Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you all for giving us your time this afternoon. It is good to have you here. Joining us today from the Education Authority (EA) are Richard Pengelly, chief executive; Dale Hanna, director of children and young people's services; and Elaine Craig, interim assistant director in children and young people's services with responsibility for special educational needs (SEN) statutory services. There is probably not much for me to say at this stage other than to welcome you here. I will hand over to you for any initial remarks or presentation that you want to make. We received your briefing material. I ask for opening remarks of up to 10 minutes, and then we will move to questions and answers. Over to you.

Mr Richard Pengelly (Education Authority): Thanks, Chair. I will try not to take the full 10 minutes. The time is probably better spent on discussion and questions. You have the paper. The session was wide-ranging, covering leadership and the operational challenges. By way of opening remarks, I will give you an overview of what I have been doing. I have been in post nine months today, so I will give you a sense of that, and then we will follow the questions from there. I took up post on 15 April. One of my priorities coming into a sector that I had not worked in before was to get to know the organisation, the people and the stakeholders. I have spent a considerable part of my time over the last number of months getting out to as many schools and youth facilities as possible, meeting stakeholders, getting across the organisation and meeting staff.

On the specific challenges, in my dialogue with the Department at my point of entry, it was clear that SEN was a specific challenge. The Minister's statement this week covered a lot of ground. We will probably touch on it, so I will not say too much now. One big issue that was highlighted to me was the poor working relationship between the EA and the Department of Education. I agree with the Department on that. I was not going to spend any time to try to understand why the relationship was poor; it was a case of, "Let's try to recalibrate that and make it better", so we looked at that. There were a range of financial challenges, and we worked on those. It was clear to me from the media narrative attached to the EA, in my early days, that staff morale across the organisation was in a very bad state. It was an organisation that, in many ways, had been beaten into submission. To be fair, the organisation had not done a lot to help itself, which was a key issue. Another issue was that we were not great at stakeholder engagement and capturing the views of the people we were using to provide services and the people whom we were providing services to. That shaped the ground for the areas that we wanted to focus on.

I will give a quick run-through of some of the achievements. I will preface this by saying that I think that we have made some good achievements over the past nine months, and, to be very clear, the single biggest contribution that I have made to that is to help people to better tell the story of what they have been doing. The people in the organisation have been doing this and striving for excellence, so I do not want to convey any sense that I am the game changer in terms of better performance in the EA; it is the people, including the colleagues with me today, who have led the charge on that.

We have made good progress. Last year, the issue with SEN placements was better than it had been. It is not as good as we want it to be or as good as people demand that it should be, so we have more to do. Part of that was having better collaborative work with colleagues in the Department and working better with parents and other stakeholders to communicate what we were doing.

When it comes to the financial challenge, we are on target to have a balanced budget this year. We are not there yet. The Department set us a target of £15 million savings this year. Thus far, we have delivered about £25 million. It was really important to me that we over-delivered compared with what the Department wanted. That savings contribution has been recycled within the Education budget to provide services and to contribute to the pay issues, of which members will be only too well aware.

I have worked closely with the Department. There were some very historical and caustic issues with the pay mechanism for assistant directors and directors. The obvious manifestation of that is that there are five directors on my senior management team, four of whom are interim appointments, because we cannot recruit. Taking the organisation forward, it is essential that we have those substantive appointees, so, just before Christmas, I secured Department of Education and Department of Finance approval for a new mechanism to address those pay issues. The next stage in that will be consultation with trade union colleagues and the affected staff. I am hopeful that we will get through that in the next number of weeks. That will allow us to go to market to start to recruit and to fill those posts on a substantive basis. We also reviewed the leadership structure across the organisation. The Minister touched on that in his statement. One thing that I want to do is to recruit a post at senior level with a specific focus on SEN transformation and reform, bringing real energy at the top of the organisation to something that is a ministerial and organisational priority.

Before Christmas, we did some work through facilitated focus group discussions to capture the input and views of school leaders on the services that we provide and on where we can improve. We are designing what I call a baseline stakeholder survey. That is a comprehensive survey that will go out to the school network to find out how they find the services that we provide. I want to repeat that survey every year. I want those stakeholder views to influence how we design the services that we provide and how we work in partnership to do that. School leaders have been engaged and proactive in working with us on that.

We have made good progress on resetting the EA's relationship with the Department. It feels more like a partnership now. We are not there yet, and I add the caveat that I doubt that the relationship between a sponsor Department and its arm's-length bodies is perfect in any scenario across all the sectors. We have made some progress, but there is room for a bit more.

I will finish with a few points about what is next. The Minister made a statement on special educational needs in the Assembly this week. Dale will probably want to say a bit more about that during the course of the discussion. We are working flat out with departmental colleagues to develop and finalise the delivery plan for that. The Minister has made it explicitly clear to us that he is keen to get that finished and published as soon as possible, so we are working flat out on that.

I touched on stabilisation of the leadership team, recruiting and new structures. When the EA was created 10 years ago, we produced a 10-year interim strategic vision. We are doing work to reshape that. I want to link that to the departmental vision, but I actually want to better understand and articulate what our strategic ambition is. I have found that often, in the education sector, we rush headlong into a process or operational issue without actually thinking about where we want to land it strategically. That work has started. I should say that, in support of that, this year, we recalibrated the way in which we produce our business plan. I do not know whether you had a chance to look at it. One element in the business plan was a renewed focus on that stakeholder engagement and actually bringing in the views of the people whom we are delivering services to as part of that.

There is a programme of work that we are calling "service review". There are around 70 to 80 different service lines in the Education Authority. They are the products and services that we are deliver. We are reviewing each of them with a view to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, and asking whether, in a time of constrained financial challenge, we really need that service at this point in time. We want to ensure that the answer is yes. If the answer is yes, the next question is whether there is a better way in which we can provide it. We are doing a paper-based review, but we are also, as a senior management team, meeting each of the service leads to talk through those issues. The key question is what other parts of the organisation you can collaborate with to make that a more effective service. That will be a really promising piece of work.

Finally, we are working with the Department to develop a longer-term "priority improvement plan", as we are calling it. There are load of areas where we need to up our game and improve. There is always a risk that, if you try and do everything, you will actually do nothing. We want to create a prioritised list of the most important things. The first year will be a combination of the big strategic issues that have the biggest impact plus quick wins, because it is important to capture the momentum. We will put together a year 2 list and a year 3 list and start to take that forward.

That was a pretty quick gallop through lots of stuff. I am happy to move into questions, Chair. I hope that that was helpful.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Absolutely. Thank you for that. I think that everybody is probably eager to get into the questions. Your briefing material was also very helpful.

Richard, I will direct the first question to you as CEO. You have set out the range of challenges that you face. When you first came to Committee, you were clear that you did not really have your feet under the table at that stage and were not necessarily able to cover all the issues in detail. We are obviously ahead of that now. I am conscious that you were appointed with a clear directive from the Minister with a transformational agenda. That was very clear in the Minister's statements about your appointment. You have set out some of the challenges. Obviously, there are challenges with SEN — I have no doubt that we will come to SEN — and departmental relations. It is positive to hear that those are being reset. In the interests of the system's operating well, those relationships need to be good. I have no argument with that. I have no argument around the level of financial challenge or the morale issues. Again, it is important that those are addressed.

The one that really stands out for me is the stakeholder engagement. That is around, effectively, what I would call your customers: the people who use your services, namely schools and pupils. Let us think about schools first. In my engagement with school principals when I go out to see them, and when I speak to teachers and special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs), from whom we get a lot of feedback at the moment, what I hear is that they feel as though they spend a really disproportionate amount of their time chasing the EA in order to be able to access the services that they need, be that maintenance or whatever aspect of pupil support they are trying to access, rather than doing the job of educating children or leading their schools. That is the feedback that we receive consistently. I am not making any judgement as to why that may be the case. I have no doubt that your organisation is massively under-resourced, and I know that your staff really struggle just to meet the basic statutory requirements. That is the feedback that I hear from the stakeholders that you engage with. They just do not feel that they can easily access the services and, when they access them, particularly around maintenance, they do not always feel that the outcome is effective. They feel that their interactions with contractors are suboptimal, shall we say? I give that by way of example. What will you do to address that, so that, in a year's time, if we speak to principals, they will say, "Actually, our interactions with the EA are really positive, we get the services that we need when we need them, and we are not the ones who are chasing; we ask, and it is provided"? What can you do to address that?

Mr Pengelly: The points that you have made, Chair, are fair criticism. I have been out to lots of schools and met groups of school leaders, and I have heard the same comment. You ask what are we going to do to fix it. I met a group of school leaders at about the end of November or early December, and I am delighted to say that what I was hearing from them is that it is starting to feel better. Starting to feel better is good, but I do not want to become complacent; it is not where we need to land at. The reality is that if you take school leaders, school principals in particular, they are a highly experienced and highly expert group of individuals. My view is that they should spend their time doing the things that only their skill set can do. They should not spend their time on basic administrative tasks. Spending an hour in the morning trying to find who is the right person in the Education Authority to speak to is not a good use of their time.

I think that in annex B to the written material that I submitted is an example of a letter that I sent to a principal. That was illustrating some really good progress that we had made on recruitment. One of the concerns from schools was that recruitment was taking too long, and you can see some of the change. That was one letter that we picked. A separate letter went out before Christmas articulating the implications of a new help desk that we have put in place. We have an aspiration now that we have a single point of contact. Some queries from schools will always be complex and require more engagement and more detail. For the vast majority, it should be a one-touch engagement. We have started to put that in place, and I can send to the Committee the note that went out showing the benefits of that. I want a situation whereby we take receipt of the school problem and then, as an organisation, take it away and come back with a solution, rather than, "Well, that's not me. You need to go and speak to Joe," or something else, which I think happened in the past. There is a clear agenda to improve that.

Mr Dale Hanna (Education Authority): I will pick up on the SENCO issue. You are absolutely right, Chair: they really do need to get in touch with our services. Just to advise on that, you know that we are introducing local integrated teams. The SENCO portal is about to go live in the next couple of weeks. That, in itself, will be the opportunity, ability and mechanism for SENCOs to more easily access information. One of the other things that we did around there is, as part of that, to reduce the educational psychologist (EP) role in gatekeeping accessing services, so we have removed that barrier for SENCOs. Finally, once we get the fully integrated local impact teams in place, there will be dedicated trams to wrap around x number of schools. Alongside that, a little bit like the HR helpline, a bespoke helpline is being developed for SENCOs and school leaders to be able to access stage 1 and stage 2 services. There is real, live, tangible work happening at the moment to help to improve that for SENCOs.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): The local impact teams are a good example. Principals and SENCOs in particular speak about feeling that they get the runaround sometimes when just trying to get the right service and support. I have seen the information about the local impact teams and how they are going to be rolled out, also noting that the rationing of ed psych provision is coming to an end. Effectively, if schools feel that they need an ed psych referral, they are free to make that. On the one hand, that is very welcome, but some of the concerns that I am hearing are about whether we are just going to open the floodgates to a tsunami of demand that you cannot manage. You may be streamlining how you deal with those queries differently, but it is the same number of staff involved, and the rising levels of demand. Process might be improved, and I think that schools would welcome that one-touch interaction — tell us once, and we will get the right services — but do you actually have the resource in the number of people you need to meet the level of demand? My sense is that you do not, but I would be interested to hear how you assess that.

Mr Hanna: There are two bits to that. There is a risk that there could be a tsunami of requests from schools but, with regard to the analysis that we have done, we would welcome that. To date, there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that there is going to be a demand. At the very outset, what that will definitively do is help to identify the demand. If there is a huge increase in demand, then we are going to be able to start to analyse that, look at it, be able to articulate that, and maybe make the case for additional funding for those types of services. Yes: potentially, that could happen. The other thing that will happen is that it will allow that information to come in about those pupils and allow our teams to start triaging that information. Maybe "triaging" is not the right word, but it will allow us to look at those pupils and their profiles and decide how best to support them. We are going in with our eyes wide open around that, Chair. There is the potential that we could see an increase in demand, but, at the very least, we are going to start to be sighted on the real needs of the children and young people, to enable us to start to manage that further downstream.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You understand the concern. What I am hearing from a lot of school leaders is that, up to now, they have been asked to do the rationing, and they are worried that the rationing is going to happen at your end rather than theirs. At what point does the flag need to go up that we do not have enough people? My sense from interacting with your services, especially in the SEN space —. The issue of SEN link officers was well rehearsed a number of months ago. My sense is that you do not have enough people to deliver the services. That is no criticism of the people who are delivering the services; in fact, I interact with Elaine and her team regularly, as I am sure everyone around the table does. There is no question about the level of commitment among those staff to the children whom they are trying to provide a service for, but there are not enough of them. Sometimes, that is where the reputational damage comes in, because it feels like you have an organisation that does not care if it is stretched too thin. My concern is that we raise expectations that this is going to get better, but just end up with a bottleneck in a different place and do not move things along. I want to get a sense of how you are going to make sure that we do not end up in that scenario, and that we are able to deliver the real change that schools need to face in this space.

Mr Hanna: We cannot shy away from the fact that there absolutely is a pressure on resource, and that that could well continue to manifest itself, but we will continue to make the case through the Department of Education. The introduction of the local impact teams is a great lever around which we can build other services in a multidisciplinary way with Health colleagues, but also —. I have lost my train of thought.

Ms Elaine Craig (Education Authority): I will come in there, if that is OK, Chair. We have had an increase in SEN link officers and SEN support officers since the last time we were here. That has made a difference. Would we want more resource? Yes, kind of, but, at the same time, the greatest resource should be at the earlier stages in the code of practice. That is where our pupil support services — aka the local impact teams — are. It is important that we collect the data when that happens so that we know what the need is. However, the other side of that is that we have a lot of pupil support services with different referral pathways, and we could have had situations in which children were referred to two or three. Now, we will not be in that situation. Whoever is the best-placed person to meet the needs of that child will be involved.

Mr Hanna: Just to add the bit that I forgot about, but which Elaine picked up: the local integrated teams are fundamental to the success of the SEN reform agenda. That is what I wanted to say. They are absolutely critical. They are among the key pieces in how we shift everything left and move those services left so that we have less pressure on the more interventionist services and deal with the issues that children present at a much earlier stage.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Richard, do you want to add to that before I carry on?

Mr Pengelly: I do not want to prolong this; I will be brief. I do not want to give people false comfort that we are making a change that we think will solve everything. It is not a silver bullet. We are under-resourced, as you rightly said, and we will continue to be. We need to maximise the use of all of our resources. There is a piece of work in the delivery plan on SEN re-engineering and how we do this. There is re-engineering of the other bits of the business. That is why I have focused on the service reviews. Given the burgeoning demand for SEN, there are some things that we need to identify at this point that may not be as important as meeting the needs of children with special educational needs, and, in an environment where there is not sufficient resources, we need to be brave enough to say that we are going to pause doing something for a couple of years so that we can divert the resources. Chair, you will know this: if you ask schools to manage the pressures at a local level, and if every school gets to deal with its top 10 priority cases, the reality is that the eleventh case in any given school could be much more important than the second or third. At least by removing that individual management we will have full sight of the total demand and be able to do more strategic prioritisation. That will not solve the problem, but it will give us a better handle on it and help us work towards a solution.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I certainly know that many SENCOs will not be sad to see the end of having this conversation with parents: "I am sorry. I do not have a referral for you, because we have reached our quota". That is not a conversation that anybody wants to have. However, I have concerns about a bottleneck arising elsewhere, but we will see how that moves forward. You have been very clear that you are not resourced to the level that you need to be, and we will raise that with the Minister when he is here, because this is not about protecting EA budgets; it is about making sure that children and schools that need services can get them.

This is my final question, and I will then open it up to members. I will stick with those local impact teams. Much has been made — we have had it rehearsed in this Committee — of the absence of Health in that set-up, and I do not pretend for a minute that it is within your gift to bring Health to the table. A lot of other factors need to come into play, but my sense is that, if this is going to work meaningfully and if you are to have a genuine collective response to a need being presented by a school, you need Health at the table when we are talking about SEN. Based on your engagement on this, how far away are we from getting Health around the table to be meaningfully integrated as part of those teams? We had correspondence from the Department earlier. It does not even know how many allied health professionals are available to provide services to schools. I think that we were all scratching our heads when we read that correspondence. For me, Health consistently comes up in these conversations as the missing piece. Can you give us a sense of where this is at?

Mr Pengelly: Elaine can talk. There are two levels of dialogue with Health. There is the strategic dialogue, which is shaping the policy environment, but we are not completely sighted on that. That involves the Department of Education and the Department of Health, and that is happening to try to reset the rules of engagement. There is operational-level engagement that Elaine is very close to. The stark reality is —. We can talk about the pressure in the education system. Certainly, I have lost sight of the detail of it since the times when we talked at length about it, Pat. The Health sector is not short of its own problems, and there is a big, big resource issue. The sense that we are getting is that there is an ambition and desire on the part of our colleagues in the health service to work with us to do this, but they have their own resourcing challenges. Do you want to talk about that in particular?

Ms Craig: It is important to say that the local impact teams will be coterminous with the health trusts. That is important, because our services, as they stand now —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Sorry, Elaine. Just to make sure, what do we mean when we say "coterminous"?

Ms Craig: That will be the teams. There will be a team that will be in line with the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, a team in line with the Northern Health and Social Care Trust —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Not coterminous with actual health professionals? Just the location? They will reflect the area.

Ms Craig: Yes. It will be the same people who will be interacting with the same health professionals. That is positive for relationship building and knowing who you are working with. That is not the case at the minute across the EA. That is the first positive. All our services link directly with Health, obviously around SEN and other matters, on a day-to-day basis, and there are more long-standing meetings that happen, such as, for example, our monthly meetings with the child development clinics about referrals that need to come in for a statutory assessment.

Mr Hanna: Chair, we have attempted to recognise that we are maybe a little bit ahead of where Health is in transforming and reorganising our service. As Elaine said, we believe that we have forward-sighted ourselves, and we have decided to structure ourselves to match trust structures so that, at the point when Health is ready to join us, we have made it easy for that to happen. In a sense, it is a bit like that computer analogy: plug and play. We are developing the platform, and all the other agencies and services should be able to easily plug into what we are doing and be part of that. Health understands and knows where we are, and I think that it agrees with the philosophy of what we are doing. We think that we have put ourselves in a good place to make it easier for Health to join us on those multi-integrated teams, and we will continue to have those conversations. As director, my big challenge at this stage is reorganising our own services as, I suppose, the first stage of that. The second bit is then how we build those teams so that other services and other agencies can join in and it can be a truly multi-impact team, as opposed to just EA services.

Mr Pengelly: On the resource position, Chair, you can easily fall into the trap of saying that the problem is one of resourcing and that, until we get more money, we cannot fix the problem. We are trying to make the service a much more investable proposition. If we are going to secure additional investment from the Executive into these services, we need to develop a model that we can take to them and say, "Every pound that you put into this service will create the maximum impact and the value return on it".

That has not always been the case. Pouring more and more money into a flawed model at a time of constraint will not be attractive to the Executive, because they want the biggest impact. That is part of what we are doing.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Absolutely. We hope to see progress in that area. I will finish by making a comment. I will not name the school, but I met a principal, who discussed the access to speech and language therapy in their school. He gave an answer that is not always the common one. He said that their access was really good. I said, "How has that come about?". He said, "It just so happens that one of the teachers has a really good relationship with the team and knows the speech and language therapist. They work well together, so it has just come about like that. I feel very grateful to have a staff member who is doing that". That is not how services should be run, and children should not be reliant on that lottery. Fair play to that teacher, who reached out and made those relationships, but we should have predictable access to services when children need it. I will leave it at that.

Mr Sheehan: Thank you, Richard, for your answers so far. I will pick up on Nick's point around the Department's response. It said that it did not know how many allied health professionals were in the system, what their disciplines were or where the gaps were. Does the EA have any of that information?

Ms Craig: I do not have the detail of it now, but I can certainly check and get back to the Committee.

Mr Sheehan: OK. We all know that there has been an exponential rise in the number of children who are presenting with special needs over the past number of years. Those numbers are projected to continue to rise. In fact, in a statement to the Assembly the other day, the Minister outlined how the budget will have to increase for special needs in our schools. Richard, you talked about working strategically. If you are going to work strategically on providing support for children with special needs, we first need to know what their needs are and who can provide for those needs: is it behavioural therapists, occupational therapists or speech and language therapists? We need to know about all the wrap-around support that is needed. Unless somebody sits down and starts to think strategically about what is needed —. To me, it beggars belief that the Department does not know how many it has, how many it needs and where the gaps are. That suggests to me that there is no strategic thinking and absolutely no collaboration with the Department of Health.

I acknowledge what has been done on placements for children with special needs over the past short while, particularly since you came into post, notwithstanding some of the challenges that still exist. It is not perfect, but things are better than they were when it comes to placements. However, here is the crux of it: unless the appropriate support can be provided for those children who are going into specialist provision in mainstream schools (SPiMS), special schools and so on, the problem will not be resolved. It will just get worse. Do you want to comment on that?

Mr Pengelly: I do not disagree with anything that you said. It is difficult to give an answer today as opposed to mapping out a road map on how we might fix it. Take the combination of the Minister's statement this week, the ongoing work on the delivery plan and the work that I am doing to reshape the organisation. We are going to create a director-level post, and that person will report directly to me and will have specific personal responsibility for SEN transformation and for making it a high-value service. It is very welcome to hear that, from your perspective, you are seeing some improvement on the ground.

You are absolutely right: we have a long way to travel, but the point that Dave, Elaine and I talk about is that work to deal with the SEN issue has to be a lot more strategic and significant than trying to deal with SEN placements every year. The first thing that we need to do, which will be part of the work that the Minister will publish alongside the delivery plan, is to think about what the ultimate outcome is and what we are aspiring to provide for children with special educational needs. At the moment, I do not think that we have the clear outcome measures and an understanding of what we are shooting for. Once we do that and articulate it, we need to completely re-engineer the end-to-end process. That starts with the earliest possible intervention, and that is why the dialogue with the health service is so important. There has been talk of the fabled "shift left". The health service will have better transparency about children who are likely to present with a special educational need earlier in their journey than we will have. It is about trying to assemble all those building blocks.

The numbers will always be fluid and will always change. It can always be an easy alibi to say that to change so much is very difficult ever to know. In broad brush strokes, we will know what the position is. You are absolutely right to say that we need to get a better handle on that. We need to better calibrate the supply of services alongside the likely demand on services and to re-engineer that.

I could talk for hours about how important that is to us and the processes that we are going to put in place to deliver that. Until we get the delivery plan and the restructuring of the organisation and a very granular focus on that, it is difficult to give you what you are really asking for, which is for me to tell you the detailed actions that we are going to take forward on a day-to-day basis to make this better. We will be able to come back to you with that, but we are just not there yet, and we are continuing to work on it.

Mr Sheehan: OK, well, we will look forward to seeing that when it is ready. I want to move on to the controlled sector, because I know that you were part of the review of the controlled sector. You are clearly aware of the Minister's plans to set up a managing authority for the controlled sector. Can you give us an update on that?

Mr Pengelly: I can give you something of an update. The Minister launched a task force that was chaired by Mark Baker from the controlled sector organisation. That task force met, and I was part of it. The Minister was very clear and published the terms of reference, which set out a road map as to how that might be delivered. That work was completed before Christmas. Mark Baker delivered his report to the Minister, and that still sits with the Minister, who is considering it. The next stage, at the risk of speaking for the Minister, will be that the Minister will conclude his thinking on the report that he has received. I suspect that he will say something shortly about what the next steps are on that.

Mr Sheehan: OK. One of the reasons that the Minister has given for his plans to set up this new managing authority is that the EA has not been cutting the mustard when it comes to providing support to the controlled sector. That is your responsibility as the boss of the EA. Do you agree with that?

Mr Pengelly: I would absolutely agree that there is a strong perception that we have not been delivering that support. We would hold our hands up in and say, "In some areas". In my opening remarks, I touched on the fact that some of the work that we had commissioned was about facilitated focus groups to look at what the service is offering and how good, bad or indifferent it is. As a first stage, that was primarily focused on facilitating that piece of work in the controlled sector, so it leant more into the controlled space.

One of the things that comes out of that is that some of the criticism about the quality of services is because there is a misunderstanding about the services that we provide. People are concerned about an EA service that is not actually an EA service. There is a fair bit of noise in there, but I want to be clear. We have not performed as well as we could have or as well as we are capable of performing. We will improve our game. Part of that is about resourcing, and part of it is because we are stretched.

Another part of it is that colleagues in EA have always adopted the position that if a school has a difficulty and it reaches for support, we offer it to them. In some cases, arguably, if that is not a controlled school, our response should be that we do not have responsibility for that, so we cannot help. Thus far we have always actually —. Ultimately, if the school is not able to resolve its problem, we are the last resort and we will pick up the pieces. We need to recalibrate that and be clear about what support is available and who should provide it. That is part of our wider improvement plan.

We need to get better. We need to do that in dialogue, and that is why the stakeholder survey is so important to me. We need to understand the views of school leaders about the quality of services that we provide. That is a two-way information exchange. We need to provide better clarity to them about some of the services that they are frustrated they are not getting and do not come from us, and for which they need to look elsewhere.

Mr Sheehan: Yes. Nothing is ever perfect and there is always room for improvement. However, I did not pick up whether you agreed or disagreed with the Minister.

Mr Pengelly: I agree, but I do not accept the view that we have failed the controlled sector. Our services are not as good as they could have been, but we provide some very high-quality services to the controlled sector, given the constraints that are on us. I am uncomfortable with the word "failure". I am absolutely comfortable with and accepting of, "We could do better".

Mr Sheehan: Righto. One final question, Chair, if you do not mind.

We all know that the EA is under-resourced, but you are handing £10 million back to the Department when you do not have to. Explain that to us.

Mr Pengelly: Which £10 million is that?

Mr Sheehan: You said that you identified £25 million of efficiency savings when the Department asked for only £15 million.

Mr Pengelly: I am sorry if I misled you. I am not handing that back. We were on a trajectory to overspend by many, many tens of millions of pounds, but we have delivered savings to bring that down so that we will spend only the money that we have been allocated and not overspend. As you know well, public-sector organisations must live within their budget. Those savings are designed to allow us to live within budget; they are not about handing money back.

Mr Sheehan: OK. Fair enough.

Mr Baker: Thank you for your time. I will bring this back to placements. Early intervention is key, and it worries me a wee bit that you are on a pathway while Health is still not there, Dale. You are creating a platform for Health to fit in when it chooses to. That is worrying.

Placements are also about early intervention — getting the right placement at P1. I have raised it a number of times, and I heard the Minister talk on Monday about the SEN-first approach and the removal of the supernumerary designation for children with SEN. How will that work operationally in the coming year? Will those children be placed at the same time as their peers?

Mr Pengelly: In reality, SEN children will not be placed at the same time as their peers because the process runs —.

Mr Hanna: It is a different process. It is important to establish at that high level that we will do our best to align what we can. There are natural transition points because the school year operates on a particular cycle. Mainstream children apply at x point in the year, and the processes then work through to 1 September. For children with statements, that is a 24/7, 365 process.

Mr Baker: I get that, but we are moving towards a SEN-first approach, which basically means everybody getting their place at the same time. The Minister is saying, "We do not have the plan", but he is also talking about the removal of statements, saying that no child should need a statement and that everyone should the same education. Meanwhile, we do not even get the placements right to begin with and, children are waiting longer. This year, we have seen change in the move towards SPiMS because we do not have enough special schools. I am concerned that there are children who should be in a special school but are in a SPiM. From my engagement with teachers and school leaders, I do not believe that those children are all getting full support. That really concerns me. If, as part of the action plan, we are going to move to a SEN-first approach, surely that would mean all children being placed at the same time.

Mr Hanna: Yes, I agree that we want to make sure that there is sufficient capacity in the system to place children with SEN at the right time in the right way. If that aligns with the mainstream, that should be the case. The ambition set out in the Minister's statement is really helpful when it comes to operational plan 2, which is very much about the SEN-first approach that you outlined. What that allows us to do, operationally, is go out to the system with it. The Minister has set the clear direction with his operational plan 2 that it is very much about SEN first. I will give you an example. Looking at all schools at an aggregated level, we see that only about 30% have specialist provision. The Minister's direction of travel allows us to be clear in speaking to the other 70% that there is a direction from the Minister and the Department and a requirement for those schools to work more closely and collaboratively with us on setting up placements. That is what is important about the SEN-first piece: it signals to the system that it needs to collaborate with the Education Authority on delivering the placements.

Mr Baker: I get that, Dale, but there are children who were given placements back in August 2024 who did not go into SPiMS until the end of October or the start of November, and some were even delayed until December. That is a lot of school time missed that a mainstream child does not lose. To be brutally honest, a lot of those children did not get the support that they should have had from the EA. Maybe things feel a wee bit better, but, from engaging with parents, that is certainly not how it feels for them. Some kids got only 30 minutes for the whole time between August to December. That was their education — 30 minutes — and that is the big problem with placements. If we do not get it right, children will sit at home who should not be sitting at home. If mainstream children are getting an education, those children deserve to get an education. We must work towards that.

The only way to do it is to make sure that children are placed at the same time as everybody else. Nobody should be starting school in September while another child is sitting at home. That is the very least that parents want to hear from whatever we deliver in the coming years because that is what has to happen.

Also, I worry about the operational side of a knock-on effect, because we have children who should be in special schools but are in SPiMS. Then, children who would benefit greatly from SPiMS or a unit, for example those with moderate learning difficulties, are probably going into a mainstream class too early. There are then children who are in a mainstream class who would have got support from the EA. This is something that I am only starting to pick up, and I do not know whether this is a part of the change towards the training of the LITs, but support for a child with, say, dyslexia, is not quite where it would have been. There are concerns that there are knock-on effects of displacement, and I am really worried about that.

Mr Hanna: You have raised four or five points, and I will try to pick up on some of them. I am not aware of any child who has only had 30 minutes of education between the start of September and where we are now. When we went about putting the placements in place, we were honest and said that there will be construction projects that will not finish until x time. In the interim, we worked with every individual school to agree with them that suitable contingency arrangements would be in place for those children. None of those that I am aware of are 30 minutes. If there is one of those, I would like to know about that, please.

Mr Baker: They were very low.

Mr Hanna: I would like to know about that because —

Mr Baker: Maybe I am exaggerating when I say 30 minutes.

Mr Hanna: — we would want to deal with that.

Mr Baker: It is quite low.

Mr Hanna: Moving forward, it is going to be challenging. The number of children who are entering the system now has increased. We know that. In simple terms, the number of children entering SEN is much greater than the number of children who are leaving the system. So, for the next five to six years, there will be an exponential rise of children in the system. We have absolutely real challenges in creating that additional capacity in the system, but we are working on that. When we looked at lessons learned, one of our strong points was that we got a much better handle on our data. We now have a really good, strong dashboard that allows us to look at our data and try to start to plan ahead of the curve. We have that, and that will help us. We have challenges in that area. There is no doubt about that.

On what you said about children not being placed in the right setting, again, maybe, this is being reflected on us as the Education Authority and then, maybe more broadly, with you in the Committee and other politicians and other stakeholders. We have to get away from the blanket statement that not all children were placed and so there is a domino effect where, if there had been a special school place, they would have got a special school place and would not have been in a different type of provision. We have levels of confidence that all children have been placed in an appropriate setting. It may be a different setting —

Mr Baker: Dale, there are children with very complex needs who should be in a special school and who are in SPiMS. They really should have got a special school but are in SPiMS.

Mr Hanna: Again, we have high levels of confidence that the vast majority of children have been placed in the right setting.

Mr Baker: They are getting the same wrap-around support that they would get in a special school. Are you 100% confident about that?

Mr Hanna: They should have the same support that they get in special schools.

Ms Craig: I think that it is important to say that they would get the same support from the EA. Any of the specialist provisions that are being set up have support from the SEN specialist support team for two years, and, if they need it for longer, we are flexible with that as well. There is a link officer who is involved with them through the whole process.

Mr Baker: Has the Education and Training Inspectorate (ETI) carried out an inspection of all the SPiMS facilities yet?

Mr Hanna: Yes, and that —

Mr Baker: All of them?

Mr Hanna: It went out and did a survey or an inspection of the SPiMS provision. Whether that captured all of the SPiMS facilities, I am not 100% sure, but, overwhelmingly, there was a very good response to that, and the evidence suggests that those have been very successful.

On your other point about qualified people in the classroom, again, we acknowledge that it was very difficult to set up a huge amount of additional classroom provision and facilities at relatively short notice and at the same time be absolutely confident that we could make sure that every teacher and every classroom assistant who walked into the classroom was absolutely experienced. That just could not happen, but we do, as Elaine said, have the specialist support team. For any new provision, it has a priority to support all of those new specialist provisions within the first two years of their operation.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You can come back in very quickly, Danny, and then we will have to move on.

Mr Baker: A knock-on effect of LIT being set up seems to be that literacy support in classrooms has dropped off. It is just to highlight that point. I am not saying that that is definitely happening; I am just highlighting it.

Mr Hanna: That is a really important point on literacy —

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I am happy for you to answer that, but I am conscious that other members need to come in as well.

Mr Hanna: OK. In the interests of equity for all pupils, we are moving from an old legacy approach to literacy support to much more equitable support. It was called the discrepancy model. Again, I am not an expert in the discrepancy model, but, basically, we provided literacy support in the education sector to a very small cohort of children whose reading score did not match their IQ score, so there was a gap. It only focused on about 10% of children. However, we know that, among both children who do not have SEN and children who have SEN, reading and literacy are a challenge, so part of the work of the local integrated teams involves using the most recent evidence and most modern practices and introducing a different model of support for children — all children — with literacy needs. If a school decides that a child in its population needs literacy support, it can refer that child, whereas, under the old model, only certain children could be referred under the criteria. What we are putting in place is a much more equitable model of support for all children with literacy needs.

Mr Pengelly: Can I have just 30 seconds?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It needs to be 30 seconds, and then I will bring in other members.

Mr Pengelly: On the placement issue, the fundamental constraint is the number of places at special schools and the amount of specialist provision. If we had unlimited supply, the debate about placements would be of a fundamentally different order of magnitude. Dale makes the point that only 30% of schools have specialist provision. Operational plan 2, as part of area planning, will be published shortly. That will change the nature of the landscape on the work that we are doing to recalibrate special school provision and specialist provision. Currently 30% of schools have specialist provision. As part of my education, I went out and spoke to school principals, and I can say without exemption that every school principal whom I talked to who has specialist provision on-site said unequivocally that it adds to the value of the school for children without special educational needs.

Mr Baker: I have no doubt about that.

Mr Pengelly: It is a better place because those children are interacting with children who have special educational needs. That is a message that I want the 70% to hear, and it is the message that the Minister wants them to hear.

Mr Baker: I get that. Sorry, I did not mean it in that sense —

Mr Pengelly: I know.

Mr Baker: — but there are children right now who are on reduced timetables because the settings are not right.

Mr Pengelly: That is a fair point.

Mr Baker: That is a problem.

Mr Pengelly: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I will give the EA the benefit of the doubt. Given that operational plan 2 will have a focus on specialist provision and that that will not be separate from the main operational plan is welcome. You referred to principals saying that learning support classes — or whatever term we want to use now — are a real positive in their school. I agree; that is the feedback that I hear. However, they also say that what is not a positive is when it is rushed and not done strategically, because that puts them under undue pressure, and there is a mad rush to get it over the line over the summer months. They said that that is not helpful. That is what makes other principals reticent, because it looks like a chaotic process, whereas they would rather that it was planned. Let us hope that we move to that. I genuinely mean that.

Mr Pengelly: That is fair. I will add another criticism to that. Some principals have said to me that, when they are creating specialist provision, we are at the school every time that they turn up, but, as soon as they open the doors of the specialist provision, they do not see us. So, we need to do more to support schools once they create the specialist provision. The facilitation of peer support is a very strong component of that. We need to do more there.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is a welcome acknowledgement.

Mrs Mason: Thanks very much for your time here today. Dale, I want to pick up on what you said about literacy support and get clarity on something. I cannot remember the terminology that you used, but will you confirm that there will still be one-to-one literacy support for children under the new model?

Mr Hanna: The new model will provide one-to-one support if a child specifically needs that. If child x is referred in a school, we would like to be in the position where a member of our staff or our intervention officer is able to go out to the school. It might then say, "You know, Dale and Richard could also do with some literacy support", and that can be done in a small group setting, because the evidence suggests that, for children who have literacy needs, working in a small group setting is as effective as addressing their needs one to one. I get that there is some chat on the streets that says we are removing one-to-one support. That is absolutely not the case. Where it is required, we will have that support. Equally, however, we will take the opportunity to be much more ambitious, trying to address the needs of more children at the same time and to use all our services in order to lean in and support those children.

The other benefit of the local integrated teams is that while, traditionally, the literacy service would have gone in and managed the literacy issue, we want to get to a stage with those teams where, if our staff go in and find that a child — or a group of children — with a literacy need also has a behavioural need, we can put in place a range of services to support that child at that moment in time rather than waiting for a referral to address the behavioural need. It will take us a while to get to that stage, but, if a child needs one-to-one support, they will get one-to-one support.

Mrs Mason: Thanks for that. Richard, you said that you had done much engagement. It is clear that you have, and that is welcome. Can you tell us what engagement you have had, directly, with SENCOs. The Chair mentioned engagement with principals. What direct engagement have you had with schools' SENCOs?

Mr Pengelly: I have not sat down directly with SENCOs as a group. I think that I have encountered some SENCOs at schools during some of the broader engagement that I have done. If SENCOs say that they want to sit down with me directly, I will spend whatever time would be helpful. I am more than happy to do that.

Mrs Mason: That is positive. I genuinely think that there is a gap there. There is a need for SENCOs to be listened to.

I will be completely honest, Dale: you stated that you removed the barrier of the educational psychologist assessment. A number of months ago, departmental officials sat here and made that same statement. I am not joking when I say that, following that meeting, my phone was red hot from calls from SENCOs and school leaders. I have been told that, in reality, that is not the case and that the workload has been pushed onto SENCOs. I have sat in a room with them, and, honestly, a lot of them are at breaking point. They do not see any light at the end of the tunnel showing them how to move forward. We are waiting on a plan, but what support will there be for SENCOs? I would be interested to hear that.

Mr Hanna: I will go back to the point about everything that we are attempting to achieve. We need to recognise that the EA cannot come in to fix and deliver intervention services all the time. We need to build capacity of the SENCOs in schools, and in schools more broadly, including teaching and non-teaching staff. A key pillar will be teacher professional learning (TPL) in schools, which will provide a toolkit for dealing with some of the issues at an earlier stage and to lean into the EA as a support service that they can go to for support to problem-solve for themselves, without having to call on us to bring in an intervention officer. That is one of the key areas.

We know that SENCOs are vital. EA's transformation programme has engaged with SENCOs through the LIT initiative and SEN transformation programme. A number of SENCOs have been part of that. Richard gave a commitment, but we are more than happy to engage with SENCOs to a greater degree and to take their feedback.

Mrs Mason: I appreciate that. The reason that I asked the question on literacy support is that, like a lot of things, a lot of what you mentioned — the SENCO portal and things like that — sounds fantastic in theory, but, when you drill down into the issues, that is not the reality of day-to-day life in the schools for those children. That is the feedback that we get at the minute. I have limited time for questioning. I appreciate your response with regard to the SENCOs; it would be good to reach out to them.

A lot of the talk today has been about SPiMS, but do you agree that our special schools are dealing with more and more complex medical needs and more and more complex and challenging behaviours?

Mr Hanna: Yes. The special schools do an amazing job, working in difficult circumstances. Given that there is also that pressure on the placements, they have stepped up to the plate, so, yes, I accept that. However, we need to find out how to solve the problems that present themselves in the special schools. Again, to be completely honest about that, I think that the system sometimes thinks that the EA has all the answers, yet, ironically, the people who are most expert in dealing with those issues are probably the professionals who work in the special schools, day in, day out.

What we need to do and will do, I hope, as part of the transformation journey is find a way to unlock that professionalism and expertise in the special schools so that there can be peer-to-peer support. I agree that they need more support, but some of that has to come from within. The EA does not have all the answers, but we will support the special schools to find those answers.

Mrs Mason: There is an acknowledgement that they need that support, so please tell me why on-site nurses are being removed from our special schools.

Mr Hanna: My understanding is that those decisions are taken by the health and social care trusts.

Mrs Mason: I understand that. I get it, but what are you guys doing to support special schools? I had a really tragic incident in my constituency, which the Chair is aware of, in which a pupil died on-site. That school did not have an on-site nurse who could have dealt with that situation. I get that it is a Health matter, but what is the EA doing to support that school? The follow-up support that it has had since that incident has been atrocious as well.

Mr Pengelly: I take the point that you make. I understand. Those are devastating circumstances for anyone to have to deal with. There is ongoing dialogue between the Department at a policy level and us at an operational level. There is no easy answer. The health service is withdrawing resources, partly because it does not have the money to pay for them and partly because the resources are very scarce.

Mrs Mason: I get that, Richard. I do. I understand, but what is the EA doing specifically to help that school and fight for that resource for it?

Mr Pengelly: I do not know whether there is anything at a collective level —.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): May I come in here? I am familiar with the issue and have dealt with a lot of the special school principals. I had a meeting with the Public Health Agency (PHA), trusts and the EA about the withdrawal of nursing provision. I sent a detailed letter to all those stakeholders asking for specific information. Nobody gave me the courtesy of a response. It was not until I met the Minister that anything landed on my desk. That is not good enough. The question, "What is the EA doing to go out and bat for those special schools?" is valid.

Ms Craig: First, I apologise that you did not get a response. I hope that that is not the norm from me or my colleagues here. I will certainly go back and look into what happened with that, Chair.

That situation was tragic. It is always horrific in any school community when a child dies. There is a response from the EA, but I know that you are not talking about that. You mean what happened prior to that. I need to highlight the fact that there is a critical incident response team, which will go in to support any school in which that has happened, a member of staff has died or there has been a critical incident. That team is made up from a number of services across the EA, including our educational psychology service.

We are batting for our special schools. Do I think that that is perfect? No. I recently had a meeting with Nick and some of our special school principals about how we can better respond when they feel that they are in a crisis situation. I hope that we will be able to take that forward in the near future. If there are opportunities for us to work better with the health service, we will take them — absolutely — and we will work with our sponsoring Department on that.

Mr Hanna: My understanding is that it is a bit like what used to happen when there were five education boards. The five trusts did things differently. There was a shift in direction. Two trusts, I think, made that decision; the three other trusts did not have school-based nursing support. The critical question, which we will go back and ask from our perspective, is about how we make sure that there is appropriate nursing support and access to it in schools. That is for Health to answer and provide us with assurances that it can provide the relevant level of medical support in those scenarios. I am not sure that it is for us to go into schools and say, "We think that you need to have a school-based nurse", but it is absolutely right to pose the question and revisit the issue of the best way to support children with complex medical needs when they are on-site in special schools.

Mrs Mason: OK.

Mr Brooks: Thanks for your presentation. I will be a bit parochial, but my question is on a Northern Ireland-wide issue — the school estate — and comes from a visit that I made on Friday to Dundonald High School, which was earmarked for closure in, I think, 2012 and has since turned around significantly its numbers — it is full to the gills now — and its performance. Credit to the teachers and the school leadership who have achieved that. They are doing great work, but they are doing it, as the staff in a lot of our schools are, in facilities that are not just not perfect but, from what I saw on Friday, really should not be in use. I will give a few examples. At times, it has one out of five boilers working. Holes in walls currently covered by Correx were reported in May but have not yet been fixed. At times, it can open only two toilets during the day because of issues with the plumbing, and I believe that it has been told by the EA that the problem is too expensive to fix. Those are basic facilities. Pat and I sometimes disagree, but we agree that it is one of the schools that is shouldering some of the challenges, in that special needs children are supported there. There are over 25 different languages in the school because of its significant asylum-seeking population. It feels as though it is shouldering a lot of that burden without having support.

I recognise the resource challenges and that there is no magic wand that can be waved. I suspect that having been earmarked for closure in 2012 has prevented in some way the start of the process of addressing those challenges and the process of looking towards a new school, but it is in a very different situation now. Dundonald is growing, so I do not foresee that challenge emerging again. I do not envisage a new school appearing in Dundonald quickly, although I will fight for it. What can be done in the meantime to make sure that schools that are sharing a lot of the burden have the bare basics in terms of the facilities that they should have, particularly when it comes to maintenance? Its SPiMS is in a very small classroom. There is not enough space. Although there is space in law for home economics (HE), art and so on, SPiMS is in a very small space there. The school has done away with staff rooms and so on in order to accommodate SPiMS, as have a lot of schools. What can we do in the meantime?

Mr Pengelly: I will say something from my perspective. It is not Dale's area of responsibility, although he used to be involved in it. I do not think that there is any answer that I could give you that you would judge to be satisfactory. Certainly, there is no answer that I would be comfortable giving to you. The simple reality is that too much of our school estate is below the acceptable standard for an educational setting for children. It is that simple. It is just not good enough. We do not have the money. I wonder how many times I have said that. When I have been out with principals, I have said to them, "Please be assured that, when you've made a case to get something fixed, there isn't somebody sitting in the Education Authority thinking that we could fix it or we couldn't — we could do either — and we've just decided not to because we don't believe you that it needs fixed. We believe you, and we want to fix it, but we physically don't have the money". We are trying to do more and more with less and less. It is an intolerable position.

How will we fix it? Obviously, a big enabler will be when more money is available. Bear in mind that we are coming up to the 12-month anniversary of the Executive's having come back; it was 3 February last year. One of the priorities for the Executive is to move more into the space of medium- to long-term planning. We are still in a one-year planning cycle. One of the things that will help us is having visibility. I take your point: Dundonald, in any environment, is a long way away from a new school, but, at times, people will say, "Well, we'll not do something because there's the possibility of a new school". You need to have a longer vision so that you can say, "Well, the new school is happening seven years from now, but that can't be an excuse for not doing something in the next six years, because we can't ask children to come into this".

Mr Brooks: Maybe they are looking to do that now. I have asked for officials to visit various capital build projects.

Mr Pengelly: We need to do that. At a micro level, one of the things that we need to do, as our colleagues in maintenance say — this will not solve any of the big problems — is to create a bit more flexibility at local level for schools to deal with some of their issues. A constant concern is that they are forced to use central contracts, which are very expensive. There is a local solution. We are trying to find ways —.

Mr Brooks: They raised that with me. In general procurement, they spend a lot more than they need to on things because they are forced to use central contracts. A very small example is having to spend £75 on a toaster when you can get one for £10 on Amazon. The same goes for their computers. There are much bigger examples. I have here pages of things that they could buy more cheaply, so procurement is a big thing for them.

Mr Pengelly: We are trying to carve out a solution. Obviously, whatever we do must be compliant with the law. One of the big issues with procurement is that the legislation forces an organisation of the size of the EA that spends so much money as a sector to aggregate the demand and go to the market with contracts. When you go to the market with a contract, you can give the contract only to the best deal on the table. I have seen that time and again across the public sector. Whatever aggregated contract you sign at any given point in the year, you will find some supplier who, opportunistically, can do you a better deal. The reality, however, is that, if we take the toaster example, somebody can give you a toaster for £10 and we pay £75, but could that person supply 50,000 toasters a year, which is our demand and what we need to contract for? That said, there is more that we can do to find some flexibility, and that is work to do.

Mr Brooks: If schools had more flexibility and autonomy, you would not need to look for 50,000 of those. They would have the responsibility of sourcing them themselves.

Mr Pengelly: I will not take the easy approach of saying that I looked at the legislature to fix that problem for us. [Laughter.]

Mr Hanna: One of the successes of the organisation is that, just recently, we got new contracts in place. We had legacy contracts, and, to be honest, the change was challenging. We faced legal challenges from incumbent contractors whose perception was that they owned those contracts, and we had to work our way through that. The new contracts are much better value for money.

On maintenance, colleagues in operations and estates and colleagues in DE are working closely together to look at what our capital strategy is for the estate. I think that you are right: we need to flip it a wee bit. Capital expenditure needs to have a greater focus on maintenance and looking after what we have. We still need to have conversations about where we spend our money. I would add —.

Mr Brooks: The sustainability of that is a consideration. In very many cases, maintenance may be appropriate, but it could be a false economy when the upkeep of an old building becomes more expensive than the alternative.

Mr Hanna: Exactly. In simple terms, we need to have a plan and programme for every single school that states that — I am making the numbers up — after 10 years, you get new windows, and, every 15 years, you get a new boiler and so on. It would not get to the stage where the EA was forced into, for example, a situation, in 15 years' time, of saying that 100 schools would not get their boilers. By doing that, we would maintain what we have. It is a bit like keeping your car on the road.

The other factor in that —

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Briefly, Dale, so that I can bring other members in.

Mr Hanna: OK. That capital strategy piece between DE and EA is important in setting out for the future how we spend our money.

The final point is that we also have an unseen infrastructure, which is our digital infrastructure — making sure that your internet is in place, making sure that you have cybersecurity, making sure that schools are kept up to date with computers etc — and that puts pressure on capital expenditure.

Mr Brooks: The Minister has improved some of that, but schools made the point that it sometimes takes 25 minutes for their computers to be up and working. That is class time, and it very much shortens the time in which kids can actually learn.

Thank you very much for your answers.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I am not sure how this will work. Michelle is online and has submitted a couple of questions because she has lost her voice, so we will see how it goes. I might not be able to provide any commentary on these questions. We will do our best and see whether Michelle can help.

The first question that Michelle has asked me to put is on early years: how will the SEN early years inclusion service change as part of the transformation agenda?

Mr Hanna: In what respect? That would be helpful to know.

Ms Craig: She cannot say.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Can you say at all, Michelle?

The Committee Clerk: You can text me about it, if you want.

Mr Pengelly: We are struggling to provide a comprehensive answer. If it is OK with you, we will take that away and come back to you. It is difficult to provide that granularity because we are still developing the delivery plan, which will set out the detail. If it would be helpful, we can come back with a written response specifically on early years.

Mr Hanna: Equally, Michelle, we are happy to engage directly with you on that and put you directly in contact with the right people in the EA who can give you those answers. You may want to have a meeting or discussion about it.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is fine. It seems that Michelle really has completely lost her voice.

Mr Brooks: She seems to be typing something.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We will see whether that comes through.

Mr Hanna: If the next question is really difficult, we might lose our voices.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I can see Michelle's question on the screen. She wants to know whether the delivery of SEN early years inclusion service is changing.

Mr Hanna: The early years inclusion service is a little like the local integrated team. It will be part of a local integrated team structure and based on the same structure. It is changing, Michelle, from that perspective. Again, we will come back to you with more detail.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I do not think that the next question is easy, but, hopefully, you will be able to provide a response. Michelle has asked a question that relates to the Minister's statement, I think: from the EA's perspective, how do you measure outcomes for SEN children; and what is the measure of outcomes for SEN children to see whether your services are having an impact, and will that feed into the wider outcomes framework that will be developed for the transformation agenda and the delivery plan?

Mr Pengelly: That is a really insightful question, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It is not my question. [Laughter.]

Mr Pengelly: I am more than a little uncomfortable about where we sit today. I am a great advocate of, whatever you do in life, being certain of what you are aiming for. Know where you are going to land the plane before you take off. I spent an awful lot of time last year working proactively with colleagues on this year's SEN placements. I think that, at times, I sounded like a broken record. It has to be about more than getting a child a place at a school.

At times, we may go a bit too far. We talk about making sure that every child fulfils his or her potential, and that is what we have to do, but we need to better define what their potential is. At the moment, this is how I see the outcome measures and why I think that they are unsatisfactory. Two of the figures in the Minister's statement were the percentage of children with SEN who achieved GCSEs and the percentage of children with SEN who attended higher education. Those are wonderful aspirations for some children with special educational needs, but there are big cohorts of children with special educational needs for whom neither of those two things will ever be achievable. We have to have something else for them to aim for. A big piece of work is needed in order for us to be absolutely clear about what the outcome should be.

Fundamentally, we exist to improve the lives of those children. We have to do that, demonstrate it and measure it in a way that we do not measure it at the moment. Dale and I have talked about that over the past 48 hours. It is a big focus of the work, in parallel with the delivery plan. The delivery plan is the route map to take us somewhere, but we need to know where we are going with it.

Mr Hanna: We will have measurable metrics around the local impact teams, Michelle, so that we will be able to demonstrate that. The metric for one child could be that their reading ability has moved to a level of x, y or z. We have built a management information system that should allow us to start capturing the nuances of improvements by children with special educational needs. That will be part of the outworkings of our local impact teams. I am sure that, at some point in the future, we will be able to come back and give you some information on that.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): The second part of Michelle's question was about the outcomes framework that the Minister referred to and that would be associated with the delivery plan. Will we see the sorts of metrics to measure outcomes for children with special educational needs that you are thinking about in that outcomes framework, or are we not there yet?

Mr Hanna: I suspect that that work will sit alongside some of the work that we are doing. If, for example, we are looking at new models of professional support in the classroom, we will want to build an evaluative piece alongside that. For instance, if we were to run a pilot, we would be able to come back and very clearly demonstrate that that particular model delivered good outcomes for children and young people in those scenarios.

Mr Pengelly: I do not want to pre-empt what the Minister may decide and publish over the coming weeks. Given the importance of that work and bearing in mind where we are now, it is more likely that the delivery plan will specify what we are doing in the outcome space and how we articulate and measure outcomes as opposed to giving us the finished article that you asked about. It will give us the set of outcomes that we are shooting for, and we are not there yet. It is too complex to rush, because it will shape the work that we do for the next three to five years. It is important to get it right.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you. Time is probably beating us. I will bring Cara in for the last question.

Ms Hunter: I have two questions, and I will put them together and see where we end up. First, thank you for being here today. It has been helpful for the Committee to get a full picture of where things are. I want to follow up on the engagement and feedback mechanisms in the EA. Can you detail the level of engagement that you have had with the parents of SEN children? How do you listen to them? What methods do you utilise to do that? Recently, I spoke to parents in my constituency. Experts through lived experience, they just want the best learning environment and experience for their children. Can you talk us through how you identify the issues that parents feel are in the EA? How do you use that feedback to improve things?

Mr Pengelly: There is lots of detailed engagement on casework. I will be honest: I have not met parents in the last couple of months. Engagement was through advocacy groups for the parents' groups in the earlier part of last year, probably in the summer. It was partially an introductory meeting at a high level. There has not been a granular engagement. The meat of the parental view comes from the detailed conversations and dialogue that we have on individual cases.

Ms Craig: A team meets parental advocacy groups fairly regularly. Within the statutory assessment review service, we have an advice and information service. It is a very small team, but we employed more people recently. It is the primary team that leads on parental engagement. As part of the DE end-to-end review, the team met specific parent groups in different localities. In the last year, we have started drop-in clinics for parents. In some areas, particularly Belfast, the clinics were very successful. A number of parents came to each session, and those sessions continue. In more rural areas, the drop-in clinics have not been as widely taken up. Of course, every child will have a SEN link officer who is linked to them and, moving forward, a SEN support officer. It would be wrong of me not to highlight the role of the family support link officer that we had last summer for the children for whom we did not manage to get a placement by 30 June.

Mr Hanna: Sorry for interrupting. I will add that, as part of the local impact teams, we have had a specific parent reference group. The programme team has had regular engagement with parents to run through some of the thinking about how services might operate in the future. There is a mechanism in place, and, along with senior colleagues, I have met advocacy groups. We have reached out to advocacy groups to say that, if they want us to meet parents, we are more than happy to do so.

Ms Hunter: It is good that their voices are heard. In the rural context, have you thought of doing a digital drop-in?

Ms Craig: Yes. We have done that online as well.

Ms Hunter: I am thinking of ways to tap into the rural space.

Lastly, I have a question that I want to ask while you are here. A few months ago, there was a Committee meeting that really stuck with me. We discussed the Addressing Bullying in Schools Act 2016. It became apparent that there is a severe lack of data on and monitoring of bullying and the nature of bullying in Northern Ireland. We discussed the role of the board of governors and potential moments of conflict of interest. Will there be any efforts or engagement between the EA and the Department of Education to look into that further, recognising how crucial it is that we monitor effectively bullying in Northern Ireland? It ties in with the SEN aspect.

Mr Hanna: We probably need to come back to you on that. An EA addressing bullying team support schools with training, advice and guidance. If there are particularly complex cases, the team will go in and support the school. I do not have the detail of the captured data with me.

Ms Craig: Schools now have a responsibility to record the data, and the addressing bullying team will help them with implementation.

Ms Hunter: When the team was here, it did not fill us with much confidence. The extent to which it was mandatory to bring forward information was not clear. Schools did not want to be seen to have lots of bullying incidents, so there were conversations that they were less likely document.

Your response fills me with more confidence. If you have any more details to hand, please get back to me. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): The Clerk and I were speaking this morning about that legislation and whether we need to think about some post-legislative scrutiny. That would obviously involve your team, but it would extend more widely as well. We can pick that up.

I have given a fair bit of latitude with time today in light of the big appetite to engage with you. Thank you for giving up your time this afternoon. We look forward to seeing what happens in this space. We are aware of the scale of the challenge, and we hope to see progress in the weeks and months ahead. It is important to note that a lot of schools and a lot of parents will be watching this session with interest, because, as we all know, things have not been where they should have been over the past number of years. We are hopeful, but we understand that the scale of the challenge is significant. We thank you for your time.