Parks Special Nursery Consultation

Yes. Public consultation on the Parks Special Nursery School is running from 1 November to 3 December 2023. All responses we receive via our dedicated consultation email address during this period will be considered.

The Council has enlisted Maureen Morris to support the consultation and provide an independent overview of the process. Maureen is a parent-carer herself and has worked as a parent participation consultant nationally for a number of years, as well as being an associate of the charity Contact for families with disabled children. She is highly experienced in gathering the voice of parents, carers, and children. 

Maureen is reviewing the comments, questions and responses as they come in, and she will take into account the impact on the author, the number of responses and the themes raised to compile a report. Maureen Morris is providing an independent view on the consultation process and the comments that come in. She has been fully informed of the launch,  the content of the proposal and sees all entries to the Council. She is asking questions of the Council as they arise.  

From this, a report will be created and presented to Rutland County Council Cabinet which will be published in advance of the Cabinet meeting. The Cabinet will then make a decision on the proposal. The Council will publish all representations received as part of the Parks consultation. This information will be anonymised, so as not to identify individual respondents, and will be made publicly available with papers for the Council’s January 2024 Cabinet Meeting. Councillors will also receive this information. 

An experienced group of independent SEND professionals has been reviewing the special provision at The Parks Nursery School since 2019. This has been done to examine the current arrangements and make sure they are fit for purpose, or plan for a future delivery model. Following on from this review, a working group made of Council officers, The Parks staff, Oakham Primary School teaching staff and leadership, as well as parent governors, was set up to develop a more inclusive Early Years offer for Rutland, targeting a wider group of children including those with additional needs.

The funding for Special Needs education and provision comes from the High Needs Fund (HNF), which is part of the Dedicated Schools Budget. The HNF is currently running at a deficit of £1.3million. The Parks has a Minimum Funding Guarantee of £250,719 for 7.5 places. This is to ensure the school and the provision has sufficient funding to maintain a safe learning environment for students.

This money will not be taken away from the school but will be used to enhance the offer at Oakham Primary School in line with the Memorandum of Understanding between the Council and the School. This will be done by increasing the number of places in the school’s Designated Special Provision (DSP) from September 2024.

There are currently no nursery age children at the Parks Nursery Special School. All children currently at the Parks are of school age (Reception) and may be supported in Oakham Primary School’s Designated Special Provision (DSP). In the previous two academic years, there were no more than three nursery age children attending the Parks, all of whom did so on a part time basis. Looking ahead, we are not aware of any children of nursery age needing specialist nursery provision from September 2024. This means there would be no increase in the number of children needing nursery places in mainstream settings if The Parks provision were to close.

The number of children in mainstream nurseries or with a childminder would not change if the Parks were to close. This is because there are currently no nursery aged children attending The Parks. Early Years providers receive funding from a range of sources - the High Needs Fund, from the schools DCG budget and from the Councils Inclusion fund. From January 2024, the local authority is making changes to funding available for nurseries and childminders, so they can offer SEND support to wider range of children. This is called SENIF and the changes means that the SENIF spend is set to be higher than ever before for Spring 2024 term under a new banding system. Early Years providers should receive a similar amount of SENIF funding for children aged 3 and 4 years under the new banding system as they would have for applications under the old system. There is also exceptional funding that providers can apply for if further funding is required to meet a child’s needs.

 This will allow the sector to provide additional support at the earliest opportunity and improve the long-term outcomes for our children with special educational needs and disabilities. Rutland County Council continues to provide this inclusion funding at a significantly higher rate than neighbouring local authorities.

The expertise of Rutland nurseries is growing rapidly and is currently the best it’s ever been, following support from our Early Years SEN Specialist Teacher. Nurseries and childminders can contact the Specialist Teacher at any point. They have also identified and provided bespoke training for mainstream practitioners, to help meet the needs of children with SEND. The Council’s Inclusion Team is providing more targeted support for nurseries and childminders who care for children with the most complex needs.

A Schools Support Partnership (SSP) has also been set up to promote inclusion in all schools in Rutland. The Partnership provides support for Speech, Language and Communication needs (SLC), advice for settings, training for all staff in the identification of SLC needs, ideas for promoting good SLC development and strategies for supporting children experiencing difficulties or delays. Rutland County Council also continues to fund training for Rutland Early Years practitioners from entry level inclusion training to Level 3 inclusive practice training, alongside a wide range of courses from quality trainers, such as Dingley’s Promise and Nasen.

More than 70 Early Years practitioners have now accessed inclusion training with Dingley’s Promise. The Disability Access Fund remains available for nurseries and childminders to use for children claiming Disability Living Allowance. This helps settings to provide the facilities or make adaptations and adjustments to their environment to ensure accessibility for children with additional needs. 

There are currently 11 Rutland children under the age of five (Nursery and Reception age) with EHC Plans. A further two children under the age of five are currently being assessed. In the past three years, we have refused to assess one child under five for an EHC Plan. This initial decision was eventually reviewed and a needs assessment was carried out. We have not refused to issue any EHC Plans to children under five years of age during the past three years.

There are currently no children of nursery age being assessed for an EHC Plan and none being appealed.

Children with special educational needs and disabilities will continue to receive the right care and support in Early Years settings, whatever the outcome of this consultation. As a Local Authority, we have a legal duty under Section 27 of the Children & Families Act 2014 to keep under review the educational, training and social care provision made for children and young people with SEND. We must consider the extent to which the education, training and social care provision is sufficient to meet the educational, training and social care needs of the children and young people with SEND.

As we have referenced already, a recent Local Area Inspection by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission reviewed the Rutland’s provision for children with additional needs and found these services to be among the best anywhere in the country.

Inspectors from Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) reviewed assessments and plans belonging to more than 100 children and young people. They visited education settings, including Early Years and post 16 settings. They also spoke with children and parents in Rutland, as well as those in out-of-county placements.

We want to increase opportunities for children with SEND or emerging needs to access mainstream Early Years education closer to home. This would reduce the need for long journeys and give children with additional needs the opportunity to form friendships with other local children their age. There are currently 338 children and young people in Rutland with an EHCP and of these,  237 are in mainstream settings. 

The Designated Specialist Provision (DSP) at Oakham Primary School will be equipped to meet the needs of many of our Rutland children who may have previously attended The Parks Nursery Special School in Reception or Year 1. Our mainstream schools are also rapidly developing their expertise as part of Rutland’s School Support Partnership (SSP). In addition to this, several primary schools are now creating more flexible mainstream offers of provision to meet children’s needs and are doing so effectively and inclusively. As a result, there are lots more opportunities for children who may have attended The Parks in the past to access and thrive in a mainstream setting.

Rutland County Council does not expect the number of children travelling outside of the county for specialist provision to change. This remains a very low number of Early Years aged children. There are currently no Rutland children of nursery age and just three children in Reception or Year 1 attending out of county specialist provision.

The Designated Specialist Provision (DSP) is part of Oakham Primary School, which is an academy in The Rutland Learning Trust. It caters for children whose special educational needs and/or disabilities require specialist support over and above that which a mainstream school can normally provide as part of an EHC Plan. The DSP provides care and support for pupils from Reception, Key Stage 1 and 2.

The DSP is designed to enable primary phase children with SEND, who require specialist and individualised support, to continue to access and experience mainstream education by offering them the opportunity to access aspects of the mainstream curriculum, the internal environment and the external environment of a mainstream school as appropriate. They do this while continuing to receive individualised specialist support within designated DSP facilities.

The DSP supports children with the following Special Educational Needs:

• Cognition and Learning - children with learning difficulties which are persistent over time, pervasive across the curriculum and which affect, alter or slow their learning.
• Communication and Interaction needs - children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) and have difficulty in communicating with others. This may be because they have difficulty saying what they want to, understanding what is being said to them or they do not understand or use social rules of communication. The profile for every child with SLCN is different and their needs may change over time.

Like the Parks Special Nursery, Oakham Primary School's DSP is not intended to provide support to children who have severe or profound and multiple learning difficulties, who are likely to have significant levels of support requirements across all areas of special educational needs and daily care.

The provision may support children whose special educational needs might also require emotional and behavioural support and wider adaptation. This includes children with low to moderate behavioural support and sensory needs and may include children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with additional cognition and learning needs.

An explicit ambition of the DSP provision is that children will have increased opportunity to access learning and social opportunities alongside their mainstream peers as an integral part of the mainstream school community. Oakham Primary School facilitate access to support as part of an EHC Plan, if required. This includes Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Educational Psychologists and Speech and Language Therapists, to ensure provision is appropriate to the individual needs of children. There is also a dedicated family liaison officer who provides support for families and works closely with the staff at Rutland County Council’s Family Hub.

The Parks Special Nursery School and the DSP occupy the same building and much of the space is already shared between the two provisions. This includes a swimming pool, which is used by children from The Parks and the DSP.

Many of the staff, including the leadership team, already work across both The Parks and the DSP, ensuring the skills and expertise will remain. The funding used to support the running The Parks Special Nursery would not be taken away if the provision were to close. Instead, it would be used to further enhance the offer at Oakham Primary School, including the DSP.

As well as support and signposting from individual nurseries, Rutland’s Family Hub has a range of support groups for parents. This includes an Autism Support Group, Triple P ‘Stepping Stones’ parenting programme for the parents of children with SEND, as well as play and learning activities for children with developmental needs, such as the Let’s Get Talking programme or Space to Play. Full details can be found on our Family Hub website, by calling 01572 758 383 or by emailing: familyhub@rutland.gov.uk

This support is part of Rutland early help offer, delivered through the family Hub - this will not be taken away.

Oakham Primary school also has a Family Liaison Officer available to families with children in the Dedicated Special Provision, from Reception to Year 6. Where children with SEND are not attending a nursery or childminder setting, Rutland County Council’s Early Years Inclusion team provides support via home visits.