard Hanks told Bristol health & wellbeing board on Thursday, January 12, that inspectors found a “more mixed view” from parents on the quality of support to youngsters than before.
Mr Hanks said: “But the key message is that it is not where it needed to be by this point.” Ofsted’s report said some parents “continue to lack trust in the system and feel that leaders are not acting in the best interests of children”.
But the inspectors said the majority of those accessing services more recently had a positive experience – a conclusion disputed by SEND campaigners. Mr Hanks told board members that much of the improvement work aimed to iron out inconsistencies in the quality of support, which caused a “lack of trust” and perceived unfairness in the system.
He said: “We acknowledge that not all young people with SEND get the support they need as quickly as they could and that timeliness is something we need to continue to work on. We can make changes to systems and processes and to professional development in the workforce in our schools and settings but it will take time for that to lead to a positive experience for all parents.
“So we can’t let up on these things, we have to keep pushing them through. It’s a long-term piece of work. Co-production is not fully established yet. We have not yet got that clear and strong working relationship with parents and carers, and some remain worried that schools do not give their children with SEND the support they need.
“These are critical, fundamental things that still need a lot of work.” He said there was still a long way to go to improve the four areas where sufficient progress had been made, including lack of accountability of leaders at all levels, inconsistent timeliness and effectiveness in assessing SEND pupils, inadequate EHCPs, and high levels of underachievement, absenteeism and exclusions.
Mr Hanks said: “The formal structure to ensure co-production is not currently in place and that is something we are working through now to move forward. We are planning to reestablish the formal body to represent parents and carers, and in the interim we are looking to ensure we have representatives on the groups as we develop our plans.”
SEND parent and campaigner Jen Smith said in a statement to the meeting: “The number of unhappy parent carers in Bristol runs into the hundreds. Bristol City Council has made it abundantly clear throughout 2022 that it does not wish to engage in co-production, just tokenistic box ticking – otherwise the former parent carer forum would not have been blocked from DfE funding.
“Parent carers are not difficult, we spend our daily lives having to deal with daily council incompetence and spend years navigating legal action we don't want to take part in simply because the council will not and still does not follow the law. The relationship with parent carers is fractured due to the way the council continues to behave and the way it behaves is a political choice.”
Read next:
Independent inquiry to investigate Bristol council officers monitoring SEND parents
Top council lawyer claims ‘no systematic monitoring’ of social media of SEND parents
Bristol City Council scraps funding support for special needs charity in surveillance row
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