SEND Assessment and Review Team (0-25 years)

The SEND Assessment and Review Team is part of Middlesbrough Councils Inclusion and Specialist Support Service, are responsible for our Local Offer website.

The main work of the SEND Assessment Team is to co-ordinate Statutory EHC Assessment procedures. In addition to arranging for appropriate special educational provision to be put in place for children and young people with an Education Health and Care (EHC) plan and to keep them under review. Staff also liaise with schools, parents / carers and other agencies in the issuing of documentation.

Staff can give you advice about SEN arrangements and Statutory Assessment procedures. If your child is undergoing Statutory Assessment they will be able to keep you informed about the progress of the assessment. If your child has a EHC plan the SEND Case Officers are your main point of contact if you have any questions about your child's Special Educational Needs.

SEND Case Officers also support schools through the EHCP assessment process, offering advice to schools on their legislative responsibilities as laid out in the SEND Code of Practice. They will also liaise with parents/carers on aspects of their child's education.

SEND Case Officers may also represent the Local Authority at statutory annual, interim, transition and multi-agency reviews as required.

The SEND Assessment Team also includes a small number of SEND Case Officers who provide careers guidance.

Transcript:

My job entails coordinating the E H C assessments for children from 0 years up to 25 years. We meet with parents, professionals, families and young people or children who are going through the assessment to gather their views. We’ll talk to them through the summary assessment meeting, over the telephone, there’s a form that they can fill in to gather their views. For those children that are a lot younger, we encourage settings to provide us with pictures of photographs of the children doing things that they enjoy. We are open to gathering views however the children can record them. A SAM is a summary assessment meeting. It’s the last little bit of the jigsaw when we have done an E H C assessment, so by the point of the SAM, we’ll have gathered all the advice from professionals working with that child. It’s our chance as Officers to meet parents and carers of the children who have been through assessment. We go through a series of really informal questions. The final bit of the SAM we set some outcomes for the child or young person. So these are targets such as developing their communication, developing their independence, or developing their literacy and numeracy skills. Once panel have decided to issue an Education health and care plan, it’s our job as officers to write that document, so that means pulling all of the reports together into one document which details the childs views, the childs special educational needs, the provision they are going to need, any health and social care needs that the child has got. Then we issue that document as a draft. We then give parents 15 days to check the plan and make sure they are happy and then we will issue the final document. At that point if parents are looking to move the child onto a more specialist setting we start those conversations around what’s available, what would be suitable for the child. Once the plan has been issued, we review that document on a yearly basis, if the child is happy and settled in the setting they are accessing, school will invite parents and professionals to a meeting to go through the education health and care plan and make any changes. For example, if the child has a new medical diagnosis we would add that in. We would look at a childs learning levels to make sure they have made some progress. We do expect school to then update the targets and tell us which ones that childs met and where they want to go next. Every year we target specific year groups of children where an officer will come attend these meetings. Generally these are when children are moving key stage to key stage or from primary to secondary, or to college. At the end of the E H C process we always send parents or carers a questionnaire about how they found the assessment process, is there anything we can do better or improved, or if they were happy with the how the process went.