Collaboration and Working Partnership
There are many ways schools and education settings work in partnership to support children and young people with SEND:
Stakeholder Engagement – The Partnerships
The SEND and Inclusion Partnership
- Is a multi-agency stakeholder engagement group which has a central role in the development of strategy and initiatives in relation to SEND.
- Focuses upon championing inclusion and challenging exclusion of the most vulnerable, improving attainment and achievement and ensuring quality and sufficiency of education.
- Includes North Lincs Parent and Carer Forum, the Youth Council and representatives from across education, health, care, housing, leisure and transport.
- Includes representatives from across the range of educational settings – mainstream and specialist – pre and post-16.
SEND Standards Board
The SEND Standards Board takes account of key local and national policy drivers and ensures a clear line of sight for holders of statutory responsibilities on the duties of the local area for children and young people aged 0-25 years with SEND contained in the Children and Families Act 2014 and amplified in the Code of Practice published jointly by the Department for Health and the Department for Education. Additional duties for promoting the wellbeing of adults are set out in the Care Act 2014.
The SEND Standards Board is an overarching group that has the overview of standards and quality to improve outcomes for children with special educational needs and disabilities within North Lincolnshire and to have oversight of compliance with regulatory and statutory responsibilities.
Integrated Children’s Trust
The North Lincolnshire Integrated Children’s Trust (ICT) is guided by the Children’s Challenge 2022 Refresh which sets out children, young people and families challenge to local partners to improve outcomes through partnership action.
The ICT is an executive function of the North Lincolnshire Place Partnership (Sub Committee of the Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board) and is the singular vehicle for developing our integrated approach and commissioning intent in relation to health, social care and education for children, young people and families.
The ICT has a key role in the oversight, line of sight and development of all services for children, young people and families including those commissioned and or directly provided. This reflects the breadth of the children’s system, including participation, prevention and protection and reinforces the importance of schools, colleges, other agencies and communities as part of our integration agenda.
Children and Young Peoples (CYP) Partnership
The North Lincolnshire Children and Young People’s Partnership is a stakeholder/reference group which brings together representative partners from all children and young people’s workforce sectors as well as young people and family representatives. It will focus on the collaborative work of agencies and services, help to secure the added value of integrated working and in partnership with young people and family representatives will help to ensure improved outcomes and reduced inequalities for children, young people and their families in North Lincolnshire (particularly the most vulnerable).
The Children and Young People’s Partnership will also take account of the national and local drivers for change in relation to the context. Representative partners will continually examine and challenge their approach to delivering against statutory duties as well as the outcomes outlined in the Children’s Commissioning Strategy (and any associated refresh documents and other relevant plans and strategies).
Children’s Multi Agency Resilience and Safeguarding Board (CMARS)
The purpose of the Children’s Multi Agency Resilience and Safeguarding Board (CMARS) is for agencies to work together to:
- safeguard children
- protect them from harm
- promote their welfare.
CMARS has agreed three priorities for safeguarding children and young people in North Lincolnshire. These are to reduce the harm from:
- child sexual exploitation
- domestic abuse
- neglect.
Further information can be found on the CMARS website.
North Lincs Parent and Carer Forum
North Lincolnshire’s Parent Forum (NLPF) is run by a dedicated group of volunteers. Each of them have a child/children/young person(s) with special educational needs and/or disabilities. They support families in North Lincolnshire with children and young people between 0 and 25 years of age at any stage of the process who also have special educational needs and/or disabilities.
NLPF is recognised as one of the key strategic partners in North Lincolnshire for all services that work with and for children and young people with SEND. These services include:
- North Lincolnshire Council’s Children and Families, and SEND teams
- North Lincolnshire and Goole NHS teams
- Carers Support Service and Carers in Partnership
- Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board.
They also work alongside mainstream primary and secondary schools, specialist primary and secondary schools, alternative provisions and with further and higher education providers. They sit on a multitude of boards representing their members at the local, regional and national level.
Further information can be found on the North Lincs Parent Forum website..
Examples of collaboration and partnership work between schools and education, health and care providers:
- Schools, colleges, post-16 and independent providers and the local authority have collaborated to promote housing advice about specialist schemes and ensure independent living is explored during EHCP reviews.
- All our education settings have identified Mental Health Champions as part of the Emotional Health and Well-Being Plans and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) Transformation.
- A streamlined service between health and education has been co-ordinated to ensure standardised delivery of the Integrated Health Check.
- Parents, carers and professionals across education, health and care have worked together to develop a Sensory Needs Framework which builds upon the existing multi-disciplinary/multi-agency approach to sensory needs assessment and intervention in North Lincolnshire.
- Schools, colleges, post-16 and independent providers promote coordinated housing advice about specialist schemes and ensure independent living is explored during EHCP reviews.
- Headway is an inclusion support provision which has opened at Baysgarth School in Barton-Upon-Humber. Funded by Department for Education (DfE) SEND Capital Funding, Headway includes a two-classroom extension and a refurbishment of the Skills Centre on the site, to make the facility more practical and adapted to pupils’ needs. Further funding has been allocated to develop two new inclusion support provisions in Scunthorpe and the Isle of Axholme. These will mainly support young people with Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) needs to successfully access mainstream school provision.
- Our EHC Hub is an online area for families, professionals and education settings to work together and contribute on EHC assessments, plans and reviews.
- Partnership with schools and colleges ensures that robust forums exist for making and moderating decisions regarding the education (and in some cases care) placement of vulnerable children and young people. These are:
- Primary Fair Access and Inclusion Panel
- Secondary Fair Access and Inclusion Panel
- Post-16 Engagement Panel
- Special Educational Needs and Disability Advisory Panel (SENDAP)
- Complex Care and Integrated Commissioning Panel (Complex Needs).
- SENCos continue to facilitate networking opportunities which feed into the North Lincolnshire SENCo Network.
