SEND Improvement

The SEND Partnership have worked to improve the offer for children and young people with SEND and their families. The SEND Partnership includes:

• Sheffield City Council (departments across Education, Care and Community Youth Services)
• South Yorkshire NHS Integrated Care Board
• Sheffield nurseries, schools and colleges
• Sheffield Parent Carer Forum

We are proud of the work we have done together since our first Local Area SEND inspection in 2018. We know more is needed to achieve our aims.  We want to deliver better, more consistent outcomes and experiences for children and families.

From October 2023 we will be starting a new, ambitious programme of work.  This will be to:

• Further improve our understanding of the challenges faced across Sheffield.  Look at the opportunities to do things in a different way.
• Develop and test new approaches to help us identify and meet needs as early as possible.  This will be in the most appropriate way, to support the best possible outcomes.
• Create a long-term delivery plan.  This will continue the pace of improvement and innovation across Sheffield.

To begin with, we will start to work on:

• Using existing and new information.  We will use this to explore how we can do better for children and young people with SEND.  We will look at what our priorities for the future should be.  We will use feedback from our:
• children/young people
• parents/carers
• partners
• Trialling a new way to understanding needs.  This will look at the whole child/young person including what they are good at.  We will look to support better conversations between schools, families and partners.  We will be looking at using a Valuing SEND tool.