SEND – How can ICFP help?

It’s time to talk about SEND.

The increase in SEND, both in terms of pupil numbers and need, is probably the greatest challenge that schools across the UK are facing.

The increase in need across the school system means that special (or specialist) schools are overwhelmed and pupils who may have found themselves in a special school five years ago are being catered for mainstream schools.

One of the ways that Local Authorities are coping with this change is to increase the number of resourced provisions attached to mainstream schools.

These developments present an interesting challenge to anyone working with ICFP. The higher level of SEND in school inevitably means a higher level of curriculum support staff and so, in traditional ICFP tools, this will indicate an imbalance in the staff deployment. But, this change in the profile of pupil need inevitably means that this staff profile will need to change. How do we approach this change?

ICFP.school allows schools to filter their metrics so that they are built upon schools with similar levels of SEND need. In our ‘advanced options’ tab you can select to only compare with schools that have a similar percentage of SEND. (And soon you will also be able to select schools with similar numbers of pupils with EHCPs.) This allows schools to assess whether their staff deployment is appropriate within this specific SEND context.

Conversely, it allows schools to see whether their SEND provision is efficient. You can discover whether schools with similar high levels of SEND are balancing their budgets and, even, identify the specific schools who are.

In our roadmap we are developing a module which will allow schools with a resourced provision to extract their income and expenditure for the resource base and, therefore, focus on the efficiency of the school excluding the resource base which inevitably skews the metrics.

We will then explore how we can compare the efficiency of the resource bases themselves. But that is a longer-term aspiration.