'Real improvement isn't happening': SEND action group 'will not be silenced' as they protest outside West Northants Council

The group hoped to grab the attention of West Northants councillors entering their monthly full council meeting on Thursday and raise awareness of vulnerable children who struggle to access education due to the lengthy wait for care needs assessments.

This comes after West Northamptonshire Council (WNC) received a scathing Ofsted and CQC report earlier this summer, calling out ‘widespread and systemic failings’.

Lauren Bunting, co-founder of West Northants SEND Action Group told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “We have been around for two years now and we have not seen any improvement in SEND provision at all despite all of our hard work.

“We attended the last council meeting and the chair of the council cut off speakers who had registered to speak before their allotted time had finished. We’ve come back to make sure they know that we’re not going to go away and that we won’t be silenced no matter what they do.

“We just want to see things get better and at the moment all of their resources are going into pretending things are improving, into PR. They’re bragging about their improved EHCP timeframes, their percentage done in 20 weeks, but we’ve done freedom of information requests that have shown they’re basically taking kids that are beyond the 20-week timeframe and dumping them in a backlog group.

“The real improvement isn’t happening. They’re still not listening to parents, the staffing is still a revolving door- nobody wants to stay, nobody wants to work in this toxic environment.

“There’s just so many children without an education and they deserve better.”

When asked what communication had been like with the council, Ms Bunting replied: “We had a meeting with Adam Brown and he was fairly respectful, he listened to everything we had to say. There just needs to be widespread serious action in that council and it needs to be more than just one person.

“He does seem to be listening to what we’re saying but he’s still backing Fiona Baker who has overseen failure for years here, who has done nothing to improve the situation and who just enables the failure to continue.”

In response, WNC Leader Cllr Adam Brown said that Fiona Baker continued to have his “full support” for their improvement journey.

“This is such a challenging area for our Council and nationally. There are no easy answers to meeting the demand we face and we are in no doubt that we have a lot to do,” he added.

“I have no doubt about the commitment, time and energy being put into this despite all the pressures we face. We apologise to those speakers who did not get the opportunity to voice their concerns in full at the previous Council meeting.”

Cabinet member for children, families and education at WNC, Cllr Fiona Baker told the LDRS : “We are committed to working hard with all our partners to deliver better outcomes for SEND children and their families.

“We continue to work with parents and partners from across our local partnership to try and make things better. We are also working with schools to make sure together we can act earlier to help parents and children before things escalate into a crisis.

“We fully accept the findings of the recent report and apologise to children, young people and their families where we have fallen short. We are in the process of our improvement journey with many families not yet able to feel the impact of this work, but it’s encouraging to see we are making gradual, positive progress in addressing our challenges, particularly around our unprecedented EHCP caseloads, which local authorities across the country continue to face.

“We continue to work on our shared priority action overseen by the Department of Education and report our progress. We are under no illusion that there is still a lot to do but we are committed to making the required improvement.

”We have not invested any extra or new money in communications activity.”

Cllr Baker added that the council is now able to issue 10 times as many education health and care plans (EHCPs) within timescales compared to last year and that significant investments in additional staff had been made.