The schools minister has issued a rallying cry for expert SEND professionals who quit their jobs to return and staff the £1.8 billion “experts at hand” service.
Georgia Gould pledged staff such as educational psychologists will have “ring-fenced” time on the frontline in schools, rather than “spending all their time doing form filling and administrative work”.
The new experts at hand service aims to boost availability of external support. Schools can then draw from a pool of education and health professionals to fix the current “inconsistent and limited access”.
The Department for Education has said it expects that by April 2029, the average primary school will benefit from 40 days of help a year, rising to 160 days for secondary schools.
However, with chronic staff shortages, school leaders are questioning where the staff will come from in an already stretched system.
Speaking to Schools Week, Gould said: “We have a really strong message to those people who have left the profession and moved out of these roles.
“What they often say to me is the reason they have is they’re spending all their time doing form filling and administrative work, and not actually intervening to help children.
“Under this new system, this support will be ring-fenced to do the actual intervention, to be out in classrooms.”
She added: “That is what a lot of these professionals got into the job to do. So we will be asking them to come back and support these efforts.”
Gould said the government expected the scheme would involve 7,500 experts. When asked for more information on this figure, the DfE said it was a modelling assumption based on the average salaries for support staff, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and EPs.
Staff shortages
EPs play a fundamental role in assessing the needs of pupils for education, health and care plans. But a government report previously found they were stuck in a “vicious cycle” preventing early intervention work.
Analysis by Schools Week suggests the number of EPs employed by councils has not kept up with workload demands in recent years.
While there has been a 20 per cent rise in full-time equivalent EPs since 2020-21, the number of EHCPs has jumped by 48 per cent.
Councils can also pay private EPs to help – but day rates can vary between £350 and £1,000, research has found.
The local government ombudsman has warned the shortage was having a “significant impact” on councils’ ability to meet SEND needs.
Ministers are aware of the challenge and had invested more than £31 million to recruit 200 EP trainees a year on to three-year doctorate courses.
However, the Association of Educational Psychologists, which runs the training application system, said last year it received 1,765 applications.
On top of this an average of 300 EPs retire each year, AEP membership data suggests.
Donna Wiggett, AEP’s general secretary, said: “EPs want to be in school, observing children, doing interventions and upskilling teachers and school staff to enable better outcomes for children – we are the best placed people.”
The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists’ annual survey found 10 per cent of SALT posts in NHS children’s services were vacant last spring.
Huge waiting lists
Sarah Findlay-Cobb, chief executive at Landau Forte academy trust, said “there’s just not enough experts right now to get the support, so there’s a huge waiting list for all our students no matter what we are trying to get”.
In December, 17,433 youngsters were waiting to see an occupational therapist, who help children overcome challenges with everyday tasks or activities.
Dr Sally Payne, from the Royal College of OTs, said the test with the reforms would be “whether the funding, workforce planning and local delivery structures are enough to make these reforms a reality”.
Edward Timpson, the children’s minister who rolled out the 2014 SEND reforms, previously told Schools Week he wished they had done more “capacity building in the system before the legislation”.
Gould said the DfE was working “closely with the NHS on their workforce planning, and they are really confident that we can meet our ambitions.
“We absolutely recognise that we need to be training more people and bringing them into the system, as well as asking people to come back.”
Councils and integrated care boards will work together to establish the experts at hand offer, according to local circumstances, the SEND consultation states.
A total of £1 billion will fund the pool of external professionals, while a the remaining £800 million will fund outreach from “high-quality” alternative provision, special schools and special post-16 institutions into mainstream.
The government’s neurodivergence task and finish group, which informed the SEND overhaul, called for a “robust model” to stop health and education operating in “silos”. This would include data on prevalence rates, population and demographic characteristics.
Schools North East has called for “regional workforce guarantees” to ensure even access to specialists.
