Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Joining us today we have Deirdre Ward, the Department of Education's director of SEN strategic policy; Julie McBride, the head of the Department's special education review team; Dr Tomas Adell, the Education Authority's (EA) chief transformation officer; and Craig Donnachie, the EA's SEN transformation programme director. You are all very welcome here again today. There is no point in too much preamble. We are in the middle of our inquiry, and we are pleased to be in that phase where we are hearing evidence from the Department. It is welcome that we are having joint evidence from the Department and the EA in relation to this, because clearly the policy and the operational elements have to align. I hand over to you for an initial presentation. Deirdre will be kicking off, after which we will go to questions and answers.

Ms Deirdre Ward (Department of Education): Thank you. I begin by thanking the Committee for the opportunity to brief members on the work that is being taken forward by the Department with our colleagues in the Education Authority. We are jointly delivering three of the early actions from the special educational needs reform delivery plan. It is crucial that collaboration underpins the delivery of the actions from the delivery plan. Our joint attendance today underscores the significance of that approach. The early actions that are being discussed represent an important and ambitious shift in how we support children and young people with SEN, embodying a move towards earlier intervention, greater inclusion, improved transparency and enhanced professional capability across the education sector and workforce. The successful delivery of these actions will create the conditions that are required for a more coherent outcomes-focused system that is capable of delivering the right support at the right time for highly skilled and competent professionals. I do not intend to take members through each of the early actions in any great detail, as that information has already been provided in the briefing paper that you received. Instead, I want to ensure that there is sufficient time available to address any specific questions that you may have.

I will give you a very brief update on the three early actions, which include the digitisation of the statutory assessment process, transforming the support model, and the design and trial of a teacher and classroom assistant professional learning programme. I am pleased to advise the Committee that the EA launched a new digital platform for the statutory assessment process on 12 January. That marked an important initial step towards a more modern, efficient and accessible system that enhances transparency, enables secure communication and provides improved digital support for parents, carers and schools. The platform portal had received 860 referrals as of 2.00 pm today; that is as up-to-date as we can get it. The efficiencies that are delivered through digitisation will play a critical role in enabling the EA to meet the new statutory assessment timescales of 22 weeks that are being introduced under the new SEN framework later in the year. We will deliver a briefing on the SEN framework to you next week.

The wider issue of how support is delivered in the classroom is closely aligned with the statutory assessment and statementing process. At present, we have a system that relies heavily on an almost universal model of one-to-one classroom assistant support. However, there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that one-to-one classroom assistance does not deliver the best outcomes for most children and, in some cases, can be counterproductive. During engagement, schools have been clear that they want a more flexible, child-centred model that sufficiently recognises their professional judgement. In partnership with the EA, we are exploring the best way to deliver a needs-led, whole-school support model that delivers improved outcomes for children and young people with a statement of SEN. That will build capacity across the education system and strengthen multidisciplinary practice. Schools will be able to allocate resources more effectively, focusing on the specific needs of individual children and students. The EA will set standards to promote fair support for everyone, supporting innovation and consistency. Progress to date has focused on undertaking a comprehensive analysis of the needs of 34,000 children with a statement of SEN across Northern Ireland, alongside an assessment of the support arrangements that are currently in place. A co-design approach is currently being adopted to ensure that all elements of the enhanced model of support are informed by the lived experience, professional expertise and operational insight of those who are working in and impacted on by the system.

It is important to emphasise that classroom assistants will continue to play a highly valued role in our schools and will remain integral to any future approaches. Work is under way to stabilise, strengthen and professionalise the classroom assistant role through improved contractual arrangements, career development options and the creation of specialist roles that are aligned to the enhanced models of support. Changing how the support for children and young people with a statement of SEN is delivered brings an opportunity for earlier and more effective intervention, improved use of resources and the professional development of the current workforce. Combined with the work of the new local impact teams (LITs), schools will be better equipped to meet the needs of children and young people in their settings. There is no doubt that the successful implementation of SEN reform is dependent on a confident, skilled and appropriately supported workforce. We recognise that sustained investment in the education workforce is long overdue.

The SEN reform agenda seeks to strengthen the minimum SEN content in initial teacher education (ITE) and to develop early professional development training for newly qualified teachers to ensure regular, high-quality training on SEN, disabilities and inclusive practice. In addition, there will be a new professional learning programme for teaching staff, a leadership programme for special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) and a universal SEN training programme for all front-line staff. That project is in the early stages of development and will be taken forward in partnership with the EA and higher education institutions. Our commitment is to invest meaningfully in the education workforce so that every member of staff feels supported, valued and equipped with the skills and the confidence that they need to support their children in the classroom today and in the future.

I now hand over to Tomas, who has some additional comments.

Dr Tomas Adell (Education Authority): I will try to keep them brief. First, thank you for bringing us back here. It is really important to work here, and I note that, importantly, both the EA and the Department are here. We work very well together. There are no barriers between us. We speak on most days, and that is the way that we get the best outcomes.

At the starting point of everything that we do in EA and the Department, of course, is the outcomes of children and young people. That is absolutely what we do. It is the same in SEN. For children with a statement of SEN, we know that, currently, we do not provide the best outcomes possible. I am going to be so blunt as to say that our current model of support is not optimal. For every day that we have the current model, our children are not getting the support that we should provide to make them thrive and have the best outcomes possible. I struggle to live with that. It is a driver for change. How we change it and make it better is what keeps me up at night. We have a huge amount of data in the EA. We have analysed, as Deirdre said, 34,000 existing statements and come up with something like 1,400 combinations of need. It is fairly good data. We tried to visualise it, but it became too messy because it is too detailed. Currently, the solution to that need is, essentially, three options: special schools, specialist provision and classroom assistants. That is a fairly blunt tool for a very varied need, and we need to make sure that the support actually matches the need, so we need to do better.

We have a huge and dedicated classroom assistant workforce. They work tirelessly to support the children with a statement of SEN, but we do not recognise their work. Many of those staff are highly skilled, experienced and trained, yet they are the lowest-paid members of staff in our schools. That is not right. We need to create a system where we professionalise and specialise the classroom assistant workforce; that gives people the space to have a match with the needs of children; helps create progressions and job satisfaction; and that will help our children grow and develop, and therefore have better outcomes when they leave education. That is the purpose of what we are doing. We want to build on the good-quality people that we have. We want to identify the experience and expertise, and we want to specialise the skills so that we match needs with skills of support. We also want to bring in other professionals in schools. We need to have health and social care, youth workers and others. We have talked about that before. I will not talk about details, but that may be part of the model. Of course, we also need specialist teachers and other specialists who can deliver at that level. It is about having a multidisciplinary, multi-specialism workforce in the school at different tiers meeting different needs. That works in many other places in the world. That is, if you look at other parts of the world where they have good outcomes, that is what they do. There is no reason that we cannot do it as well and have the good outcomes that others have, so that is why we need to change.

We also need to recognise that the people who know our children best and know how to support children are our schools, school leaders and school staff. Therefore, we want to give the power to school leaders to drive change and to decide exactly how their support should be delivered in schools. We appreciate there are pressures on workforce in school leaders. We need to provide systems to support what we are doing as well. I will not go into detail on that, simply because of time pressures here. Fundamentally, it is about creating better outcomes for children and young people. We need to have a system that maximises their potential to deliver. Currently, we do not. Thank you very much.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Thank you both for the opening remarks. I want to go straight to that new model of support that you both highlighted. Deirdre, you described it as a "needs-led, whole-school support model". Can you talk me through how you envisage that? What will it look like? It is really quite far away from what we have right now. Right now, the process tends to be assigning an adult to a child, and that tends to follow them through their school journey. Will whoever feels that they want to take the question talk me through, to give us a sense of what that new model will look like in practice and how it will operate?

Ms Ward: I will start off. For us, it about seeing whether we can get the delivery of support services to children to the level closest and nearest to knowing the child, which is within the school. That whole model of support might mean that a child needs some help with behaviour. They might need occupational therapy or support with literacy or any of those things. What are the exact circumstances of that child's need, and how does the school best support that child's needs to help them to engage and move forward? Some children will still need a classroom assistant if they have very complex medical needs and require support throughout the day. Other children might need other forms of support to help them with behaviour and communication might be more appropriate and might support their learning journey to be more effective in the long term, achieving better outcomes.

Dr Adell: The starting point is the five SEN categories. We want people to have specialisms and professionalisms in those SEN categories so that schools can meet the needs of children who have those needs. We want there to be different tiering or banding, or whatever language you want to use. I do not want to sound bad here, but, essentially, people who are more skilled and experienced are in a higher band, tier or grade and can therefore help more complex children. People in lower bands can help a different group of children, and there can be career progression through those bands. That builds a model in a school where you have a workforce that is much more agile and flexible to meet the needs of children, and it can easily change and grow as a child changes and grows. The needs of a child in P1 are not the same as the needs of a child in year 12. Their needs are different. The need must change with the child. That kind of model would create stability in schools. The staff should be permanent employees; they should not be temporary staff. I echo what Deirdre said, but I do not want to call them assistants. I think that we need to change the language. They are not assistants. They have their own skill set that supports children. That is more semantics, but it highlights the point that they are not second-tier staff; they are their own workforce.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): To take it a bit further, some of that still feels a bit aspirational and quite theoretical. Your briefing suggests that the roll-out will begin in September, with full roll-out in September 2028. I want to get a sense of what you anticipate that it will look like. I am not clear whether that is a resource of highly qualified, well-trained classroom assistants who are situated in a school and can be deployed as that school sees fit. Will that be combined with other external EA support professionals and health professionals coming in? My concern is that we do not have a structure that provides good training and support for classroom assistants. We do not have a system of contracts that even provides them with security. In the roll-out of the LITs, we are hearing from schools that they are struggling to get in the support that they need. If we are already dealing with those challenges, and we know that there are massive problems in respect of the capacity of Health to weigh in, how do we move that beyond a theoretical aspiration to something that is being delivered on the ground in schools, potentially from September?

Dr Adell: There are two aspects to that. First, we can have a model that we can start to implement this year. We will not finish implementing it this year. I want to make that really clear. Some aspects of the model might be quicker to implement. There are already 100 to 150 schools doing things differently that are more towards this kind of model. We can encourage those schools to develop and do even more, which is a good start. We have really good examples from real life of how this works. Some aspects of it, such as bringing in healthcare professionals in larger numbers, will take a long time. There is no way around that, because we need to train up new staff. We have 95-ish educational psychologists in the EA. There are not many others to employ in Northern Ireland, so even if we wanted to employ more tomorrow, we could not. We require educational psychologists to have doctorates in educational psychology, which is right, but maybe in this different model we having psychology assistants, for example, who have a degree in psychology and can deliver under the direction of an educational psychologist. It is about balance. Some of those discussions will take significantly longer, because those are new models of staff with healthcare professionals. That will take a number of years. There is no way around saying that. If we do not try to change, we will never get to that point, so we must create the model to start the process of change to get there, if you know what I mean. If we wait until it is perfect, we will wait forever.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I will ask a final question before I bring other members in. It is a big shift, and there will be different views around the table about the reform of the one-to-one classroom assistant model. Does it need reformed? Does it not? Other members can speak for themselves. I think we would all agree on — I think I am OK to speak for the Committee — enhanced training, enhancement of the classroom assistant's role and better terms and conditions, but it is a big shift. We are conscious of the budgetary constraints in the system. How do we resource the enhanced workforce that you aspire to?

Dr Adell: There are two answers. First, the amount of money allocated to SEN is, and should be, a political decision. I just want to stress that the EA delivers. The current model creates uncontrollable spending that is not value for money. My current spend is roughly in the region of £700 million. I estimate that if we continue with what we are doing now, by 2030, my spend will be over £1 billion. If we use a model that does things differently and is cheaper, that is a good starting point. It is not about saving money; it is about a better investment of the money we have to get better outcomes. That is a simple answer.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I could ask a lot more in response to that, but I will bring in other members in the interests of time.

Mr Burrows: Thanks, that was useful. Do you agree that we need to minimise working from home to have child-centred local impact teams? Recently, a primary-school principal stated that they have been waiting since October for their LIT worker.

Dr Adell: LIT workers are based at home, but they should spend the majority of their working time in schools.

Mr Burrows: Yes. I keep asking for figures. Are there any figures that break down how much time LIT workers spend in schools versus home?

Dr Adell: I have those figures, but I do not have them with me. I can provide that information in writing to the Committee.

Mr Burrows: Thanks. Do you accept, in principle, that some pupils will always require a classroom assistant by their side, even if it is more expensive? I am not saying all pupils, but some pupils.

Dr Adell: Absolutely. Our aim is to maximise the outcomes for children and young people with SEN. They should have a one-to-one classroom assistant if that is the right way to do that, and there is no discussion about that.

Mr Burrows: Yes. With the reconfiguration of classroom assistants, will the risk of burnout and stress be monitored so that people do not leave the profession?

Dr Adell: Absolutely. We already do a fair bit of monitoring of workloads and pressures, and we have recently opened up training — this shows a big need, by the way — on health and well-being sessions for SENCOs, for example. In quite a lot of places, the sessions were all booked within an hour. There was a much higher demand than we expected. Clearly, we need to run more of those sessions, and we take that kind of work very seriously and will continue doing that.

Mr Burrows: Finally, many of these reforms depend on new structures — LITs, resource hubs and nurture programmes. We already have multiple overlapping EA services. What assessment has been done to ensure that these models will not duplicate the existing provision or create new layers of cost without fixing the underlying problems?

Dr Adell: That is a very good question.

Ms Ward: It is about collaborating to make sure that the structures do not overlap, duplicate or pull against one another. We work closely together on every step of SEN reform to take those models forward.

Dr Adell: We are not perfect. We regularly find duplications that we try to fix. If there are particular things you have in mind, please let us know, and we will work with it. Nurture is a good example of a programme that is working well, and it should be incorporated into the SEN support offering, so we need to be part of that work.

Mr Burrows: There are always tensions and duplications. That is good. Thank you for your clear answers.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I failed to pay attention to the notes that the Clerk was writing down for me, and I allowed Jon to gazump Danny. I will bring Danny in now.

Mr Burrows: Always good.

Mr Baker: I will continue with the classroom assistants. If you currently have the support of a classroom assistant, is there no danger of that being removed?

Dr Adell: May I reframe the question? I am not trying to be awkward, but I want the child to have the best outcome possible. If a child has a classroom assistant now, that must be evaluated all the time. It is about how best the child's needs are met as they grow and develop. The needs of most children who are given a classroom assistant in P1 will be radically different when they get to year 12, because they have grown and developed. The support that we offer to a child should be based on evidence of what provides the best outcomes for that child to thrive. It is a simple as that. If the answer is that the child requires a classroom assistant, that child should keep the classroom assistant.

Mr Baker: One of the reasons why a child needs a classroom assistant is because they have been misplaced in the first place. Year on year, there are hundreds of children who are being placed in the wrong settings. Do you accept that?

Dr Adell: I would not say that they are being placed in the wrong setting. I would say we are not as optimal as we can be. You have used the word "wrong", but they are not in the most optimal setting. I would be more comfortable using that language.

Mr Baker: That is why they need that additional support. Someone will come along and say, "Right, we are going to take that away because we do not feel that you need that right now".

Dr Adell: That is not —. The purpose of this is to —.

Mr Baker: We can wrap anything up by saying that it is in the best needs of the child, but it is really a cut to save money.

Dr Adell: I hear what you are saying, but I am not saving money by doing this. This is about getting better outcomes for children. We know that many children need a classroom assistant, and they should keep that classroom assistant. The reality is, however, that we also know that some children who have classroom assistants become dependent on the adult. That is wrong, and we want the classroom assistants that they have —.

Mr Baker: They did not get wraparound support. That is my whole point about misplacement.

Dr Adell: Yes, but the whole point is that we want to change it so that the support that the child needs is available to them. Therefore, the best support for the child is the bigger picture, which is about more adults in general, but not necessarily on a one-to-one basis.

Mr Baker: We know that Health is not really at the table. We know that children are not, to use your word, in optimal placements. Is specialist provision in mainstream schools (SPiMS) working?

Dr Adell: SPiMS is working well. I want to distinguish two different things about SPiMS. There is the concept of SPiMS, and there is the practice of SPiMS. The concept behind SPiMS — to have smaller classroom settings for children who require that — is right. SPiMS is working very well for many children. For some children, SPiMS is not working well, so we need to find solutions for that. Sometimes, that is because a SPiMS setting is wrong, or because the support network around the SPiMS is wrong.

Mr Baker: Some children will be in a SPiMS setting from P1 to P7. That is not a whole-school environment, so that concept is out the window.

Dr Adell: The smaller class size is right for some children, because that is what they individually need. They should be integrated into the wider school setting, but the SPiMS should be staffed so that those children can be guided and supported to develop and thrive as they are. For some children, it is right to be in a small class setting throughout their whole schooling. For some children, it is right for part of their schooling. It all depends on the needs of the child, and that is what we need to respond to. We have excellent examples of some children with very significant needs who are in schools that are currently doing things differently. There are children who have been in a SPiMS, essentially — it may be called different things — and have been helped and supported and, through developing with really good staff in that school, transitioned into mainstream classes and are thriving academically and are doing really well. That must also exist; it is about finding the right setting for the child.

Mr Baker: I have no doubt that there are good examples. However, even in your own briefing paper, you accept that you do not even have the data on reduced timetables. The number of families that have come to me is in the hundreds, and I am only one MLA in one wee constituency. I know of hundreds of children who are on reduced timetables. You do not even have a grip on that. That is because they are not placed in the right setting, or they are out of school because their classroom assistant, for whatever reason, has not been available or the school cannot get a classroom assistant. You have talked about flexibility, but with all due respect, school leaders are being told that they cannot spend their own budgets.

Dr Adell: That is exactly —.

Mr Baker: You are asking for a lot of trust. You are asking us to trust you. I am a bit tired of hearing the same rhetoric coming back to us, whether it is from the Department or the EA. Having talked to parents of children with additional needs in my constituency, I do not feel that they are getting support or that their lives are improving. We are about to go into another cycle very shortly where children are not going to be placed at the same time as their peers. We are treating children with additional needs completely differently from children who are in mainstream education.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Final response, Tomas.

Dr Adell: I know that there is a lot of distrust in the system. We have talked about that before. I cannot do any more than be open and honest with you. I have been open and honest with you completely about the way in which I see it. I have no reason to hide anything. For children with a SEN statement, and those with SEN in general, the reality is that our outcomes are not as good as those in other jurisdictions. That is black and white. Our model does not replicate a system that does things well. The obvious solution is to find a different model that matches what others do well. It is about having specialist, trained people who know how to deal with the specific needs of children.

You said that there is an issue with SPiMS. A lot of it works very well, but I am the first to accept that, for some, SPiMS does not work. However, if we have the right staff for the children in the schools, there is a much higher chance that the SPiMS will work.

Mr Baker: This is my last point.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Final point.

Mr Baker: There are schools that have been promised SPiMS, but it is not in place yet. There are children in centres that are not fit for purpose as a temporary stopgap, but they are moving into their second year of that. I get the concept of what you want to see. It all sounds great, but that is not the reality on the ground. Trust will build when I start seeing outworkings and improvements — I will gladly say, "Yeah, brilliant" — but that is not happening. I fear that, this year, we will end up in another cycle of parents being stressed all the way through the summer.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I have to draw a line at that stage. Michelle, you indicated next. Apologies, I had not noted that; the Committee Clerk noted the indications before I did. That was entirely my mistake.

Mrs Guy: Thanks, folks, for coming in. The move around one-to-one support was talked about. We knew that it had to be done sensitively, that there would be a lot of concern from parents, and that there would have to be evidence to support it. I am concerned about the communication. The first time that a lot of parents heard about it as being real was in a consultation on the five-year budget strategy for education. It speaks of costs and budget savings, not of a child-centred approach. What can you do to try to rebuild trust, so that people believe that the move is genuinely about the child, rather than cost?

Ms Ward: A lot more work needs to be done with parents to involve them in the discussion. There are plans to do some consultation work, where we will talk very specifically to parents to understand their concerns and challenges, in order to shape the model as we move forward. Our proposal is that that consultation work will start very shortly. I agree that it is not ideal that it was aligned to the budget statement. There is anxiety out there, which we want to address through proper engagement and consultation. There are already some plans in place to begin that engagement with school leaders and special school leaders very early in March.

Mrs Guy: Good luck with that. It is not going to be easy, and you do not want the process to be fraught with misunderstanding, or to create anxiety. A lot of people think that the move is sensible, but that was not a sensitive approach to a sensitive topic.

This is all about one-to-one support's being linked to kids with a statement. I heard yesterday from a SENCO with 18 years of experience, who said that this week was the first time that she had had a request for a statutory assessment rejected, and that that was because of LIT involvement. If a child is known to the LITs, will their statutory assessment automatically be turned down? Is that now the process?

Dr Adell: No. It is as simple as that. They are not exclusionary processes. If a SENCO, or anyone else, for that matter, thinks that a child requires a statutory assessment, they should make a referral. There is then an assessment of whether the requirements for a statutory assessment are met. Those requirements have not changed. They are the same requirements as they have been in the past about evidence and those things when it comes to the child's needs. During that assessment process, there is an assessment of the needs by ed psychs and others. That has not changed with the start of the LITs.

Mrs Guy: Is there no requirement for a child to have gone through LIT support before they can go to a statutory assessment?

Dr Adell: There is no requirement. For some children, a less-serious intervention will be the more appropriate way through, but, for others, it will not. There is no requirement to have a LIT service before you have a statutory assessment. They are not exclusive in that way.

Mrs Guy: How do we explain that rejection, then, based on LIT involvement? That does not sound like an assessment; it sounds as though someone just checked a box.

Dr Adell: I cannot talk about that individual case because I know nothing about it. If you want to come to me afterwards, we will look into that. It is not a tick-box exercise in that way. I say that categorically. That is not the way it is.

Mrs Guy: It is helpful for us to have these conversations. Time and time again, we find that the understanding of the process on a page and the understanding of how it is applied in the real world do not align.

Dr Adell: This is the thing at the minute. My statutory assessment team is doing really hard work. It is an incredibly challenging job. Each member of the team has a huge caseload. Of course, we get things wrong. I am not talking about that case; I am talking in general. Things will go wrong, and we can only put our hands up. We will try to fix things when they go wrong, but we are not perfect. We have had 860 referrals in the first five weeks. We usually get 500 a month, so there has been a massive increase compared with what we usually get. My link officers have between 650 and 750 cases each, so their workload is massive. Things go wrong. We cannot talk about individual cases here, but, if you come and speak to us, we will look at individual cases. That is what we do all the time. When we have done something wrong, we hold our hands up. I have no problem with saying that.

Mrs Guy: Will you feed that back into the system?

Dr Adell: Absolutely.

Mrs Guy: May I ask a final question?

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Briefly, yes.

Mrs Guy: It is a quick one. It is good to have the EA and the Department together here. It is good to hear you say that you are working closely together. I am going to bang a drum that I have banged many times before about support for resourcing LITs. I asked the Department about that last week. The answer was, "The EA hasn't asked us for any extra money to support the LITs". That was a disappointing answer, because I am not sure that the EA needs to ask for that; it is clear and evident — I put this to the Minister as well — that those teams need to be supported. That is where the support on the ground is supposed to happen. If we are saying that, potentially, children will not get statemented unless they go through a LIT, those teams have to be supported. Can someone explain to me why those teams are not being supported financially, and why they are not getting that basic level of resourcing that they need to even attempt to be effective?

Dr Adell: I do not know who gave you that response.

Mrs Guy: The response was, "You haven't put a business case in, so that's why you've got no money".

Dr Adell: I assure you that it was not from any of us. This year, I expect to spend £690 million, about £24 million of which will be on LITs. My budget for this year is £622 million, so I have a £70 million deficit in my budget.

Mrs Guy: I am asking these guys why they are not giving you the money that you need.

Dr Adell: The financial position across Education is not a secret. These guys —.

Mrs Guy: Money is being spent on other things, but we are told that this will be transformational.

Dr Adell: Yes, but it needs new money. Almost everything that we spend is on staff. We cannot stop spending here in order to spend over there, even if that is better, because the staff are over here. That would require a lot of things, such as statutory redundancies and all those kinds of things, which involve a whole different process, and which would cost money. We cannot do those things when we have deficits, so it becomes a vicious cycle. We are fully in agreement that, in order to transform the wider SEN work, when it comes to how we spend the pot of money overall, we should not have black-and-white lines in the sand between different services. Silo working is not right for children. There needs to be much more flexibility across the spectrum. It is then about reprofiling how we spend the money so that it meets children's needs. Consequently, that means that the support service in general will grow and develop naturally.

Mrs Guy: I do not think that you are going to convince me.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I have to draw a line at that stage. Other members may wish to pick up on resourcing.

Mrs Mason: I am not going to get into this with you, Tomas, because we have been through it before, but we have heard that, even if the LITs were fully resourced, the system just is not right at the moment. However, that is not where I want to go. Deirdre, I go back to your response to the Chair on the whole-school approach. You mentioned behavioural, therapy and literacy support, and how the school can support children in that regard. I am not hearing how the EA and the Department will support the school, so that it can provide that support. Let us talk about the elephant in the room: during the industrial dispute — we have seen this in the media — the head teachers' union has cited SEN safeguarding pressures, including appropriate placements of high-risk vulnerable pupils, inconsistent or unacceptable support from the Education Authority, and school leaders being left accountable for decisions outside their control.

We are now one year on from the beginning of the dispute, and, based on what you are saying on paper, and on what is happening on the ground, we are now seeing that playing out. Is the Minister going in the wrong direction?

Ms Ward: No, I do not think so. We want the best outcomes that we can achieve for children. There has been a letter from the union. An independent panel has been appointed, which reported in November on the workload pressures of teachers. That report is being considered, and all the recommendations have been formulated into an action plan. That is expected in April this year, so we are not far away from taking forward actions from that workload panel piece of work.

Mrs Mason: I appreciate that, Deirdre, but can you see the contradiction? On one hand, we are talking about all these different things, and about how a school can do this and that, and, on the other, we are talking about a workload agreement that has not been implemented.

I will not take us down another rabbit hole on TransformED, the pace and scale of all those changes, and where our school leaders are on that. It seems that the focus is on how the school will do that, with less of a focus on how the EA and the Department will support the school to do it. I say it again: we see that playing out. None of us wants to be in the situation where school leaders take industrial action, because, at the end of the day, our children will suffer. The Minister said:

That is not where we are headed.

Dr Adell: May I give you four examples? We cannot fix everything at once. I am talking about SEN alone. First of all, we are finalising an enhanced support package, or whatever you want to call it, for SPiMS. That includes SENCO releases, extra admin funding for new SPiMS and retrospective funding for existing SPiMS. That will come into place this autumn. The details are being finalised as we speak.

Secondly, we are doing health and well-being classes for SENCOs. The demand was much higher than we expected. Those classes booked out within an hour last week. We are looking at having more of those classes. That is one quite small but important thing.

Thirdly, there is a particular piece around special school nursing, which is an absolute requirement. It would relieve workload and pressures on special schools. That is one of the things that principals tell me that we need to fix.

Fourthly — I have not put it last because it is less important — as part of the enhanced support model, we need to make sure that teachers and school principals do not do basic admin functions. SENCOs have specialist skills in SEN; they should work with children. We have not got to the point of exactly what that will look like, but that is part of the enhanced support model. I hope that those four examples give you some assurance.

Mrs Mason: I hand it to you: you have a focus on complex medical needs. However, if the school leaders whom I know listen to that, they will say, "OK, they're tiny things". There are chronic issues and chronic failings right across the system that have led them to this point. I see a huge contradiction in trying to load more onto them without the support to follow it up. None of them is saying, "We're not up for the task", or that they do not want to provide that support for children. Of course they do, but they cannot do it on their own, and they cannot do it with the pressures that they are currently facing. Nothing that has been said here gives me any hope.

Dr Adell: I hear what you are saying, and I do not disagree with you. First of all, in those four examples, the support for special provision is not a small package; it is a multi-million-pound package to support schools. It is not one-off support; it is ongoing.

With special nursing, we have to start somewhere. We cannot do everything at once. That is a particular one that has a fix. Health and well-being for SENCOs is a small thing in itself, but it was more to show that we are really trying to find solutions. We are starting from a position that is not fantastic, but we cannot fix everything at once. We have to go incrementally, and see what works and what does not. However, part of the enhanced support model will involve different ways of supporting schools. I do not want SENCOs to fill out paperwork and do admin. That should be done by someone else. I want a SENCO to lead the SEN response to the children, if you see what I am trying to distinguish. Again, it is about trust. Will they trust us to do that? I cannot force people to trust us, but we are taking it seriously, and we want to find solutions.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Final comment from Cathy, and then we will close this one.

Mrs Mason: I do not know whether there is anything more that I can say. I do not feel any reassurance, and I do not believe that any school leaders who are watching will feel any reassurance from the Department, either, but I appreciate your response.

Mr Brooks: Thanks for your presentation. I think that, in recent years, people would agree that some correct and positive decisions have been made about reform in the health service, but they were made in a moment of crisis, because, ultimately, that is where it had to get to before people would make those decisions.

I am not trying to make a party political point, but Danny said earlier that his trust will come when he sees it. You have to be brave enough to argue for reform when you see a system that is broken and needs to be reformed, but I also acknowledge that there are an awful lot of parents who feel the same way that Danny articulated: they will believe it when they see it. However, that is an easier approach to take when you are used to a system and you just want more investment in it so that, hopefully, it will work better.

You said that your budget this year is £622 million. I see also from the presentation that you have given us that, on current forecasting assumptions, that will increase to £1·27 billion by 2027-28 if no action is taken to reform the system. My maths is not great, but it seems that you currently have about half of what that will be. If you had that kind of shortfall in your budget, what would that look like for the system?

Dr Adell: To clarify, I think that those are two different budget figures. My budget is £622 million. My spend is £690 million. My forecast in my particular thing — sorry for not being clear enough — is just over £1 billion by 2030. That covers slightly different areas, but, fundamentally, if we were sticking with my current budget and current growth, it would mean that we have to drastically cut classroom assistant hours. I reckon that, for many children, that would mean that we have to cut about half. Currently, for new classroom assistants in the mainstream, we allocate, on average, around 20 hours per child. If we were to cut that down to about 10 hours per child in the mainstream, I could probably live within budget. That is where I would have to go if I had to live within budget, but that is also why we are not living within budget at the moment. That is why I am overspending: we are not willing to make that decision, but that is what it would look like if I were to stick within budget.

Mr Brooks: So, it is right to say that the current system is not sustainable. Sometimes, it is presented as your trying to save money, rather than look after kids' well-being. Kids' well-being will be worse off in the future if we do not get our accounts right; if we are not able to spend within our limits. Therefore, the reforms are really about making sure that we have as optimal a system as possible for the child. It is not just about saving money. Is that right?

Dr Adell: It is all about having the optimal outcome for the child.

Ms Ward: Yes.

Dr Adell: There are three problems. One is the money, as I said. That is an underlying thing, but it is not the core reason. It is about the outcome for children. Currently, we do not deliver the best outcome for children that we can. We cannot recruit classroom assistants in some parts of the current model. The workforce does not exist, and that is really difficult. A significant number of our partner workforce is quite transient. The turnover is very high.

Mr Brooks: There is a spectrum of those who are particularly skilled at what they do and others who have just joined the workforce. Schools say to me at times that that is a tick-box exercise: they need to provide someone, and someone is available, and so they are put there. It is a false narrative to suggest that the current system is not as varied as that, or that one-to-one support is always the gold standard for every child. It is important that we make those arguments for reform, and that we make it clear that, although it may be about making sure that we can live within our limits, it is also about making sure that we are making the best use of our money to support those kids and get them the best service possible.

Dr Adell: You talked about healthcare transformation. I was in the Department of Health for quite a long time. When I went into work every day, I asked myself whether I would want to be a patient in the system. I have three children. Would I want my children, if they had a statement of SEN, or if they had SEN, to go through the current system here? The answer is no. If that is what I think, how could I live with myself if I did not try to change things? Will we get every change that we want to make right? Probably not. However, if we look at other models in the world, we see that they do things radically differently and get much better outcomes. That is what we need to look at.

I was over in Sweden a few weeks ago. I am Swedish, as you know. I visited my old junior high school, which has 400 kids aged 13 to 16. Sweden has a radically different model and much better outcomes than we do. Granted, the whole culture and the whole system is different, so you cannot just transpose it. It has very different outcomes for SEN children. The whole concept of how to treat children with SEN is different in the first place. That school has a special school section of the school, it has a small SPiMS-like area, and it has a mainstream school in the same building. You do not separate out SEN children there because that does not make sense. Can we get that in Northern Ireland? That is tricky with our infrastructure, our culture and all of those things, but they are children. We are not treating many SEN children as children. We are treating them as something else. First and foremost, they are children. They have a right to education, and they have a right to thrive, grow and develop. We do not do that. We do not let them do that. We must change that; otherwise, how could I live with myself? How could Craig, Deirdre and Julie live with themselves? We could not live with ourselves if we did not try to change things.

There are questions about what it should be. We can argue about that, but we need to move away from the fact that, currently, we are not doing it right. We need to accept that, and, therefore, we must find alternatives. If the model that we are proposing is not what we should do, do not tell us that it is wrong; tell us what we should do instead. What we see in international evidence is what we are proposing. If there are other options, please bring them on. I am all up for that, but do not tell us just to keep doing what we are doing, because that does not work for our children.

Mr Brooks: When you are before us, we always see your passion for what you work at, and that is great. My next question was about evidence anyway, so some of those international examples were very useful.

I always thought that you had an east Belfast accent, but there we go. [Laughter.]

Dr Adell: I have lived in east Belfast for many years, but I am Swedish, yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I will pick up on the question about evidence, because it is really important. It has been cited a number of times across your evidence session that evidence of best practice shows that what we do does not deliver best outcomes, and that there are better systems out there. Can you share material on that with the Committee to help us?

Ms Ward: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): We are running an inquiry, and I would like us to come forward with recommendations that are constructive.

Ms Ward: We can produce a paper on all of the evidence that we have reviewed and brief you on that.

Dr Adell: I had intended to have a paper with you on Friday last week, but I spent the week in hospital, so I could not. Sorry.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): I hope that you are recovered.

Dr Adell: It was my daughter.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): OK. It would be really helpful for the Committee to see that, even as a written briefing as a starting point, to get a sense of it. I feel that, sometimes, we are at risk of descending into anecdotal evidence. We hear that evidence says something, and members will say, "Well, my constituents say different". Where does that really get us? Some of the evidence would be helpful.

Ms Ward: If the Committee wants a demonstration of the digitised system, we would be happy to organise that to let you see how it works.

Dr Adell: If we have screens, it makes it much easier for us to give that presentation because, obviously, it is a digital system.

When it comes to evidence, I highlight the fact that proper outcomes evidence on children with SEN is a very long-term piece. It is not quick evidence, because how well they do after school is what provides proper evidence. There are challenges. It is not about saying, "This child gets".

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Again, it is a question of what we are measuring. It is not just GCSEs.

Ms Ward: No, it is not just educational. It is about distance travelled.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Yes, and well-being measures and all of that. I appreciate that it is not straightforward, but I wanted to put that out about the evidence. David referenced that. I think that we would welcome some of that material.

Mr Brooks: Chair, on that presentation, the figure was in the same section, in case you wanted to look at it. It was 22, and then the —.

Dr Adell: We will get back to you.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): That is great. Thank you all for your time.

Mrs Mason: We wish your daughter all the best, Tomas.

The Chairperson (Mr Mathison): Yes, absolutely.