Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I welcome Claire McGowan, a special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) at Bloomfield Primary School; and Anita Stewart, a SENCO at Kilcooley Primary School. I apologise for the delay in getting you in front of the Committee and thank you for your patience in waiting for the evidence session to start.

Your briefing paper was really comprehensive and helpful, so I will make no commentary. I am happy to hand over to you for any initial remarks or presentation that you want to make. You have provided a copy of the outline of that. I ask that you take up to 10 minutes, and then we will move into questions and answers. I know that there will be significant interest in this item, as every member hears from SENCOs in their constituency. However, I ask members to be focused in their questions, so that we can get round everybody. It would be helpful if everybody could be on the same page: less preamble and more getting to the issues.

I hand over to you. Claire, are you opening, or is it Anita?

Ms Claire McGowan (Bloomfield Primary School): I will let Anita introduce herself.

Ms Anita Stewart (Kilcooley Primary School): I am in Kilcooley Primary School, which is situated in the heart of a large housing estate in Bangor. The main school consists of classes from nursery right up to P7. We have nine specialist setting classes, which cover specialist provision (special) (SPS), specialist provision (learning) (SPL) and specialist provision (social communication/autism) (SPSC).

We have 238 pupils on our roll, 145 of whom have additional needs, which means that 61% of the children in the school have additional needs. The main school opened in 1969, and the specialist provision opened in September 2019 with me, one classroom assistant and a handful of children. Today, we have nine settings with 84 pupils, nine full-time teachers and 25 classroom assistants to manage. We are a nurturing school that provides every child with opportunities to grow, learn and thrive. I have been teaching since 1993, been in Kilcooley since 2012 and been the SENCO there for about 11 years. I am privileged, because I am released for my role as a full-time SENCO.

Ms McGowan: Thank you so much for having us here and for the invitation to speak to the Committee. We really appreciate it. I have been a SENCO for 14 years, just over three of which have been in my current school, Bloomfield Primary in Bangor. We have 109 children on the SEN register, which is just over 25% of our school. Forty of those are at stage 3 with statements, and five more are going through statutory. We also have two specialist provision (learning) for moderate learning difficulties. As well as that, I am a mum of an autistic child who has a statement, so I have been through this as a parent and have a vested interest in it.

I will touch a little bit on the role of a SENCO. On the first slide, you will see a definition of a SENCO, which is very broad. Our role involves implementing the SEN policy, liaising with parents, supporting teachers, maintaining the SEN register and liaising with external agencies. All of us who do the job are noticing that, over the years, the role is becoming increasingly big and difficult to manage.

On the next slide, you can see the responsibilities of a SENCO, which I have pulled out from data and from talking to people. In reality, our role is ever-expanding and becoming more complex with, it feels, more being added to it almost by the week, never mind by the month or year. We are the go-to person for everybody. We are there for parents; children; staff; the Education Authority (EA); people from the statutory assessment and review service (SARS); external agencies; the Department of Health; and the local impact teams (LITs). We are everyone's go-to person. Increasingly, our role is one of paperwork management, rather than of working with children directly.

We feel in the dark about what lies ahead and how to navigate the systemic changes that we face. We are the only staff who are called to tribunals, such as a special educational needs and disability tribunal (SENDIST), to give evidence on a decision to not grant someone a statutory assessment. We do not make those decisions, yet we have to defend them. We feel a huge responsibility in that we have to answer for decisions that we have not made, while trying to maintain good relationships with everyone with whom we are involved.

I sent a survey to SENCOs, and I got just over 200 responses in about five days. Their amount of experience as SENCOs ranged from one month to the likes of someone who said, "I've been a SENCO since it was invented". I do not know what that is in years, but it is a lot. [Laughter.]

From the responses of that wide range of SENCOs, I pulled out their four greatest challenges: the increasing pressure on schools to meet the needs of children with SEN with dwindling budgets, fewer resources and little support from the EA; the increase in paperwork, which we all know about and feel; time management and juggling the role alongside teaching responsibilities; and the fact that we are seeing children in mainstream settings with increasingly complex needs. A lot of other challenges were identified: being everyone's go-to person is a lot of pressure; we have to fill in long forms for allied health professionals; our views on new initiatives are not heard, and our opinions do not count, yet we still have to run with them; we have too many systems and portals; there are too many forms to fill in, and nothing is streamlined; and workload is having a huge impact on well-being.

I asked a few different questions in the survey, including:

Seventy-eight per cent reported feeling "Not very well supported" or "Extremely not well supported" by the EA. That is an awful statistic to hear, but that is the feeling out there. I wanted to present as much data as I could, so that I am not a lone dissenting voice. I wanted to get a wee bit of information from whoever I could. Consequently, as the next slide shows, 76% of SENCOs have considered leaving the role. We have a lot of very experienced SENCOs out there, and, if we lost them, schools would lose a massive amount of experience.

I tried to look at the reason for that. We know that we face SEN transformation and that there are big changes ahead. We all recognise those changes as being needed. We are working in a system that needs to be updated, reviewed and sorted out. Part of that transformation includes changes in SEN services, with the formation of our local impact teams and a new referral portal. Those have contributed to the mounting pressures that SENCOs feel.

We have received conflicting information about SEN transformation. When asked how well the EA communicates new initiatives with SENCOs, 59% reported that information is not well communicated. Often, we are left with more questions than answers. We now feel that we are being thrown into a system that is not fit for purpose. We are unsure of how to access the best support that we can for our most vulnerable pupils. The graduated response framework feels to us like a bit of a stalling tactic. It is what we have been doing for years. We have supported children at all stages of the SEN register and those at whole-school provision and put in the provision that every child needs. It feels like a rebranding of what we have always done: meet the needs of all our pupils, not just those with SEN.

I turn to the request for involvement (RFI) portal. Eighteen per cent indicated that they find that using it is "Extremely difficult", and 52% said that it is "Not so easy". We have all encountered difficulties with the portal. I have made two referrals this week. We have tiny boxes to fill in. One of them says, "Please be as specific as possible in identifying all the SEN that this child has". When I did that, I ran out of space — we do not even have enough room to write in everything that we need to mention. The portal crashes, and we lose information. We often have to type our answer into a separate Word document before copy and pasting it, because we cannot see the tiny boxes. That is not just our age; it is too hard for us to use. [Laughter.]

We are limited in how much information we can give. We are limited in file size and the number of files. That has been upped this year compared with last year, which is good. That is appreciated: it is, at least, something.

We get inconsistent feedback on what is being offered. We are offered advice and guidance without anyone laying eyes on the children, often after a lot of interventions have been put in place by the school at whole-school or stage-1 level. We were promised that the educational psychologist would be removed as gatekeeper to those services, but, in all honesty, it feels like that has been replaced with a brick wall. We are also told that the RFI portal is a temporary portal and will be changed as time goes on. Eighty-three per cent of SENCOs feel that their professional judgement is not trusted in the process. We have to provide massive amounts of information on children, and we are not trusted.

When asked what contact they have had with local impact teams, 74% of SENCOs said that they have yet to receive information from their local impact team or be told who their key contact is. We know that it is early days, but we need something to work towards, and, at the minute, we cannot see it working. If those teams were trained only at the end of August, how can they be ready to launch at the start of September? It seems that we are still being referred to individual services — there is no multidisciplinary thinking.

We have been promised a "team around the child" approach; at the minute, it is "team around the paperwork". Very often, the child is not involved in most parts of it. There is no transparency as to what the moderation panel is looking at or its criteria or even as to who the panel members are. We have been told that three pathways of support are offered, but the EA also tells us that it does not want the "three pathways" language to be used. In the guidance that the EA provided us with, it called it "entitled pathways". That, again, is not of our choosing.

There are delays with support. The local impact teams are not staffed equally. Our team has no early years person. How can we look at early intervention without early years? Special schools have been left out completely. They are in the dark as to what they can access from those teams — at the minute, it is seemingly nothing. We are told that we can contact SEN Central: that that is not mandatory but that it would look good if we phoned SEN Central first. A lot of it feels like stalling tactics.

As well as that, the role of the educational psychologist is changing. Previously, we were on a time-allocation model. That is now changing whereby educational psychologists have more of an advisory capacity. We can still refer children to them, but it ends up that we decide who has to be referred for statutory assessment. We are not educational psychologists: we are not trained to test children to see if they have a learning difficulty; that is beyond our training. We are worried about the impact that that will have. If the EA comes back and says no to those statutory assessments, will we get the blame for not having given enough information or not having done enough? It is a really difficult position to be in. We were told that we would no longer need to fill out paperwork to talk to the educational psychologist, and that it would go through the RFI portal. We have since been sent another form to complete. Therefore, we have to complete the form to speak to the psychologist, and then we have to put all the information on to the portal, thereby doubling our workload.

I asked SENCOs what they would like the EA to know, and the responses are clear. There is an overwhelming workload. We are feeling isolation and a lack of support. We need to be recognised and respected for what we do and how we do it. SENCOs are fixers, so we like to fix everything and try to get everything right. We have excessive amounts of paperwork, too many portals and too much repetition. We are all under time constraints and funding deficits. Most of us are teaching SENCOs, so we are trying to juggle our classroom responsibilities with everything that being a SENCO brings. We are seeing a lot of mental health issues and burnout. A lot of the comments that I received are very emotive, including:

Someone even said:

That was not me but someone else.

Ms Stewart: You are much too young. [Laughter.]

Ms McGowan: Yes. Other comments included:

Seventy-six per cent of SENCOs said that they are doing that right now. They do not feel that the role is sustainable.

What would help? We need time to perform our role properly. We need streamlined systems and reduced paperwork. We need funding for and recognition of our role. We are in a managerial capacity in which we work with everybody, but the pay and time that we are given does not reflect that. We need to be on a salary scale that recognises our experience and what we bring to the role. It is still at the discretion of schools as to what they pay their SENCOs. Not every SENCO has points awarded for their additional management and responsibilities. There needs to be consistency in that. We need to look at having non-teaching SENCO roles, especially for schools like ours that have such a high level of need. We need to be trusted. We need to have professional autonomy. We need consistency and communication. We need to be trusted on how to provide the best support for children that we can.

We are happy to take your questions. That was a whistle-stop tour of the role of a SENCO, but we can elaborate if there is anything that you would like to ask us.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That was brilliant. Thank you so much. Your presentation was so comprehensive. It will reflect what a lot of members round the table hear locally. I really benefited from having a conversation with you previously, not in my role as Chair of the Committee, just to get a sense of what you are dealing with locally. It has been so helpful. We thank you for your time.

We also know that it is not easy, when you are a working teacher or SENCO, to put your head above the parapet to speak about the issues, because this is a public forum. I hope that you understand that the Committee appreciates your willingness to engage. It is vital for us, as a Committee, to really hear and understand the issues that you are dealing with, rather than hearing only how things are operating from the EA's perspective and local anecdotes. It is really important to have the realities put on the public record. With that, in and of itself, we could probably finish the session now, and it would have been useful, because, when we come to hear from the EA, we will have the bank of information that you have given us.

You set out clearly what, you think, the EA needs to do to support you better. That was going to be my first question. It is worth pointing out just how bleak a picture you paint of what is clearly a dedicated workforce. I pulled out some of the stats: when you combine the percentages, 78% said that they are not well supported, and only one individual said that they feel supported in any way. Did you say that you had about 200 responses?

Ms McGowan: Yes, I had 203 responses. I am not a statistician; I just did that survey off my own bat. I am one of the admins for the NI Primary SENCOs Collaborate Facebook page, which has about 1,600 members. We use that forum to help and support one another, because we are not getting the information that we need from the EA. We also work really closely together in the Ards and North Down Borough Council Cluster Group. We find that we have to do those things ourselves, because it is not being put in place for us. We are trying to be proactive. I am invested, because I need it to work for my son. I need to be able to say it for all the kids in my care as well.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): The commitment to the role is clear. Those stats do not make good reading, nor does the qualitative data in there around SENCOs feeling overwhelmed and isolated; not being recognised or respected; being overloaded and burning out. Those are not —

Ms McGowan: It was really upsetting to read when I went through those.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Those are not words that we want to hear from our teaching professionals. Your written and oral evidence about what support you need is clear.

I want to focus on the stage-2 process. There is a huge push from both the Department and the EA that the emphasis needs to be on stage 1 and stage 2. In fact, I think that the Minister said something along the lines of, "When a child is statemented, that can represent a failure, because it means the support has not gone in beforehand". If that is the departmental position that we are working from, we have to get stage 1 and, crucially, stage 2 right, when the school-based resources have run their course. In the new system — the graduated response framework, the new request for involvement portal and your engagement with the local impact teams — how would you describe the effectiveness of the process and the support that comes out at the other end of it? At that point, you are engaging and moving a child on to stage 2 for more directed support. How would you characterise that?

Ms McGowan: We have put a lot of whole-school and stage-1 provision in place already. We are fortunate to have learning support teachers in the school, so some children have had two years of learning support and nearly daily sessions. We refer them on to our local impact team, which may say, "We will give them pathway 2". That is six hours of advisory support. What other advice do we need at that stage, when we have ploughed all that time and effort into children and tried to give them intensive support and early support? That is not enough.

I acknowledge that more needs to be done at stage 2 so that we may not have to get to stage 3, but it is not enough to say that the local impact teams have been created by combining services together. They are not combined. We are not getting a multidisciplinary approach. We are still being signposted to individual services. I am not in any way criticising the local impact teams. They have been thrown into a system that is not in place yet. It is painting by numbers, and we have to take it one day at a time. It would be absolutely fine if the strategy had been looked at first and the EA had said, "This is what we want. This is our end goal, and this is how we're gonna do it", but there is no strategy. It is a case of putting people together in a team and saying, "Away you go and decide what you're going to do". That is the feedback that I have had from my local impact team staff members. The teams do not represent all areas of SEN. For example, as I said, we do not have an early years person.

At the minute, I have a few children who receive some support that is labelled "intensive". That will be for 12 weeks. We do not really know what will come after that. We do not know whether, after 12 weeks, we will be told, "Right, they're discharged", and that will be it. We do not know how that will be done. We do not really know what that will look like, but I know that it is not what was promised. It is not early intervention if you need to have a year of personal learning plans (PLPs) to show as your evidence. It is not early intervention if you do not have any early years people on your team. It is not early intervention if we have to exhaust everything and then be given less than we were already doing.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): When we had the EA in, one of the officials who was giving evidence took a wee bit of exception to the suggestion that there is a mandatory requirement for a certain amount of evidence. The official said that everything is dealt with case by case and that there is discretion and flexibility, but there may have been a sense of the EA saying, "We can't just take teachers' word for it either". Can you speak to that? It has been put to me that there is a mandatory requirement for a certain amount — a number of terms' worth — of evidence. Has that been your experience?

Ms McGowan: Yes. That is on the list. In the information that the EA sent us, there is a list of what we need in order to make a referral. The list is from the EA. It has been updated again this week. The form asks:

— you would have to, because the SENCO is the person who makes the referrals —

The form then states:

That means two reviewed PLPs, with targets and interventions to date. Early years referrals require only one, if a child is in nursery and has only just come to you. Generally, if we are on a two-PLP-per-year cycle, that means a year of evidence. The EA will come back and say, "You could shorten the PLP cycles and make the referral sooner", but, generally speaking, that is what our PLP cycles are — schools do two or three PLPs a year. That requirement is there in black and white.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It is important to have that on the record, because there was pushback from the officials on it.

Your concern seems to be that, when the support comes, it tends to be advisory at first, even though you have been through, I imagine, intensive stage-1 engagement at school level.

Ms McGowan: Last year, I did a couple of referrals, and the response was, "We will give you advice and guidance". I was not happy, because, at that stage, the children had had two years of learning support. I said, "We don't need advice and guidance. We need help here. The children are significantly behind in their literacy skills". I was then told that I would have to cancel my last RFI and redo the whole thing, and the EA sent me a ream of literacy assessments to do with the children. I had to spend a day with each child to do the assessments and then upload all the documents again. By the way, when you upload a document, you have to change it to a PDF. When I uploaded them all in one go, the document was too big to be accepted by the portal, and I had to cut it in half and do it all again. When you question the system, the EA gives you more hoops to jump through.

I have been lucky this year: I have literacy support for a couple of children whose referrals I asked questions about last year. I have direct intervention for them, and I have behaviour support for another child, but, again, that is not multidisciplinary. It is from individual services.

Have you had the same, Anita?

Ms Stewart: Yes. Behaviour support comes out to our school, which is a continuation from last term into this term. Again, that is a separate service. We are really lucky to have our own literacy support in school, but, again, there is a financial cost. By the time that you have gone through everything that you have to do, including creating folders of all the evidence for each child, you just feel pressure that you do not have enough evidence, and you worry that you might go through the whole referral process only to be turned down.

Then you feel that failure in yourself.

Ms McGowan: It is "the team around the paperwork".

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I have made a note of that phrase. This needs to be about the child, and it feels that it is about the process.

Ms McGowan: It is judging us.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I will just finish with a comment, and then I will open up to other members. Through the multiple reviews around special educational needs up until now, it has been consistently highlighted that the EA was very system-led. It was about ensuring the system and the processes were followed. There has been widespread acknowledgement across DE and EA that it needs to change. Something that was put in place, which should be more agile and respond to the child, seems to have almost immediately gotten caught up in a process-driven approach. I hope we are in early days territory and that we will see improvement, but that has all been really helpful. I will open up to other members.

Mrs Mason: Claire, you mentioned being a lone descending voice. I would say that there are hundreds and hundreds of SENCOs cheering you on right now, watching this, and fair play to you both for coming in and doing it. I just wanted to start with that.

Ms McGowan: I appreciate that.

Mrs Mason: I work closely with the East Down SENCO cluster group, and everything that you say rings so true with what they say to me. I want to read something to you: "I am feeling utterly disillusioned and frustrated by the current direction of travel by the EA. I would have been the first to agree that a complete transformation of our SEN was necessary. We just feel that we are ploughing ahead at an alarming rate with our local impact teams not fully functional, prepared or equipped, which, in turn, is overwhelming school teachers and SENCOs." Does that sound familiar?

Ms McGowan: I could have written it myself. Absolutely, 100%.

Mrs Mason: The response I got when I raised this was, "That is why we have a line in the delivery plan about looking at the role of a SENCO." Does that reassure you in any way, shape or form?

Ms McGowan: No. They might listen, but they do not hear. That is how we feel. We are trying really hard. I have tried to engage with the EA; I have tried to contact people at SEN transformation if I can keep up with who does what role on a particular day. I sent the emails, and the only response I received was from Nick, the Committee Chair. I have had no response from anyone else. I went to training a few weeks ago on the graduated response framework. We were told, "You need to tell us what is going on, and tell us what is happening." I said, "Well, I have tried, and no one has replied to me, and no one has engaged, so what else are we supposed to do?" We do not know where else to turn, really, so that is why we are here.

Mrs Mason: Again, fair play to you both for that. You mentioned the criteria for getting support through the pathways. Do you have any concept of what the criteria are to get a child onto pathway 3 or the one-to-one support?

Ms McGowan: No, and we have asked for clarity. There is a moderation panel, but we do not know who is on it.

Mrs Mason: OK.

Ms McGowan: The information goes to the moderation panel. On day two of the graduated response framework training, someone asked directly who is on the moderation panel and what the criteria are. We were told that the local impact teams would have no criteria. Where before, we had literacy service and scores, for autism, you needed the diagnosis and all the rest of it. We were told that there would be no criteria, but now there seems to be a lot of hidden criteria, and we do not know what it is. They told us that for pathway 1, the child would stay at stage 1 because it really is pre-RFI input that they are having, in an advice and guidance capacity. Basically, they are saying that you have not filled in your form well enough or have not done enough. Pathway 2, we are told, is six hours of partnered support, which may include some observation or a bit of assessment with the child, and then they will give you some advice about things to do. Pathway 3, our intensive support, is 12 weeks of support with the child, and we do not yet know what comes after that. Again, we have asked for clarity. They have said that we do not have to do two more PLP cycles at the end of that, but I still do not know whether that means we have to do another RFI. We might then have to do another RFI and say, "We have tried what you said, and it is still not working." That is my understanding. I do not know if Anita thinks any differently.

Mrs Mason: Basically, you are doing these referrals blind. You do not know what evidence or what you need to put forward.

Ms Stewart: We put in as much evidence as possible.

Ms McGowan: We are not all on an even playing field with what we can provide at stage 1. We are fortunate to have learning support teachers in school. Not all schools have them. If you are not able to have that in your provision, why should that go against you? Our provision maps are not all the same. What we can do at stage 1 will not be the same as what another school can. Why should you be penalised on what you can get at stage 2 because of that?

Mrs Mason: There are hundreds of questions that I could ask you. We have heard from SENCOs and members of LITs about how they feel, which you raised. They feel as though they are in the firing line. They are the ones who have to go into schools and face it, but they are not aware of what is going on, either. There seems to be a suspicion that the aim is to make it look as though there are lots of referrals and lots of children on those pathways, but maybe the reality is that not as many of them get support at the end of the process. Do you agree?

Ms McGowan: It is hard to tell at this stage because it is so new to us, but, from what I am seeing now, it does not seem majorly different from what we had before. We were promised multidisciplinary thinking. We now have a key contact in our local impact team. I asked my key contact, "What's your role?", and they said, "I don't really know yet".

We also have a key contact in Regional Integrated Support for Education (RISE), which provides multidisciplinary support from the health trust. We have a consultation model. We discuss with them, we raise some children, and they might say, "Right, do you know what? We'll do a small group support with this lot. We'll come in and do a whole class with this", and then they lay eyes on the children and say, "Oh, do you know what? Refer them. They could do with x, y and z", which is a really good model. I asked about it at the graduated response day. Apparently, that is what we are working towards. Why are we not starting like that, then? Why are we starting one way and then changing to another, and why is it not being communicated to us that that is what they want to go towards? That model works. You have a relationship with that key contact, who knows your schools, knows your demographic and knows what you have in place for those children.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is probably a good point at which to finish on that.

Mrs Mason: I have a final question, and a one-word answer will do. I am constantly told that the removal of educational psychologists is helping the workload of the SENCO. Do you agree?

Ms McGowan: It is doubling it.

Mrs Mason: Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Perhaps we can pick that up with other questions, because it would be good to have some evidence around that when we engage with the EA.

Mrs Guy: I am like Cathy; it is like, "Wow, where do you start?". Thank you for coming in. You are giving us evidence from the front line, which is what we need. We have struggled to get consistent answers from officials, so this is really helpful.

You mentioned early years. It is something that I have an interest in. I picked it up with officials. You have explained the logic. Maybe you could expand on that. Early intervention requires early intervention. It needs personnel in those early years slots. My understanding is that there are massive gaps there. Is that what you hear? Will you speak to exactly the necessity for that? You are in a primary school. I assume that, when a child comes in from a preschool setting or early years, you need to have information to meet their needs. Will you expand on why that is important and what your experience is right now of early years provision?

Ms McGowan: We both have nurseries as well. We get them straight away. That is when we need the process to start. We need it to start in nursery. Our nursery teacher has phoned SEN Central and said, "I need help in this nursery. We have children with increasingly complex needs". Those are our COVID babies. They are our children who have not met their milestones and have missed out on a lot of their childhood experiences. I said, "Ask them whether they even have an early years person who can come out to the setting and see it and make suggestions generally", but we were told, "No, our team doesn't have any early years". We were also told that early years local impact teams, which specialise in early years, will be formed, but I do not know when. Have you heard anything about early years?

Ms Stewart: I found my LIT contact only on Friday. I have not had any other conversation around that. The needs coming in at that nursery level are so high. Speech and language is a really big issue for a lot of those children. If you can get that support in early for those children who are just missing some blocks, they can be supported at that early stage. We are lucky that we also have a nurture room in our school. That gears towards our P1s and P2s as well to try to put some more early intervention in for those children, but I am not sure how I am going to access it through the LITs yet.

Ms McGowan: We do not know yet.

Mrs Guy: We all acknowledge that it is early days, but it feels as though getting that right is such a priority.

Ms McGowan: It is.

Mrs Guy: We should not have those gaps.

Ms McGowan: We cannot stall now.

We have been told to ring SEN Central for general advice, and I have been told to try to make RFIs for children before I consult psychology. We know that some of our nursery children will need specialist provisions or special school, and that is the time to get it. If we do not get that ready for P1 children, how will they get a place in any other year further down the line?

Mrs Guy: Keep going on the subject of educational psychologists and what that picture looks like now. I will make it open for you: tell me what the experience is now. What has changed and what has not changed? Is it working? Could it work?

Ms McGowan: I am fortunate to have a great working relationship with our educational psychologist. That is key in the same way as it is with the relationship with your key contact for your local impact team. You need a person who will advocate for your school and who knows its demographic and what you need. By my understanding of the changes, the educational psychologist will no longer recommend a statutory assessment for a child, so, if we refer a child to them for assessment, their report will no longer say, "We recommend that you request a statutory assessment". It is now up to us to decide whether we do that, and we do not need to have the child assessed by an educational psychologist before we make that referral. Again, we do not know exactly what the panel that says yes or no to the statutory assessment referral wants from us. It wants a mountain of information, but we have not been used to doing that ourselves —

Mrs Guy: It is a significant change.

Ms Stewart: It is a big change.

Ms McGowan: — without the educational psychologist giving the OK to do that. It is a big change. We knew that, when a psychologist wrote in their report that something was needed, we would get it. If we no longer have that security, how will we guarantee that any of our statutory assessment referrals will get through? Beyond that, if and when the answer is no, who will get the blame? It will be us. It might be put to parents that we did not provide enough information and that we did not do enough for the child, and we will have to face that. It is very new. We do not know where it is going, but that is what we have been told.

Mrs Guy: How do your educational psychologists feel about the changes? You have a good relationship with yours, Claire, so have you discussed that?

Ms McGowan: I do. They feel that their role is changing to very much a statutory role. All their work is on statutory assessments; that is everything that they have to do. They want what they now call — sorry; I have paper everywhere — "direct psychological consultation" (DPC), which means working in collaboration with parents, schools and young people, perhaps in solution-focused meetings, and suggesting things to try for a period, rather than being a service that just assesses, advises and writes reports. That is what they are aiming for, but our difficulty is that we have children with such complex needs, and, if we feel that a child needs to be moved to specialist provision or a special school, we now have to decide to get the statutory assessment.

Ms Stewart: I do not have the training for that.

Ms McGowan: No, I do not have that.

Mrs Guy: It is all supposed to be child-centred. It does not feel as though the interests of the child are at the forefront.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Maybe make this your final comment, Michelle.

Mrs Guy: Yes.

Ms McGowan: It is brand new. We were told that there would not be a consultation form as such, but, when I had my meeting, it was a case of, "Here's the form: write down everything that we have discussed, and then do an RFI." I wanted to write on the RFI, "See consultation form", but I did not have the nerve. I chickened out in case doing that would mean the child's not getting what they needed. You feel the pressure of that: I am an outspoken person, but even I was scared of that.

Mrs Guy: Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is great. Ordinarily, I bring the Deputy Chair in first. I inadvertently promoted Cathy to that role today.

Mrs Mason: I am OK with that.

Mr Sheehan: So am I. [Laughter.]

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): No doubt my card has been marked, but Pat is happy to come in at the end, so I will bring Danny in.

Mr Baker: Thank you so much. This is what is so important about holding a SEN inquiry: we get to hear exactly what is happening on the ground. It is about everything that Cathy has raised today and what you have said. When the EA CEO, Richard Pengelly, was in front of us a few weeks ago, his reply to Cathy's question, "Are you listening to the SENCOs?", was, basically, "Are you listening to the EA?". I thought then, "They just don't get it", and I have heard from you today how you jump through hoops. That tells me that they are deliberately putting up obstacles to stop support going to our children.

Ms McGowan: It feels like that.

Mr Baker: That is what it feels like, and that is how it sounds from the evidence that you have given, which has been so important. How many referrals can a school do, roughly, for people who are trying to get support — a statement — for their child? Is it limited?

Ms Stewart: It was limited, previously, in that we had set psychology hours that generally equated to three children a year. Nursery was different, because it is not formal education. You could push the nursery ones on top. As far as I am aware, there is no limit.

Ms McGowan: You can make statutory assessment referrals continually, and they have to go away and look at it within a time. It is the same with a parent referral. Parents can continue to do that, and that will keep going. I cannot say anything against that, because I did it. I will always encourage parents to do it.

Mr Baker: That is what I am getting to. It is about the tribunals and how many of them end up in tribunal and the EA having to step back. When we asked the EA, it sort of said, "It's really the parents' fault. They are not giving us enough information".

Ms McGowan: I saw that.

Mr Baker: Is that going back on to you?

Ms McGowan: Yes.

Ms Stewart: The school also provides information for parent referrals. Therefore the school supplies them. It is not just the parents.

Ms McGowan: No, it is not just the parents.

Ms Stewart: It comes from both.

Mr Baker: So, again, extra workload back on to you.

Ms McGowan: If it goes to tribunal, their legal representatives will be in touch with us. Often, it will involve a freedom of information request, and we will have to gather everything on the child and send it off. Then the EA will say, "Do you think we should give in to this?". We give our tuppence worth, for what it is worth. I understand why that is what, parents feel, they need, because what is the alternative? Twelve weeks of support for their child? That is no alternative; that is no substitute. They hold up classroom assistant support as the "gold standard" — the Minister's words — but it is not. It is what, you feel, is your only option; that is all that you can get. That is what I felt, as a parent — that is what my child needed, because what was the alternative?

Mr Baker: I will take things in a slightly different direction. It relates to specialist provision in mainstream schools (SPiMS). At the weekend and this week, a teacher reached out to me. They are doing their utmost, as you are, on the front line, but she has five year groups in the one class. She said that she is at breaking point. How can she teach a P5 — I think about my kid and the way that he behaves in P5 — and then a child in P1 who will be learning rhymes? How is that child-centred?

Ms McGowan: That is a P1 with significant deficits, not at a P1 level. Anita has nine.

Ms Stewart: My learning support has P1 to P4 in the one room, and my second learning support, which is a pathway for the older children, has P5 to P7 in the room. In our area, the difficulty and needs are very much in social communication. I have several of those rooms. I happen to have a straight P3 room, and we have had to take extra children in there; I have a straight P6 room; I have a P5, P6 and P7 room; and I have a P1 to P4 room. It is difficult to manage, but I get 60 hours of classroom support in those settings. That is two full-time assistants.

It is very much about managing the different needs of all of those children. I have taught it. I taught in learning for a number of years. When we first opened, I had P3 to P6 in the one room. It then went to P5 to P7 and then to P1 to P4. I like composite classes; I come from a composite class background, and I think that there are benefits to having them. However, I also know that the workload is more intense. It is hard for some of the P1s who are settling when there are P4s who are settled. It is about dividing your time.

Mr Baker: If you do not have —

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Final comment, Danny.

Mr Baker: — a breakout room, which is needed when one child "kicks off", as it has been described to me, all the children have to go into the corridor.

Ms Stewart: It depends on the profile of the child. We have safe spaces throughout our school for different children, but not all of them want to go there. They may choose to go there when the spaces are regulated, but, quite often, it is about removing those children and letting the other children settle.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Very briefly, Claire.

Ms McGowan: There are big deficits in social communication specialist provision. Ours are learning, and we have four in one and six in the other. We have space, but we have children waiting for years for social communication specialist provision. Schools need to look at the need and match it to the provision.

Mr Middleton: Thank you both for taking the time to share your lived experience and professional experience. I also very much value the information that you have provided from others who have responded. It is particularly concerning that, as you said, Chair, three out of four SENCOs consider leaving the role. That is deeply alarming. When I read the comments and the feedback, I cannot help but be moved by the stress that people are clearly under, so that is a concern.

One of the key issues that seems to be raised time and time again, not just by you but by parents, is frustration at the way in which communication is provided. One of the comments was that SENCOs find out more from the Facebook page than they do from the EA. A postcode lottery was mentioned. What information are people struggling to get from the EA that they can get from the Facebook page?

Ms McGowan: It can be about what the local impact teams will provide. There has been a lot of talk about the pathways on the Facebook page and what that support looks like on the ground, because not everyone is having the same experience.

We moved away from having a five-board area in which everyone was doing their own thing, but our concern is that we may go back to that if every local impact team is going to be doing its own thing and providing its own support. The Facebook page enables us to see what is going on in the whole country and not just in our local impact team. Being able to communicate in different forms gives us a bit of breadth to see what is going on around us.

The difficulty is that, when we go on to those pages, so-and-so will say, "I was told this", while someone else will say, "My local impact team keeps in contact, and it said this".

Mr Middleton: There is conflicting messaging.

Ms McGowan: Yes. Under local impact teams, we are all being fed different information. That is where we see a lack of consistency.

Mr Middleton: There was concern about the communication of the new initiatives. The LITs are very new. Did I hear you right when you said that you have had no input into or involvement in them?

Ms McGowan: The LITs have working focus groups. I do not know who is on them, but it is definitely not me. When we have information sessions with the EA, it is a case of "Cameras off and mics off". We are allowed to type some questions or comments in a text box. I normally have mine ready so that I can copy and paste them in quickly, but the questions that will be answered are very much hand-picked.

Last year, we raised big queries about when we could re-refer a child for support. I had a report about a child being discharged from the literacy service. At the bottom of the report, it read, "We will need two reviewed PLPs before you can re-refer this child". Then, on SEN transformation, it was stated that that was not needed and that the child could just be re-referred straight away. I said that that was not true and communicated what we had been told, but I was ignored and told to re-refer them. I therefore copied and pasted the bit off the bottom of the report and popped it in the text box, but I got no answer. There is an example of contradictory information.

Mr Middleton: I have one final question, because a lot has been covered. Claire, you said in your briefing that you have been a SENCO for 14 years. We hear that there are serious problems. Have you seen any changes in those 14 years that are making a positive difference?

Ms McGowan: The intentions of the local impact teams are good. I would love to see them move to multidisciplinary working. I do not have any arguments with any of that. It is amazing. We have more and more complex children now. Children were not allowed to be autistic and dyslexic before. They were not allowed to access the autism service and the literacy service. We need multidisciplinary thinking for our more complex children, but the systems are not in place. We are being promised all of that, and I have been on parent information sessions online where that has been promised.

Parents have been told that there will no longer be long waiting lists and that they will get more support. They were pushing for group support for children, whereby the children would be taken out in groups and lots of multidisciplinary work would be done. There is hardly a mention of group support in any of this. The intention is absolutely 100%, and none of us will argue with that, but there is no system-wide support in place to manage it. Recruitment and retention of staff who are skilled in those areas is also a concern.

Ms Stewart: I feel really supported by my educational psychologist.

Ms McGowan: Yes, as do I.

Ms Stewart: I have been lucky to have had her for a few years now. There was a time that we did not know whom our educational psychologist was, and it was hard to get in contact. I have a really great working relationship with her. My statementing officer has been amazing. For a while there, I had lots of different statementing officers. The one whom I have now has been to our setting, understands it and knows what we are about. She will be there for me: I tend to rely heavily on those two people. I also have a great senior management team to depend on.

This is about support for the children. We are in this job because our hearts are with those children. We often have parents sitting in front of us who are at their wits' end. I keep a box of tissues on my desk, although it is not me who is making the parents cry.

Ms McGowan: I need them as well.

Ms Stewart: It is heartbreaking. I appreciate that the EA is taking those steps. As you said, the intention is there. The EA wants the children to receive the support, but the strategy needed to have been thought out much better before —.

Ms McGowan: We were launched into a system that was not ready.

Ms Stewart: It was a reactive response to the national situation currently.

Ms McGowan: Everything is relationships-based. We have relationships with our psychologists and with our local impact team staff. Those relationships are in place as our foundations, but we need the system in place to support them.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you. Time is against us, but this is really crucial evidence, so I am not going to cut short anything that you have to say to us today.

Before I bring in John, may I make an observation? A slight concern for me has been that there is a lot going on in the transformation space. We are hoping to hear from the Department soon in order to help us break down what is happening and what the priority actions are. The local impact teams seem to represent the direction in which we are going. I will be happy with a yes or no answer to this question: is there a risk of a loss of confidence in the transformation agenda if that first headline action is not resourced and delivered effectively? I want to be clear about that, because there was a bit of a suggestion from the EA that we were having a pop at its staff, but we were not. I have no doubt that there are really dedicated people on the local impact teams who want to deliver but feel that the structures are not quite in place. Do you have a concern about the confidence in the system about transformation?

Ms McGowan: Yes. I have concerns about that. We are not blaming our local impact teams for that. We need to work with them, and we support them. We are behind them 100%.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That has come through.

Ms McGowan: It is the system. We need a system in place for them to work in.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is great.

Mr Burrows: Thanks for that. It was really enlightening, as is the report, which is very good. I have two points to make. First, I want to ask about the impact of the disruption on SEN children that storm Amy caused, including the late notice of school closures. I have asked the Education Authority to look at having faster and more agile ways of communicating. Secondly, I want to ask about admin, as that is the big one. It is like cholesterol, in that there is good and bad. We need records for transparency reasons and for an audit trail. It seems that you are saying that there is too much admin. What is the solution to that? Do you have any practical solutions? Is there a need for more admin support? Are there duplications that could be better managed? Is there streamlining? Is there stuff that can be taken out? Are we over-recording for risk aversion reasons? Is there something concrete that we can recommend to the Minister next week in order to improve admin processes?

Ms McGowan: We need one portal to go to. We do not need five. If information were held centrally on one portal, we could go to it for whatever referrals we need to make. Instead, we have one for RFIs, one for annual reviews and one for making statutory assessment referrals. Our pupil data is recorded on the school information management system (SIMS), and we have a SENCO portal, to which we go to get our information. That is five already: five logins, five interfaces and five usernames to remember.

Mr Burrows: Five passwords.

Ms McGowan: Thank goodness that passwords can be saved on the computer. Otherwise, I would not have a clue.

All of that needs to be streamlined. We have been told that EA Connect will do that and that everything will go on to it in the future. We have been told that the statutory assessment referral portal, where we do our annual reviews, will go on to EA Connect. The EA has told us that it hopes to do that, but, when we get to a statutory assessment for a child, we very often have to make an RFI referral; consult with and make a referral to psychology; and make a referral to the statutory assessment portal, filling in information that is taken from everything else. If the statutory assessment is agreed, we then have to write educational advice. All of that has to be done for one child to receive a statement. All along the way, the same information is asked for in a slightly different way.

Ms Stewart: The questions are slightly different, but the information provided is very similar. It is frustrating. I do not know about Claire, but I have to go in over the summer to keep up with a lot of the paperwork. I had 11 consultations to do over July and August. I put in education advice for the RFI in June that I had to do in July, and I had to phone teachers to try to get that information. That could be streamlined. I have just scheduled all my annual reviews in my calendar. There is a really easy way to do it on EA Connect, and I enjoy using that portal. It involves opening the SIMS and transferring information. There could be some sort of administrative process for doing that.

Ms McGowan: Yes, there could be a central way. We are told that Bromcom is coming, although we do not know when that will be —

Ms Stewart: Or how or what.

Ms McGowan: — or what it will look like. We could have something whereby Bromcom could feed the information that is held there with all the pupil's details, including SEN details, straight in. That would save us a lot of work straight away. Some of the annual review stuff will be populated, but some will not, and there is some that, even if were done last year, might not come up as being populated this year.

Mr Burrows: That is useful. Can you write to me, even if it is just to exchange emails? I would like to follow up on that, because I would like to get my teeth into it.

Ms McGowan: About all the portals?

Mr Burrows: Yes, and about what we can do to improve the situation. It is just so that I can ask the right questions.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It would be genuinely helpful if that could be shared with all Committee members through the Committee Clerk. The amount of admin involved is a big issue.

Mr Burrows: I struggle to process the information without seeing it. I do not know whether there is a way, without revealing any child's personal details, in which you could say, "Here's what this looks like, and here's what it could look like". That would be beneficial.

Ms McGowan: I did that as part of staff training this year to give staff an insight into our role. I put up a picture of each of the portals and said, "This is what I need to do for x, y and z". It is useful for people to see for themselves how the system works, or does not work, such as when the portals crash and you lose everything or things do not upload.

Even today, for example, I found that I had forgotten to upload one document to my RFI portal. I cannot go back in and edit that. I have to fill in a contact form and say, "I forgot this. Can you please add it in?". I sent the RFI number, but the EA said that the RFI number could not be seen and that I would get a reply within 10 working days. I was told, "We cannot do that when we are asked for a form". Thankfully, the EA came back to me the next day. I said, "This is the number that I was given," and it replied, "Sorry, that is a psychology one. We don't deal with that. You need to ring psychology to deal with that". Even when I have to do a tiny thing such as upload one more document, it therefore involves hours — I do not know how many — of work.

Mr Burrows: I do not know what is planned, but I know that the likes of the Strategic Investment Board (SIB) digital transformation team run through such things with service users to come up with a solution that has been tested and works. Tackling this as a single issue would take a lot of work off you and allow you to get back to having more interaction with the child as opposed to managing admin.

Ms McGowan: It should be one portal — the same user interface — with different tabs. That should be simple in this day and age.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We will draw that line of questioning to a close.

Mr Burrows: Thanks.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): It would be helpful if that practical detail — what it looks like — could be shared with the Committee. That is crucial. I think that we are all on the same page, which is that it would be really helpful if a "Tell us once" mentality could be introduced. If there were one place to send the EA the information, it would not need to be told again. That would be so helpful.

I do not see any other indications. I think that that is us. The freshly demoted Deputy Chair

has waited patiently.

Mr Sheehan: I am happy to wait.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): You have been very gracious, Pat. I overlooked you when bringing in members.

Mr Sheehan: Thanks very much for all the information that you have given us today. It reflects what we have been hearing from practitioners in our areas, in local schools and so on. When the Department and the EA launched their big drive to open up specialist provision classes because there were not enough spaces in special schools and so on, it was sold to us that there would be multidisciplinary teams and that, when a school needed support, it could contact that team for whatever type of support it needed, be that support for speech and language, support for behaviour or the support of a social worker. The name was then changed to local integrated teams, and, when we asked the reason for the change in name, we were told that it was just a matter of language and that there was no real reason for the change other than that. It was changed again to local impact teams, and those teams are now coterminous with the health trusts. One of the issues that we have is that there does not seem to be a great level of communication between the Department of Education and the EA and the Department of Health. What is your experience?

Ms McGowan: There is none. Aside from the RISE hub, which comes from the health trust and with which we work, the EA, the Department of Education and the Department of Health are all running in parallel and never seem to meet. This was sold to us as meaning that we would join the Department of Health and have it on board with us, that we would have access to services from it and that all the systems would be streamlined, but that is not how it is. We even have children who are going through health assessments for whom we are sent forms that are 15 or 16 pages long to fill in and send back to the Department of Health. If a parent has concerns about autism or ADHD, we have to write a letter to outline what those concerns are. The Department of Health certainly does not provide us with any information that we ask for. It therefore seems that all the services are running in parallel, with no joined-up thinking at all.

Parents return from appointments saying that their child needs a statement. We do not have a system whereby we can say, "Your child now has a diagnosis of x, y and z and will get a statement", but that is what parents are being told by the Department of Health. Again, that puts more pressure on us. I have been asked after an appointment, "When will my child's classroom assistant be starting?". We are going, "My goodness. This is a really lengthy process that involves gathering loads of information". The Department of Health does not even seem to be aware of the processes in the Department of Education or of what supports are available out there, so we are then having to manage parents' expectations by responding, "I am really sorry, but there is no back door here to get support". I had a parent come to me and tell me that the paediatrician had said that their child was dyslexic. A paediatrician does not test for dyslexia. Rather, they will have looked at a few scores, and that will have been it. We are then left having to pick up the pieces and work things out with the parent. It is undermining our relationships with parents, because it is being made out that we are not doing what we should be doing, when, in fact, they are describing something that does not exist.

Mr Sheehan: Apart from the admin difficulties that you experience, there is difficulty in accessing the appropriate support for children.

Ms McGowan: Yes.

Ms Stewart: Our SPS setting is for children with severe learning difficulties, and I have three of them. For those children, we are able to access support from people for, specifically, speech and language, and that support is amazing. I would love to be able to offer that support to other children with those needs as well, but, because it is provided in that setting, it is geared towards specific children. I understand that it is a matter of manpower, which, I know, is stretched, but it would be great if those people were on the LITs so that we could access their expertise. They are experts in their area.

Ms McGowan: That would be the dream. It could include occupational therapists, physios and all the rest.

Mr Sheehan: That is what I was going to ask you about. You have identified all sorts of problems, and we have heard about them from other sources as well. If you were to have a blank sheet of paper to design a system that would work, what would that system look like?

Ms McGowan: We would align the Department of Health with the Department of Education. The children whom we see in nursery and early years have not met their developmental milestones, and we cannot put a pencil in their hand and say, "Right, you're ready to learn". Our children are not ready to learn. They need a multidisciplinary approach, with physios on board. If they do not get their gross motor skills, they will not get their fine motor skills. We also need a curriculum that reflects the children whom we are getting. We need to look at the intensive supports provided in early years and develop all the basics skills, such as motor skills, by getting them to learn to play and all those things.

We need to transform our curriculum so that it is geared towards the children whom we have in our classroom now. I know that what that will look like is on the agenda somewhere down the line, but, to me, it needs to include multidisciplinary thinking. From early years, we need to have OTs, physios and speech therapists working alongside our school providing group support. We rely on parents to take children to speech and language appointments. If they miss one, they are discharged or, if they are given three or four sessions, there is then a break for three or four months, after which they are reviewed again. We are getting children who cannot communicate, and, if they cannot communicate, that is when they will have behavioural issues, because there is frustration there. We need to meet all those needs before we can hand them a pencil and expect them to be ready to learn.

Mr Sheehan: Fundamentally, the Department of Education and the Department of Health need to collaborate to resolve all those problems.

Ms Stewart: Really from birth.

Mr Sheehan: It must amaze you that, at a strategic level, they are not doing that.

Ms McGowan: We were sold the promise that we were aligning with the health trust areas and that we would all work together, but there has been no mention of the Department of Health being involved in any of the local impact teams.

Mr Sheehan: We were all sold that promise, but we have been sold a pup.

Ms Stewart: It would be great.

Ms McGowan: Having that would be amazing.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We have run over time. Thank you for your patience in waiting to come to give evidence to the Committee. Your evidence has been incredibly helpful to us. I do not think that I am overstating that on behalf of any members. It has been so helpful to understand some of the realities on the front line.

I will finish by thanking you for the work that you do every day in schools. It is noted and appreciated in difficult circumstances, as, at times, it must feel as though the system is working against you when you are trying to meet those children's needs.

Ms McGowan: We have talked about ourselves a lot, but, ultimately, it is the children who miss out.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Absolutely.

Ms McGowan: I know that we have moaned an awful lot today, but, ultimately, we want the system to work for them.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That has come through.

Ms Stewart: That is why we went into teaching in the first place. People cannot work in education if their heart is not with the children. That is where a lot of the burnout and frustration comes from, because people see what they could and should be able to do, but they are only one person.

Ms McGowan: You are only one person, and you are trying to maintain positive relationships with parents while breaking bad news to them that is not of your making.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is an appropriate point on which to finish. There is nothing for me to add. Thank you for your time.