Official Report: Minutes of Evidence
Committee for Education, meeting on Wednesday, 1 October 2025
Members present for all or part of the proceedings:
Mr Nick Mathison (Chairperson)
Mr Pat Sheehan (Deputy Chairperson)
Mr Danny Baker
Mr David Brooks
Mr Jon Burrows
Mrs Michelle Guy
Ms Cara Hunter
Mrs Cathy Mason
Mr Gary Middleton
Witnesses:
Dr Tomas Adell, Education Authority
Mr Dale Hanna, Education Authority
Mr Richard Pengelly, Education Authority
Public Accounts Committee Report on Special Educational Needs: Education Authority
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We are very glad to have with us from the Education Authority (EA) Richard Pengelly, its chief executive; Tomas Adell, its chief transformation officer; and Dale Hanna, its chief operations officer. You are all very welcome. Without any further preamble, I will hand over to you. You know the drill: you have up to 10 minutes in which to make an opening presentation, which will be followed by questions from Committee members. We will aim for five minutes a member.
Mr Richard Pengelly (Education Authority): Thanks very much, Chair, and I thank you all for the opportunity to come along today. You will be glad to hear that I will not take 10 minutes. We are here to provide an update on recommendations in the PAC report. We have provided the Committee with a paper, and I do not plan to go through each of the seven recommendations laboriously. Our paper sets out the position, so I thought that I will provide a bit more granularity on where we are at and on the forward-looking bit.
Before I start, I will say that one of the things that I want to do today is to look to the future. We have talked about how early our work starts, because there are concerns that we do not start the SEN process early enough. I will provide a wee bit more granularity on that, but I very much want to finish by looking to the future. We do not speak about that enough to the Committee. At times, we come to the Committee and are asked lots of hard questions, as it is its right to do — I know that Pat in particular enjoys doing so — but our shared ambition is to better meet the needs of that vulnerable group of children. That is what we want to do, so I will talk a bit at the end about the prize for us.
I hope that this does not come across as overly self-serving on our behalf, but, at times, we have a frustration that the core problem is seen as being some sort of operational failure by the EA. I do not believe that that is the case, but, equally, I am not going to sit here and say that we are getting it right every time and that we are perfect. We are a big organisation with lots of moving parts and lots of people, and we sometimes get it wrong. I hope that the community has sensed in recent times that, when we so get it wrong, we put our hand up and acknowledge that we have got it wrong, learn from our mistake and not repeat it in the future. The key challenge for us all is to bring along with us the whole education sector and, indeed, those beyond the education sector, particularly our partners in the health sector. We have to come together and make it a real collaborative endeavour to address the problems.
It has been said that last year was the most difficult year ever and that, as I have touched on, the core problem was that we did not start early enough, with a flurry of activity happening towards the end of the year. We were saying many months ago that the September 2025 placements issue was shaping up to be one of the most difficult ever, and that was not because of a lack of starting on time on our part. Rather, it was because of the scale of the challenge and because we had exhausted the pipeline of supply of additional capacity and were having to create a new one. We have said that we felt that we had started the process early, so I want to provide some evidence for that. By November 2024, which was almost a full year before September 2025, we in the EA had engaged with 235 schools about the September 2025 position. By February 2025, that had increased to 368 schools. Site assessments began in November 2024 to evaluate the feasibility for new provision or pathways. In total, 214 schools were referred to our minor capital delivery team for site assessments to determine accommodation feasibility. That was for the mainstream school cohort. Initial engagement with all 40 special schools about capacity for September 2025 was completed by the end of November 2024.
I will go to the end point to contextualise those numbers. Ultimately, in ensuring, albeit by the skin of our teeth, that, at the start of September, all children had an allocated place, we created in total just over 1,300 additional places across 120 schools. I absolutely acknowledge that, of those 1,300 places, around 80 were not fully ready by the start of term. Some of that work has now been completed. Around 40 places are not fully ready, while the work on around 40 of them has now been completed. The key point that I want to emphasise is that that is frustrating and annoying. There are some reasons behind it, and there are lessons for us to learn for the future. One of those lessons is that we did not start early enough. Some 120 schools eventually worked with us to create that space. By November 2024, we had engaged with double that number of schools, and, by February 2025, we had engaged with treble that number of schools.
At times, people wonder why we focus on the placements issue. We do so because it is central to the totality of some of the concerns. I watched the Committee's evidence session last week with colleagues from the Department of Education, and two of the issues that came up in particular were transportation arrangements and failure to hit the 26-week target for the statementing process. Long journeys are a concern for all of us, but the truth is that, if places are available in local schools to children, they do not need to get in a car and undertake a longer journey. The choice for us is an awful one, and it is certainly not our preference, and it is between sending a child on a longer journey than we would want and having them not go to school. Until we secure local provision across the totality of Northern Ireland, that is the challenge that we face.
I will say something really interesting about the statementing process. We are currently at about 56% compliance against the 26-week target. The final piece of the jigsaw for completing the statementing process is agreeing a place.
Until the work has been done to identify that there is a need for a place and what it should look like, and it is brokered and agreed, the process is not complete. If we had a more abundant supply of places, we would have 100% compliance pretty much immediately. At times, our colleagues are trying to broker places with five or six schools. There are legitimate reasons that some of those schools cannot offer places, but it is all about the process. If we can create the supply, we can solve the issues with the statementing process.
All of that having been said, I am clear that this is not easy for schools. It is not a simple choice between their doing it and their not doing it. There are some big challenges for schools. There are some areas on which we really want to work with them, and there are constraints involved. Funding is the obvious constraint. Some schools are locked into a geographical footprint that makes it almost impossible for them to create additional capacity. Many schools are in buildings that are not exactly fit for purpose. That is why I said that it has to be a collaborative endeavour.
As I said at the beginning, I will finish on an upstroke and look forward. I provide an absolute assurance to the Committee that we have already started work for September 2026. Many of you will have read the recent positive comments from some of our colleagues in the teaching unions about working with us. We are grateful for those comments and welcome them. Last week, we had our first formal meeting with union colleagues. That will be the first of many meetings, but it represents positive engagement. We have already identified 308 mainstream schools that we want to focus on working with in order to try to create additional capacity for next year. If half of those schools work with us to turn aspiration into capacity, next year, instead of being the most difficult yet, will be one of the most straightforward. That is not to say that it will be easy. It will still be difficult, and there will still be challenges, but we have a plan and are working with those schools. The process of engagement has started.
That work will underpin a more timely statementing process. In turn, that statementing process will be facilitated by a digitisation process. We are starting testing for that in the next week or two, and it will go live next year. That will facilitate the process and make it much more transparent for and accessible to parents. One thing that we struggle with is maintaining lines of communication with parents throughout what is an incredibly difficult and stressful time for them. Part of that is a consequence of our staff being under such intense pressure that they cannot do everything. That is regrettable. With the digitisation of information flows, however, parents will be able to access information to see exactly where we are at and what the process is. Our staff being under intense pressure is not an excuse for their not communicating with parents, but the digitisation process will support communication and make the whole system more transparent.
Finally, I will say something so that members understand our mindset, not that I am suggesting that it is not the Committee's mindset as well. Assessing the needs of a child, identifying a place for a child and transporting that child to that place are the first steps in the process. The big issue then becomes what happens when children get to that place every morning and, even more importantly, the outcomes that we deliver for each of them. That takes us on to the SEN transformation agenda. The Minister set out a very ambitious plan. We are working on refining it. Lots of work streams are under way. I am not going to get into the SEN transformation agenda today, Chair. It probably merits a session of its own.
Mr Pengelly: I just want to say that there is an ambitious work agenda that is absolutely laser-focused on better articulating the outcomes to which we aspire. It is only when we can properly explain those outcomes that we can develop the detailed road map for how to get to them.
That is all that I want to say, Chair. I hope that that has been helpful.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you for your opening remarks. I had not particularly planned to ask about placements, but, given that you put a lot of focus on them and cited placements as being central to unlocking a lot of this, I will ask one straightforward question on the subject. The message that I have heard there is that you have always, and certainly in the past couple of years, started the process early but that the supply pipelines dried up, leaving you in the position that it did, so, in the end, it did not matter how early you had started. How confident are you that the pipeline has now opened up sufficiently to deliver the engagement and cooperation with schools that you need if you are to make this work for September 2026?
Mr Pengelly: I do not want to pre-empt that before we get into the detailed dialogue, but I will say that I am really buoyed by the positive engagement with our colleagues in the teaching unions. They have declared a real intent to work with us, and that is a real positive. Just before March, Dale and I, along with another colleague — this was before Tomas arrived in the organisation — visited over 50 schools for meetings. In those meetings, I was really struck at times by the fact that, when we were trying to explain the offer of support that was available, the schools were totally unaware of it. That is therefore an absolute failing on our part.
There are challenges. I sometimes talk about the footprint of schools and the resources available to them. At times, there is a reluctance, which is absolutely legitimate, to offer places, because schools think that they are in "After you, Claude" territory. We have really strong support available, so we need to better articulate that so that schools can understand what it entails. That in itself will add fuel to the dialogue.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): When Dale and Tomas were at the Committee a couple of weeks ago to talk about special educational needs placements, there was a more hopeful atmosphere in the room, as it was felt that an opportunity definitely existed to get placements right. On the same afternoon, we heard from the Autism Reviewer, who framed her remarks in such a way as to say that there was opportunity and hope, but she also used the word "fragile" to describe the situation. If, at the end of October or the beginning of November, we are in the same space and progress on engagement with schools is not being made, are we into a problem scenario again? Is that still the window of time that we are talking about?
Mr Pengelly: You will forgive me, but I do not want to give the Committee a sense that I am planning for failure. Achieving success will be a collaborative endeavour.
Mr Pengelly: Of course you do. I have been very clear that we started the process early last year. Was the challenge crystallised early enough for us? We started intense engagement just before the schools broke up for the summer last year.
Mr Dale Hanna (Education Authority): We started in March or April.
Mr Pengelly: I certainly want to pull that date forward, but there is a new energy and a new mindset among all of us this year, so I am hopeful that we will be able to work through this.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I fully accept that placements are critical. Money is also very important. It looks as though there definitely is, and has been for a number of years, tension in the EA between resource going into your statutory functions — the things that you have to do, such as the statementing of children — and resource going into support services for children. Balancing the two when resources are scarce creates a tension. Can you give me an idea, even for this year, of how much of your budget is going your statutory functions and of how much is going into support services?
Dr Tomas Adell (Education Authority): We are spending approximately £370 million on classroom assistants to provide that level of support. For local impact teams (LITs), the figure is about £23 million. The two represent different stages in the process.
Dr Adell: Those are just two services. We are spending perhaps about £650 million in total on special educational needs services and on special schools.
Dr Adell: I will have to come back to you on that one, sorry.
Dr Adell: I will have to come back to you on that, sorry.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): OK. I could be wrong, but there is a sense that the Department's direction of travel with the process seems to be that a measure of success might be that we statement fewer children and get support in earlier. Have I understood that correctly?
Mr Pengelly: A direction of travel for the EA, and, indeed, for every public service that you can point to, is to have early intervention. If we have that, we can stop problems from crystallising, but I need to be clear that we will not make problems disappear through early intervention alone. Some children have profound needs that will always require statementing and intensive intervention.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It is welcome to have that confirmed. One thing that I am hearing loudly and clear from a lot from special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) — teachers are now providing the same feedback — is that there seems to be a lot of nervousness around the graduated response framework, the new LITs and the new referral portal. There is a sense that what was meant to be an opening up of the system is starting to feel like barriers being put up. There are messages such as a child will remain in stage 1 until the school has three terms' worth of evidence.
Teachers say to me that they know from day 1 with some children that they will need a suite of measures to support them through the education system. They are then frustrated when they are told, "We need three terms of evidence before deciding that". In addition, the support that teachers get seems to come in the form of advice. There is no sense of any new resource being put into recruiting new people to provide that support.
Are we at risk of a scenario in which we are putting barriers in front of the support that children need and that that will only drive up parental referrals and increase parental demand for statements? I am really looking for assurances. Teachers, parents and SENCOs are saying loudly and clear, "We want streamlined access to the support that children need, and we want to be trusted so that when we say, 'This child needs to move on to stage 3 of this process', we will be listened to, and that is what will happen". It would therefore be good to hear from you about those concerns.
Dr Adell: There is no time barrier to determining when children can be referred on to a different stage. I can give you that assurance straight away. There has to be —.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I did not want to cut across you right away, but the message that everybody around the table has heard from SENCOs is that they are being told, "Three terms' worth of evidence is your starting point".
Dr Adell: I have been told the same thing. That is not in line with the LIT model and the graduated response framework, however. If children have a need to go in at a higher stage, after, of course, appropriate assessment and proper checks, they can do so. There is no artificial time barrier. It is also true to say that the LITs are not a new resource. They are the same resource as existed before.
Dr Adell: The resource has been restructured to provide better support for children. It wraps around the children, and, ultimately, it will be more effective and efficient. There is not a significant new ability to deal with more children than before, however. The LITs are a great resource, but capacity has not been increased in line with the increase in demand from the pupil population. Of course there are pressures. There will be children who cannot be seen by LITs because the pressures on the LITs are too high.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): In that pressurised context, there is — you have referred to it — an ambitious plan from the Department for transformation. We still have not had costings for it, however. We have had high-level costings, but we do not know how much the actions themselves are all costing. I agree that transformation is necessary and that it is important work, but, when resource is so scarce, and we are all clear that early intervention is key, would we not be better trying to maximise the resource that is going into some of the complex elements of the plan by getting it out to the local impact teams and by putting new resource in so that, when SENCOs say, "This child needs support", the resource is there?
Mr Pengelly: I hate to default to an articulation of the financial position, Chair, but there is no question that many, if not most, of our services require further resource investment. I want to be very clear, however, that this is not just about money.
Mr Pengelly: We also need to re-engineer how we work. That is an obligation on us. What I have been wrestling with over the past number of weeks is how we can come up with a plan to close a £300 million deficit. I am £300 million short of what I need to run the service as it sits today, before I even contemplate any expansion of it or further investment in it. Even if we have the conversation about what further investment we should make, where we should put it and what it would look like, until I can achieve —.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We are being told that the transformation plan will cost the guts of £500 million. There is clearly a lot of stuff going on that will need a lot of resource. Would you, as the operational body responsible for meeting the needs of children with special educational needs, like to see some of the money that is going to be found from somewhere to deliver those actions going into your front-line services?
Mr Pengelly: Yes, but, going back a number of years, there was a period of prosperity for public services. I was close to the health service at the time. A lot of money was going into the health service, but, because there was a buoyancy about public expenditure, the money went in ahead of undertaking any reform, so that tended to paper over the cracks. I need more money, but I want to make the service an investible proposition. I want to put more money into a reformed and transformed service in which my colleagues in the Education Authority and SENCOs, who are doing astonishingly good work out in the community, work together more cohesively and constructively. That is the time to invest. We are still working through the detail. You said that there are high-level costings for transformation. We need to turn those costings into detail.
Mr Pengelly: Doing that still starts with our asking, "What is the suite of outcomes to which we aspire?". I want to know the destination before I start filling in the road map.
Mr Hanna: I will build on Tomas's point about the SENCOs' workload. SENCOs are really busy. Some of their workload is down to an increase in the trends in SEN populations, but the local impact teams are there partly to provide evidence that interventions have resulted in a positive outcome. You referenced the starting point of three terms' worth of evidence. There is a requirement to produce evidence to suggest that a child needs an intervention, but that evidence is also required to set a baseline for that child so that, when we come back here in, say, two years' time, we can hopefully show, against that baseline, that the local impact teams and interventions have made a difference.
We are trying to put a new system in place. It is different for SENCOs, and it is different for our services. There is a requirement at least to demonstrate that a child has a need. It is not just a case of saying, "Dale needs some intervention". I know that the teams will work their way through that. As Tomas said, it is not about our not providing intervention services, but we have limited resources. The first step of the graduated response framework is very much about how we build capacity in schools so that they do not feel the need to approach intervention services.
Some of this is therefore about us all finding our way in a new system, but we need to have the initial evidence in order to be able to demonstrate later that, where they took place, interventions made a difference to those children.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I am conscious of time. I met a SENCO recently who acknowledged that there are schools that undoubtedly need capacity building, but there are also schools, including the school that she represented, that already have the capacity. It is clear that some schools have been providing an excellent service for years for children with SEN, and there is therefore a lot of frustration when they seek support through the new portal and what they get back are some resources that they already routinely use. There needs to be a sense of the professional expertise that SENCOs bring. We need some assurances that, when they say to a local impact team, "We are doing x, y and z, and we now need something more enhanced. We do not need more resources or advice. Rather, we need intervention on the ground", that will happen.
Dr Adell: Absolutely. It is also worth remembering that the system has been operating only since the beginning of September. Things will therefore not be perfect. We are learning as we go along. Some schools are brilliant, while some have more to learn. There is a process involved to get it right from the beginning, but we need evidence as well. We rely on the expertise of schools and of SENCOs — we absolutely do — but it cannot just be a case of their saying, "We said so. It must therefore be so". Evidence must be gathered, and assessments must be done. When it is the case, the appropriate level of support will be provided. Do we get it right every time? Of course not. Do we aim to get it right every time? Absolutely. At the beginning of a new service that is doing things differently, there will always be things that are not perfect. We have to have time to work out the kinks and fix things. We are only a few weeks in.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We are due to hear from SENCOs. We have a number of sessions planned. Those will provide really important evidence to inform the process, as other issues may emerge from it.
I wanted to ask a range of other questions, but I am conscious of time. I put on record that, from my perspective, our inquiry into special educational needs is not about trying to apportion blame for historical failures. We are long past that point. The appetite for transformation is welcome, but I have a sense that there is definitely a tension between the services that are really needed now and the longer-term, more aspirational work of transformation. That is a complex task for you. I know that carts can be put before horses, but we are keen, through the inquiry, to get a real sense of what the operational realities are, where the transformational interventions will work and where money alone will make the difference, as it sometimes does. We need to understand all of that.
Mr Sheehan: Did you see the previous evidence session with SHINE?
I suggest that you watch that, because it was very informative for all of us: evidence from parents in a community and voluntary organisation, which is dealing with parents who have children with special educational needs within the community, about the dire lack of support that they are getting and the lack of communication. In fairness, they said that the Minister had been out not that long ago, but they said that they had had no other visits from EA or DE officials, and it has been going for 15 years. It is an organisation that is doing sterling work on the ground. I suggest that you go and listen to that.
You watched the session last week, Richard, so you will be aware of the sort of questions that are coming at you, and I am sure that you are well prepped for them. The two Audit Office reports and the PAC report said that neither the EA nor the Department could demonstrate value for money, despite hundreds of millions of pounds being spent on special educational needs. What specific inefficiencies or waste has the EA managed to identify and eliminate?
Mr Pengelly: I am not sure that there is anything specific that I could point to as an inefficiency or waste. Is there anything that you have in mind?
Mr Sheehan: Well, let me give you an example that a principal in west Belfast sent to me after last week's Committee meeting. There is a school with a number of specialist provision classes, and, because they are dealing with children with complex needs, they cannot go to the school canteen to eat; they have to eat in their classrooms. The EA canteen service is not prepared to wheel the meals for those children 50 or 70 yards to where their classrooms are. What happens is that a taxi comes every day to drive those meals 50 yards across the yard to the children's classrooms. Is that value for money? Dale, you were in charge of transport at one time. Give me a ballpark figure of what that will cost every week.
Mr Hanna: I was in charge at one time, and I am back in charge. I do not know that figure of the top of my head. Without investigating, it is difficult to know the individual circumstances.
Mr Hanna: I cannot hazard a guess.
Mr Sheehan: A taxi comes in every day to drive 50 yards to deliver meals. You have no idea?
Mr Hanna: It is probably in the ballpark of £10 or £20 per day.
Mr Sheehan: Ten pounds or £20 a day? I think that it would be a hell of a lot more than that, because taxi drivers need to be there at a specific time every day to do that. Therefore, they have to forgo other fares that they could have had. I would say that it is costing a hell of a lot more than that. I am also presuming that it is not an isolated incident because, if the canteen service staff have a particular policy for that in that school, presumably it happens in other schools. The question is, Richard: is that the best value for money? If we were to ask the public whether that was value for the taxpayer's money, most people would say that it is not. There must be some other way to get round this. That is why I am asking you to identify any specific inefficiencies or waste — we have already heard about transport — that have been identified and eliminated.
Mr Pengelly: If you forgive me, maybe I will do a little bit of what you, rightly and appropriately, do to me. Can I push back a little? This is a scenario that you have given me. I often find that there are two sides to every story, so can I ask that, maybe after the session, you give me the full details of it, and let me look at the details and the rationale on what exactly is happening, before I form a conclusion on whether what is happening is appropriate, entirely inappropriate, represents value for money or does not represent value for money. We need to get below the bonnet of that a wee bit before we jump to conclusions.
Mr Sheehan: I am happy to pass those details on to you. However, we have identified other examples where we do not think that we are getting value for money, and the whole issue of transport in general is one area. I will move on to another issue. The PAC report said that the EA could not identify how many children with special needs needed support. Are you able to do that now?
Mr Pengelly: Are you talking about the totality of the school population that has some form of special educational need?
Mr Pengelly: That is identified annually by the Department of Education —.
Mr Hanna: Through the census.
Mr Pengelly: I can give you a number if you want it now. It is not the latest figure, but, in October 2024, which is the last one, the total number was 62,171. I have an analysis of that that I can —.
Mr Sheehan: That is the number of children who need support in our school system.
Mr Pengelly: To be clear, that is at all stages of the code of practice. So 30,807 of those children will be at stage 1, which is where the support is provided at a local level by the school. At stages 2 and 3, there is the layering of EA support on top of the support that is provided at a local level. I can give you the analysis of that.
Mr Sheehan: Given that you know how many children in the system require support, how many allied health professionals are needed to provide that support?
Mr Pengelly: I do not know. Let me explain that. I am just giving you the short answer. Allied health professionals are the responsibility of the Department of Health. When a child has a need, the professionally competent person needs to assess that child's need and decide what the appropriate response will be. You will appreciate that, for child A, the response might be three or four hours, and, for child B, it could be seven, eight or nine hours. That assessment needs to be made by the health service. I can tell you the numbers of children, but I cannot tell you what the appropriate response from the appropriate professional should be.
Mr Sheehan: So there has been no analysis done of the support required in respect of the number of allied health professionals, what discipline the allied health professionals are in and so on. There is no analysis of that.
Mr Pengelly: That is not an analysis; that is an assessment by the health service.
Mr Sheehan: Surely you have that information. Surely —.
Mr Pengelly: You will appreciate that I cannot make an analysis of what health support a child in the education system needs.
Mr Sheehan: You cannot say what support a child needs, but someone can. Surely you have that information.
Mr Pengelly: The point that I am making, Pat, is that I absolutely agree that someone can make that assessment, but that someone works in the health service; they do not work in the education sector. In far too many cases, because of the pressures in the health service, we are waiting for that assessment to be taken. Unless and until the assessment is done, there cannot be a conclusion as to what they need. Ronnie Armour mentioned last week that he has had some preliminary dialogue with the Department of Health. We are speaking on an operational level to colleagues in the health service to try to find and develop an alternative way to provide the service. That conversation is ongoing at the moment.
Mrs Mason: It is probably no surprise, Richard, but I want to go back to the SENCO issue. There is definitely a problem here. There is some sort of miscommunication happening. Nick mentioned the three terms earlier. That is what is happening at the minute. SENCO principals have shown us that that is what is happening. To be honest with you, I am extremely cross about the comments that have just been made, and I wrote them down when we were talking about SENCOs:
"Some schools are brilliant. Some schools have more to learn."
I think that those schools would say that the EA has more to learn. I think that those schools would say, "Come and spend a week here. Go through the process, and then go and sit down with that child". I am really cross. I know that SENCOs out there will be watching this and will be extremely cross as well about what has just been said.
Mrs Mason: Sorry, Richard, I have lots of things that I want to ask. I will give you credit for coming out and meeting a group of SENCOs. You did not say a lot, but you definitely listened to what they said. Did you take any learnings away from that? Has anything changed since then?
Mr Pengelly: It is part of the continuing dialogue and engagement that we are having. Dale was there too with me. We take those points back and feed them in, and we work through them.
Mrs Mason: Nothing has changed since that meeting.
Mr Pengelly: Things are constantly changing. I need to go back to your previous point. When we say that some schools are very good and some schools have something to learn, we are not saying — we did not say, and we will never say — that the EA has nothing to learn. The EA has lots of things to learn. I am sorry: I do not work in a world where it is accepted that, in big organisations involving masses of people, everyone is doing the job perfectly. We all make mistakes, and we all have things to learn. If that is true of the EA, which I think we all accept that it is, it is not a big stretch to say that it may be true of other organisations.
Mrs Mason: Richard, you listened to those SENCOs. You heard about the pressure that they are under.
Mr Pengelly: Well, listen to the EA, Cathy.
Mrs Mason: They are dealing with the children, and they need support.
Mr Pengelly: They are, and they are doing a fantastic job. We are trying to work with them.
Mrs Mason: They are willing to go through the new system and work with you, but they need to be communicated with. What they do not need is to be told that something is happening when it is not. I am finding, as I am sure others are, that principals are starting to fill the posts of SENCOs. A lot of SENCOs are off on leave; a lot of that is down to the pressure that they are under. Are you offering any support? I have heard a number of times in the past couple of weeks of a school being left without a SENCO. Are you offering any support to those schools?
Mr Hanna: A SENCO is a member of school staff. It is delegated authority for the school to put that support in place. In the build-up to introducing local impact teams last year, the Department of Education allocated £30 million. Part of that allocation was for sub cover to release SENCOs to do the preparatory work for personal learning plans (PLPs), so that the evidence for them would be available if that were to be required. This year, the figure is sitting at around £11 million. So money is available to schools, but, Cathy, utilising that resource is a matter for the school. It is for the school, working with its SENCO team, to decide how best to allocate that. The EA does not determine how an individual school does that.
We agree with you that SENCOs are a critical part of the system, as are the school leaders, as are the teachers in the classroom, as are the classroom assistants, and as are — you guys have supported some of these critical services — the likes of the statutory assessment and review service or educational psychologists. That is the system. As you said, Chair, the local impact teams are about moving resource away from the more expensive stage 3 intervention services to the stage 2 and stage 1 intervention services. September was the first step in that journey, so it is probably a bit clunky at the minute and will take a little time to settle down, but we had the ambition to put that in place. We have the ambition to change how we deliver those services. The Committee has heard me say that the local impact teams structure will be the plug and play platform for other services to be developed and brought online. You have challenged us before about where Health is: we have reorganised ourselves to mirror the trusts so that, at the point when Health is able to plug into the system, it can.
It is about giving this a chance. It is only September. The local impact teams are only just in place. We have reorganised huge numbers of staff groups into new teams, and new relationships have had to be created in those teams, there are new managers in them and we may have to recruit new people to them. It is new for EA services as well. I hear what you say about SENCOs, but the EA is doing its absolute best to respond to the needs and to be part of and lead on the transformation journey.
You talked about SENCOs watching the meeting. If the staff in local impact teams are watching this —
Mr Hanna: — they may well be frustrated, but they will feel as though they are being criticised as well.
Mr Hanna: A lot of people have put a huge amount of effort and energy into transforming the system. We know that it is not perfect, but we are ambitious about making it better.
Mrs Mason: — was whether there was any support for schools that do not have SENCOs.
Mrs Mason: There is no support for schools that do not have SENCOs at the minute.
Mr Hanna: I said that £11 million is being made available —
Mr Hanna: — and that the delegated resource is with the schools.
Mrs Guy: Thanks, folks, for the evidence so far. Where do I start? I want to get a sense of how you prioritise within the EA. We know that the plan has lots and lots of actions; we know about the capital announcements; and we know about the transformation. I want a sense of how you prioritise your resource. We know that it is limited and that there is a gap to fill, so it is about where it will make the biggest impact. LITs are one such area. What other key strategic things is the EA doing to address the crisis in SEN?
Mr Pengelly: You talked about capital. There is a big aspiration for capital at the moment. The Minister announced in the past couple of weeks £1·7 billion for SEN. There is an aspiration for that to turn into a priority work stream. At the point when that is allocated, it is a big job of work to turn that into real, meaningful service provision, and that is not going to be quick. So there is that work. The big priority at the moment is the meaningful engagement across the schools sector to identify the opportunities, and then to convert those opportunities into —
Mr Pengelly: — into places. As I said, you can draw a line from the placement issue to probably every other issue that we talk about. That is not to the exclusion of everything else that we are doing. With regard to the totality of the Education Authority, roughly 20% of the pupil population have special educational needs. There are 80% that do not, so that —.
Mrs Guy: We have capital, placements and the LITs. I acknowledge the work that has been done to bring those LITs together. I appreciate that it is September, and it is right to acknowledge that there is a huge piece of work going on there and that it is ongoing. Within that, though, you have not been given extra resource for the LITs. Evidence that I have been listening to continually about SEN is "Services, services, services": delivering services to children on the ground is where the impact will be. Within the LITs, the evidence that we heard in the previous session was, "Early intervention, early intervention, early intervention", so I am going to ask you about the early years piece within that. Early years settings can engage with the LITs, which is really good. What are the gaps in resource right now in LITs for early years? Is that being prioritised over other areas because of the need for earlier intervention to have more value for money, if you like?
Dr Adell: I do not have any figures. Some LITs are particularly involved in early intervention. We are looking to recruit staff within existing resources across all the LITs, which include those in early intervention. We have said before that we have a demand/capacity gap in early intervention in the LITs. We are spending £23 million per year on LITs. We could be spending a lot more but, as Richard said, with the budget position that we have, that is not possible.
Mrs Guy: Have you bid for additional resources to go into the LITs, or are you re-prioritising to make sure that those gaps within the LITs can be plugged?
Mr Pengelly: We bid for resources at every opportunity we get. At the moment, however, the clear signal that we are being given is that the monitoring rounds are not going to yield anything. At the moment, if any money does become available, I have a £300 million gap in existing service provision. So we are not investing huge amounts of energy in trying to design what a perfect model looks like and trying to secure the resources, because we are so far short of funding the existing model. That is where the energy is. That is a short-term issue, and we will move past that.
Mrs Guy: Are you giving early years any additional priority, or are you just taking what you can get when you can get it and plugging gaps ad hoc?
Mr Pengelly: At the moment, sadly, we are plugging gaps.
Mrs Guy: Who can access the services of the LITs from an early years perspective? Is that just statutory settings, or are the non-statutory also able to refer their children to those services?
Mr Hanna: The non-statutory are clearly non-statutory, but we have an ambition to do that, so yes. Going back to the previous point, we would know what resource would need to look like in a perfect model to make the services better. We know that there is a potential gap in the early years area. As the LITs settle in, we will be able to describe and understand that in a better way to determine exactly what that resource might look like for intervention across the non-statutory sector as well.
Mrs Guy: Right now, anybody in non-statutory is left out. They are excluded from that support, so the support is going elsewhere. Kids outside a statutory setting who have needs will now sit there without access to that help and support.
Mr Hanna: Clearly, part of the SEN reform plan is to be able to move to a space to get the resource from where it is. We talked about the stage 3 interventions to be able to divert that resource into the earlier phases.
Mrs Guy: I would like to understand this. Did you advise on the bid that was made for the transformation projects that the Department and the Executive are working on? Was the EA a partner on that bid?
Mr Hanna: We co-chaired the end-to-end reviews. We were part of that process. Obviously, it was a departmental bid up to the transformation bit, but we fed into that by providing what we felt were the priority areas.
Mrs Guy: That £30 million does not include any of this work. It does not include the LITs, which seems to be where we should be focused. It is not being supported through that. Do you think that that was a mistake? Do you think that the LITs should be supported by that money when the funding landscape is so constrained and that seems to be where the impact will be made? Was it a mistake not to have money coming from that fund?
Mr Hanna: I think that the transformation fund is about funding the ability for us, across EA and DE, to put in place programmes of work. It is not necessarily about that money going in, because that is a ring-fenced piece of money around transformation. We need to look at the funding that we currently have within our BAU across all the services and find a way to move that and shift that funding from stage 3 interventions into the other interventions. We were not looking at the transformation money to actually fund local impact teams; we want to utilise that funding to help us to develop the services moving forward to be able to transform. I hope that that has answered that.
Mrs Guy: Well, it is an answer. I will come back to you.
Mr Middleton: Thanks to you all for your input. I want to touch on a couple of the recommendations specifically, but I will start at a high level. In your briefing paper, you set the context by saying:
"While there is, of course, always scope to improve operational performance, that is not the critical issue here. Rather the main issue is the need for the whole education sector to work together in meeting the needs of children".
This is my first day on the Committee, and, when I got the pack, I saw eight different reviews of SEN processes and over 200 different recommendations. After all that time, how is it that we are still in a position where, first, the whole sector is not working together and, secondly, that piece about working with Health and the frustrations there? We heard from the delegation that was in before you that a lot of the issues were Health-related. How do we solve that problem?
Mr Pengelly: That is an easy one to start with.
Mr Middleton: Absolutely, and you have only a couple of minutes to answer it.
Mr Pengelly: Let us be absolutely honest. As a region, we have not been spectacularly successful at cross-sector collaboration, where that is between Health and Education or Communities and Education. My own view is that when you have organisations that are under intense financial pressure — all the Executive's funding is allocated to individual organisations. When organisations come together, they tend to enter the room with their money tightly wrapped around their funding. In a perfect world, you would identify the problem and allocate some money to the problem and say to everyone to come into the room and work out collectively how to spend the money. I think that we are a ways from that, but that is the right place to go on this.
On the collaborative bit within the system, I hope that you are not stealing my thunder, because I am still claiming to be the new boy here, having been in post for just over a year. I am still struggling to get my head around, in many cases, the lack of authority that the Education Authority has over the system. We are the employing authority — the managing authority — for all controlled schools, yet we do not have much of a reach in. To take an extreme example, if we really need a school to do something and it does not want to do it, I cannot force it to do it. Sometimes, that is the right thing, and I am not saying that we always get it right. One of the things that we have not done is a systemic overview of where the power balance should sit and how we corral the system.
Mr Middleton: It is not an easy one to solve. Obviously, it has been going on for many, many years, and it is frustrating, because it applies to every Department. You are right.
One of the recommendations in the SEN reform plan is the appointment of a special needs champion. We see it with mental health — a champion to pull all this work together and maybe provide a bit of leadership without a specific agenda or a specific departmental agenda. Is that something that you see value in? I say that without building hopes, because the reality is that appointing a champion is not going to solve the issue, but it might help.
Mr Pengelly: Let me start with a caveat. I always have a slight reservation about the role of champions, be they equality and diversity champions or special educational needs champions, because sometimes when you appoint a champion, everyone else says, "It is not my problem any more. There is a champion to deal with that." If we are going to properly meet children's special educational needs, it has to be all our problem and we all need to concern ourselves with it. We do not have a designated champion as such, but recently — we have talked the Committee briefly about this before — we restructured EA and established a new second-tier post in Tomas, who is basically our SEN transformation officer, so a seat at the top table of the Education Authority is focused on transforming our SEN provision to be world-class. Part of that is that we need to better engage. We have touched on that already: Cathy talked about lack of communication, and that is an absolutely fair criticism of us. We need to engage more with all the relevant stakeholders, but I am more in the space of, "Let us have everybody in the room talking about it", rather than just have a champion banging on about it.
Mr Middleton: That is a fair point, I suppose. When you look at the mental health champion, the idea is of a critical friend who is able to be critical where necessary or pull people together where appropriate as well.
I will move on. In the interests of time, I will ask just one more question. Obviously, the finance issue is a major one. SEN expenditure has increased 145% since 2017-18. We are told that, if the trajectory continues over the next five years, it could account for 34% of the total Department of Education budget. That is a crisis that needs to be looked at urgently:
"To this end, EA is committed to reviewing the effectiveness of expenditure"
across the board. That does not just apply to EA: we know that lots of Departments spend money on things that are not necessary. Where are you in that review process?
Mr Pengelly: Let us go back to the Audit Office and PAC reports.
Mr Pengelly: You will recall that, in response to that, the Department commissioned the independent review of special educational needs, which reported in 2022-23. One of the things that it was specifically asked to look at was "efficiency and effectiveness", which is the longhand version of value for money. Interestingly, it did not reach a specific conclusion. I would not offer that as a criticism of the work. I am just saying that it is really difficult to work out whether this is effective.
An obvious example was given recently. If you put a child in a taxi that could cost the thick end of £1,000 per week to get to and from school, by any definition, that is not a sensible use of money. However, if the only place that meets that child's needs is a £1,000-per-week taxi journey away, you look at it slightly differently. That work was the foundation on which the SEN transformation agenda was built. Rather than invest huge amounts of energy into trying to demonstrate in granular detail the value for money of what happened before, we all accept that we need to get better. What went before was not as good as it needs to be, so we are on the transformation journey. Part of that transformation journey is having much sharper metrics. Let us define the outcomes and a suite of metrics that gives us a sense of how we are performing against that outcome. That is the trajectory that we are on.
Mr Burrows: Thanks for all the hard work, because I know that, coming towards the start of the new academic year, massive work is done by your staff. All organisations should be open to learning, and that includes schools, the EA and this Committee. I will say, and put on the record, that in asking scrutinising questions, I do not think that the characterisation of the EA as the bad guy and everybody else as the good guy is always a helpful one.
Some 4,648 rely on taxi services. What is the overall cost to that? Do we know what the figure is, just for our report?
Mr Pengelly: It is circa £30 million.
Mr Burrows: Do you accept, as the other witnesses have accepted — this is not to blame anyone: it is the system that we are in — that, if your child's special educational needs are at a disadvantage in outcomes, the fact that you are sitting in a taxi for a long period of time and therefore have less time for homework, rest and family life — that disadvantage gets compounded?
Mr Pengelly: Spending two hours in a taxi as opposed to two hours out in the fresh air, of course, is a disadvantage.
Mr Burrows: That is not assigning blame; it is just for our report. I could ask a whole lot of questions, but I will make this my final one. One of the key issues seems to be supply and demand. If we take away the fact that children are at the centre of this, as human beings, but with regard to logistics, operations and money, there is a supply and demand issue. The demand for places exceeds the supply. The current trajectory of SEN numbers is exponential. So that we are not just chasing our tails all the time, there are two things that I am very interested in, and I still cannot get an answer to the first one. Is anyone looking at whether there is a reason for the rise in numbers; is it purely diagnosis? I know we are not going down that line, but is it purely down to the fact that we are now diagnosing people, or are there actually more people with SEN compared with 20 or 30 years ago? I need to understand that, and, secondly, if the current trajectory continues — one of the witnesses told us that 40% of children might have SEN in five years — what does that look like for the EA with regard to resource and capacity? What would your organisation need to look like?
Mr Hanna: There was an exponential rise, and that has started to plateau. However, because we have a system that goes across 14 year groups, the number of children leaving the system with SEN came into the system 14 years ago, when the number of children with SEN was much lower, so the rise that we are currently seeing is because the numbers coming in are greater than the numbers leaving. That is accounting for the pressure. While we are getting that pressure now in primary schools, in three or four years, it is going to come into post-primary schools. I do not believe that there is a continuing exponential rise whereby we will get to the point that 90% of the population has SEN. That has significantly tailed off. It came after COVID, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence around that.
With regard to what we are doing now, yes, the most pressing issue is how we place those children because there is a capacity issue in the system. A classroom that traditionally might have had 24 children can now only have eight, so you need three times the space. Then you have the pressures on the services, such as the local impact teams, and the pressures in the schools for the SENCOs. Again, it goes back to the SEN reform plan, and what we need to do is get the resources to meet the needs the moment those children come into the school and address those needs, rather than those children perhaps not getting the interventions until much later on, and then they require much more costly interventions. The evidence shows that the interventions being provided in the school environment at that earlier stage are much more cost-effective and have a much better outcome.
In answer to your question about what we are doing about it, we are focusing on the SEN reform plan, which is all about making sure that we can meet the needs of the new profile of children coming through, and we know what that profile will look like for the next seven, eight or nine years. Now, something could happen in society that increases that profile again, but the number of children coming through, year-on-year, over the past couple of years has relatively plateaued.
Mr Burrows: That is useful. It is the first time that I have heard that there is a plateau.
Mr Hanna: I say it with a caveat.
Mr Burrows: Yes, I understand. Finally, if I could ask one more question.
Mr Burrows: We heard from SHINE today, and the witnesses talked about the benefit that therapy animals can bring to children with SEN, but they do not seem to have access to them. I have been looking at the fact that we seem to be awash with them in prisons. Do we know how many therapy animals the EA has access to, or owns, across the school estate? Is the answer zero? Prisons own them, so I am just asking if the Education Authority owns any.
Mr Pengelly: I have been out to plenty of schools that have therapy dogs, but that is down to the school, and they are amazing animals.
Mr Hanna: The EA does not own any dogs. It would be a local arrangement with a school.
Mr Pengelly: I would be happy to give them one from home.
Mr Burrows: Your dog is up for Dog of the Year, is it not?
Mr Pengelly: No, Emma's dog is; it is not my dog. Let me make that very clear. [Laughter.]
Mr Baker: Do you believe that the education rights of children with additional needs are being breached by the Department and the EA?
Mr Pengelly: I believe that we are not giving them in all cases as good a service as we could or should, for all the reasons that we have talked about. If others want to conclude that that is a breach of their rights —. It is not a proactive, deliberate and thought-out breach of their rights. We aspire to give every child the same level of opportunities but in a system that is far from perfect it —
Mr Pengelly: I cannot argue against that as an assertion by you.
Mr Baker: Looking at tribunal appeals — I have not seen any new data, and I do not know if you are going to be publishing it — in the vast majority of cases the EA concedes the appeals.
Mr Pengelly: Just to be very clear, in the last year's data that I looked at, in 460 cases we conceded the appeal in 330 cases. The vast majority of concessions by far were because, in the appeal process, information was introduced that could have been introduced before the appeal process started. Had it been, we would have reached a different conclusion. If we are in an appeals process and become aware of something that would have prompted us to take a different decision, it is incumbent on us, at that point, to concede it and not prolong the agony of the families through that appeals process.
Mr Baker: How did you get to that stage in the first place? Who is the information not coming from?
Mr Hanna: Initially, most appeals are because of a parental referral. Parents are asked to provide information as evidence that their child has a particular special educational need. The teams that assess that have to do so within a certain time. If that information is not available, and the parent was not able to provide it within that time frame, at that point, it does not go forward for formal assessment. As Richard said, the only option then open to the parent is to take a formal appeal through the special educational needs and disability (SEND) tribunal. They go to the tribunal, we make the case, "You didn't provide evidence A, B, C, X, Y, Z," and through that process the parent, through some medical advice or whatever, then provides that information. As Richard said, once that information is provided, the context changes. We are then happy to look at that and take it away again.
Mr Baker: Would that be coming from Health's perspective? Obviously, it is not the parent who is not providing the information. Is that a breakdown in communication from Health?
Mr Hanna: Referral through a parent is one of the processes. Traditionally, however, we would expect a referral to come from the school because the school knows the needs of the child.
Mr Baker: They have to do self-referrals because you know that the school can do only so many.
Mr Hanna: No. Schools are able to make a referral. There are lots of reasons. Sometimes, a school and parents do not agree on whether a child needs to be referred or not. When a parent comes in with a referral, we have an obligation to assess that on its merits. Yes, in some cases, the information provided is insufficient at a point in time. At a later date, as part of the tribunal process, when that information becomes available, we take it away and make an assessment on whether the child needs —
Mr Baker: Not to labour the point too much, but when so many cases are going to the tribunal, and so many appeals are being conceded, does that not tell you that there is a serious problem and that something needs to change if we are not basing them on the original referral? It is not the case that schools can just refer all the kids that they want to. That is just not happening on the ground, Dale, at all. That is not the case.
Mr Hanna: That is also because the system is trying to work well. Where the intervention service and schools are working together, there are relationships whereby they can look at individual children and say, "We don't think this child needs to be referred at this stage. We would prefer to work with this child with the intervention officers that we have.". However, the parents can absolutely choose to go ahead and make the parental referral.
Dr Adell: We have six weeks to make an assessment from the beginning of the referral. If we do not have the information in six weeks, we have to refuse. That is the way that the legislation is written.
Mr Baker: Ultimately, you have to concede anyway. That is my point. The rights of the child are being breached. That is why I started with that.
Dr Adell: The legislation gives us no choice but to refuse until, on appeal, we get more information and can then make a different decision. The project work that we are doing to improve our services is to help parents to make a better-informed referral and to communicate better from the very beginning, thereby helping parents to provide all the information within the six weeks. That would make it easier to make a decision not to refuse and therefore not have the appeal in the first place. Helping parents to make better decisions is part of our improvement progress report.
Mr Sheehan: Can I come in on that point? Are there any situations where all the evidence has been provided, and the process still continues, and, only at the last stage, the EA concedes? That is what we are being told by some of the stakeholder organisations.
Mr Pengelly: Undoubtedly, there are situations where the issue is not lack of information. We have formed a view, and then the process starts. One example is, at times, when lawyers become involved towards the end of it, and they make an assessment. On one hand, we can understand the legitimacy of the decision and the reference, but our experience is that, with that particular type of case in front of a tribunal, you will inevitably lose it, and the advice at that stage is to concede. That is an example of the sort of case that you are talking about.
Mr Sheehan: No. The figures state that 97% of cases are being conceded. There is definitely a problem there.
Mr Pengelly: The vast majority of those cases are where the information —. If it is in legislation that we have to make a decision in six weeks, when we reach six weeks, we can only make a decision with the information that is in front of us. That is an unfortunate reality.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): If you have a question, we need the quickest answer that you can provide. I appreciate that the Deputy Chair took some of your time.
Mr Baker: I was going to go into the concern about the regulations, but I will go back to placements because you started with it. What you are saying about next year is all wishful thinking, to be honest, Richard. The reality is that, in August 2024, you went to a school that I work with, and you promised to set up the provisions. Children, who should have been starting first year, ended up going to a site miles away that is just an education centre. Fair play to the centre for taking them on, but those kids are not getting the full curriculum. They are not getting home economics, science and a whole list of stuff. That is not good enough. That is denying their rights.
It is now October 2025, and those children are still in the education centre —
Mr Baker: The question is —. I have no faith in you going forward with placements next year because you tell me one thing, but the reality is that you are not even delivering on what was said last year.
Mr Pengelly: OK. You have no faith in us to deliver. Have you faith in schools to work with us properly?
Mr Baker: That is my point. The school was working with you.
Mr Pengelly: That was August 2025.
Mr Baker: It was August 2024, and you still have not delivered the mobile units.
Mr Pengelly: Well, saying that— [Interruption.]
Mr Pengelly: I hate to repeat it, but there are two sides to every story —
Mr Baker: The kids are in an education centre. You would not do that to mainstream children. If hundreds of mainstream children had not been placed before we broke off for recess, you would not have taken your holidays —
Mr Pengelly: Everybody took holidays in the summer.
Mr Pengelly: We do not decide to treat mainstream children differently from children with special educational needs.
Mr Pengelly: That is absolutely untrue. [Interruption.]
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I will draw a line there. I appreciate that there were some points there, potentially, that you were looking to get to around the regulations. We will have an evidence session on the whole statementing stage 3 process, the regulations, the revised code of practice and where all that sits, but some of those questions may be for the Department.
Mr Brooks: Thanks for your presentation. Other colleagues have recognised the work that is being done around local impact teams, and I also recognise the work that is being done around the estate to bring in what we can. We are looking at the short term as well as the long term. It is not just about looking at what we can do far in the future but what we can do to support that next year. I recognise that even in my constituency, so it is right to say that.
I am not looking at you to throw colleagues or former colleagues under the bus, but there was a view in the Committee previously — and I am not going to speak for people now — which has been coming out a bit today about whether Health fully plugs in to the LITs or other processes.
We would like to see more joined-up working between Health and Education. I accept that it probably is a bit harder for Health because of budgets, and you have had experience in that Department, Richard. Are we seeing progress on that front? Are you satisfied with the way in which Health colleagues are plugging into the systems that we are trying to build and making them properly integrated, rather than having two teams being built separately and then asked to talk to each other?
Mr Pengelly: All things being equal, Health colleagues would see it as an issue that is every bit as important as we see it. It is not that they are dismissive of the issue, and they are certainly not dismissive of the children and their needs, but they are under intense resource pressures. The reality in the health service — I know this from experience — is that there is more urgency attached to the critical care end of the spectrum than the longer-term, chronic problems. That is unfortunate. I wish it were otherwise.
Mr Brooks: Those often lead to greater costs down the line.
Mr Pengelly: They do.
We are having good dialogue. Hopefully, some of the dialogue on that will start to crystallise over the next number of weeks, so I do not want to unfairly pre-empt that. We certainly have a sense of an alternative way of structuring the services that may take some of the pressure off Health and allow us to provide a better-quality service. Over the next couple of weeks, if we nail that, we can come back and talk in a lot more detail about it to the Committee.
Mr Brooks: I appreciate that. You talked about how the money is split. My colleague Peter Martin, who previously sat on the Committee, always liked to point out — I do not expect this to have been revolutionised overnight — the amount of time that our educational psychologists spend on statementing rather than on using their expertise to directly benefit children and their needs. Are we seeing any green shoots in trying to relieve that pressure on statementing? We know that the Minister has laid out his ambitions around that. Are we seeing green shoots at the moment, or is it at too early a stage to tell?
Dr Adell: Educational psychologists are part of the statementing process. That is part of the statutory process, and it is part of what we have to do. What we have done through the LITs is remove the artificial gatekeeping role that educational psychologists have so that they have time to do educational psychology, rather than assessing children who have already been assessed in school and who can go straight into a service. The unfortunate factor is that we do not have enough educational psychologists for what we want to deliver. A significant part of their time is taken up by the statementing process. We are trying to streamline that. However, that is the reality that we face.
Mr Pengelly: There are two other points on that. Nothing in what we are doing is designed to ease the burden on staff; it is about providing a better-quality service. Early intervention will remove some cases, and a child will receive the appropriate level of support without recourse to an educational psychologist. The digitisation process will, hopefully, remove some of the admin and bureaucracy-type work and help us focus more on the value-adding components of that. Everything in that will help.
Mr Brooks: Absolutely. Thank you.
One of the things that we talked about previously was whether there is an understanding both in Health and Education of the non-statutory sector and the supports that are offered by voluntary groups. Has there been an attempt to map out what is there and how it supplements the statutory support? There will, no doubt, be some areas where support overlaps and other areas where it is sparse. There is no doubt that groups such as SHINE do excellent work, and we can all cite examples in our own constituency. Has a mapping exercise been done to understand what exists, what those groups are doing and how that support could be steered strategically in coordination with the EA?
Mr Hanna: The simple answer is not to the extent that we could do it. In the local impact teams, there is a management unit, and there will be a research and development piece on connecting better into other statutory agencies such as Middletown, for example, and the community and voluntary sector. The ambition is there to tap into community and voluntary organisations and other agencies, because they absolutely provide essential services to children and young people. We want to be able to understand that a bit better. We are on the trajectory to do that, but we are not there yet.
Mr Brooks: What came across from SHINE and the parents was that one-to-one support is still the gold standard. I have anxiety about the idea of moving too far away from that. We understand that there are children with complex needs who will absolutely need that in the future. Is there pro-active work to build confidence that those other early interventions that we want to make available to all children who need them, with or without a statement, will do the job and that a statement will not be key — the gold standard — in the way that it has been until now?
Mr Pengelly: The accepted wisdom in the community is that one-to-one support is the gold standard. I touched earlier on the independent review of special educational needs, which reported in 2023. One of its specific recommendations was that one-to-one support should be nearly a last resort. The first job that we need to do is to renew dialogue with parents. If you are a parent, the thing that keeps you awake every night is the welfare of your child. If you believe that one-to-one support is the gold standard, you will fight for that. I fully respect that. We must help them to understand that an alternative model of provision may be better. Only when parents are confident that that is in the best interests of their child will we be able to start to move towards that. That is a job of work and a responsibility for us.
Mr Burrows: I apologise; I have a meeting upstairs that I need to go to.
Ms Hunter: I will try to be brief. I thank the panel for being here today. I am going to take a bit of a different angle and focus on emotionally based school avoidance. The Education Authority has said that 1% to 2% of all children in the North of Ireland are not attending school. I have spoken with hundreds of parents of children who are not attending school and cannot see a pathway to getting back into school. One of the main reasons that kept cropping up was special educational needs. They did not feel that they were getting adequate support or the right support, or, as was discussed earlier, there were delays in getting access to an assessment. Do you feel confident that the EA is doing everything that it can to serve those children and get them back into our classrooms to access the education that they so desperately need?
Mr Pengelly: That is an area of work that is a growing concern or all of us. There has been some topicality about it recently. I have commissioned work in EA to better understand the position from our perspective. I will have a first discussion with a wider group of people tomorrow afternoon to try to get into the detail of that. Before doing that, it is difficult for me to come to any definitive conclusions, but I do not feel that it is high risk to say, "This is an area where the service is not as good as it could be in terms of understanding the problem". It is only when you fully understand the scope and scale of the problem that you can properly design a response to it. I am not sure that we have done that engineering bit yet. That is the piece of work that I have commissioned. The Department is also doing some work on that.
Ms Hunter: Will that include engagement directly with young people to hear their reasoning around why they are not attending?
Mr Pengelly: I have not planned that at this moment. It is a piece of work that I have just commissioned, and part of that will be to unpack the issue. I absolutely believe that, if you really want to understand a problem properly, you need to listen to the people who are experiencing that problem. That is something that we need to do.
Mr Hanna: We have some associated evidence, Cara. The youth service recently undertook huge engagement to help to develop the regional plan. One of the findings that came out of that was about emotionally based avoidance. Evidence from elsewhere as a result of engagement directly with children and young people absolutely points in that direction.
Ms Hunter: There are parents who have had to leave their job because their child has not been in school for up to six months. It can impact on the whole family circle. I will follow that up with you during the next couple of months, after you have received feedback on the work that you have commissioned. I am mindful that the NI Children's Commissioner is doing similar work. It is good to see the topic getting the attention that it rightly deserves. I am mindful that pupil well-being, including anxiety, is one of the key reasons why kids were not attending, so there really is something to that.
Richard, you talked about the absence of a statement. We heard from SHINE in the previous session about the level of anxiety that parents experience when their child does not have a statement, cannot get access to the right support and cannot get into different clubs or schemes. You said that it was important to "renew dialogue with parents" about different approaches. How will you do that? Will you have direct, face-to-face engagement with them? Parents of children with special educational needs or suspected special educational needs feel that there is not enough engagement, that they are not visible and that they do not have a voice. Is there anything that the EA can do to rectify that?
Mr Pengelly: There is a twin-track approach to that, Cara. We need to up our game in the direct communication with parents who are in the middle of the process, talking about their own children's needs. I touched earlier on the massive pressure on individuals and our communication with parents to keep them sighted on where we are in the process, what the next steps are, and when they will next hear from us. With the digitisation of the statementing process, there will be a portal that parents can log into. They will be able to see directly exactly where the process is, what is happening and what is planned next.
Separate from that, the bit that I touched on recently, we need a higher-level dialogue at community level about what the appropriate and most effective response actually is, whether it is classroom assistants or some sort of alternative intervention. We talk about the use of allied health professionals (AHPs) for meeting different needs. We need to give a lot of thought to that dialogue because I do not think that there is any merit in parents hearing that particular piece of information from the likes of me. They need to hear it from educational psychologists, teaching professionals and people who actually work with children on a day-to-day basis and properly understand the needs and appropriate response and how that leads to better outcomes. We need to focus on those two levels of communication.
Ms Hunter: That is it from me. I will follow that up directly. I am just mindful. Given that school avoidance is so topical and there have been a number of news articles and children speaking publicly, I am interested to know what different approaches the EA would take when it has that information. I will follow that up directly after you have had further conversations on that matter. Thank you.
The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you for your time this afternoon. It was a long evidence session in a very warm room. I do appreciate it. We appreciate your engagement on the inquiry. We will hear a lot more on the EA's whole range of operational strands on SEN. We look forward to that. Thank you all for your time.