The Department for Education put out a press release today. You'll be as stark-bollocking flabbergasted pleased as I am to learn that parents feel more supported ahead of radical SEND reforms ....
Buried in the notes though is a research report looking at how much time and money it costs to process statements versus EHCPs.
In case you ever wondered what your hard-working LA SEN staff were doing on your behalf - wonder no longer. These LAs claim it takes anything from 49 to 85 staff hours (or £1,130 to £2,000 of monetised time) to conduct a case referral, complete statutory assessment and issue the first statement.
The data's pretty mind-boggling for anyone with direct experience of these services - it's not obvious what the researchers did to verify or validate the data. Probably not a fat fucking lot. For example...
- Some of these LAs say they take 15 staff hours to decide whether to conduct an SA on an individual case. In my LA, that'd be 1 minute to change the names on the boilerplate for an "after careful consideration, fuck off" letter. What happens for the other 14 hours 59 minutes?
- The variation in the data is just crazy. One LA reckons it takes 8 hours to decide whether to proceed and put a draft statement together, others reckon it takes 18 hours. My old LA just cut-and-pasted from a generic template, occasionally remembering to change names and genders in the statement text.
- The LAs surveyed here - all part of the detachment of Pathfinder shock-troops- mostly expect time taken and costs incurred to increase when the EHCPs kick in. Unless they are working in a completely different time and space continuum to the rest of us, how the fuck is this possible?