Progress made in consultations with Brighton and Hove City Council on the need for specialist teachers/advisors – but an agreement on the roles of pre-school SEN teachers/advisors has yet to be reached.

The representatives of the Brighton and Hove Learning Support Services’ National Union of Teachers’ groups, Brighton and Hove NUT’s Divisional Secretary, Paul Shellard, and Brighton and Hove NAHT’s President, Adrian Carver, had a ’round table’ conversation last Monday (9/11/15) with Tom Bewick, Chair of Brighton & Hove City Council’s Children, Young People and Skills committee, Pinaki Ghoshal, Director of Children’s Services, Regan Delf, Jo Lyons and the councillors Emma Daniels, Caroline Penn and Maggie Barradell.

This long and productive meeting resulted in a number of changes to the redesign of the new Learning Support Service: The Local Authority is now prepared to consider allowing the Literacy Support Service specialist teachers to continue to offer a traded service, as they do now. This will mean that some of their posts may be funded by trading their service with schools, potentially resulting in fewer losses of specialist teachers’ posts. However, The NUT would like to see no reduction in the number of specialist teachers in the new Learning Support Service.  It was agreed that the new redesigned Learning Support Service will not start until September 2016; which will allow the existing Learning Support Services to complete the commitments that they have made to children, schools and pre-school settings for this academic year. The Local Authority has also made a commitment to co-produce the design of the new Learning Support Service with representatives from the existing Learning Support Services.  The Local Authority has agreed that there will be specialist teachers for Literacy, Language, Autistic Spectrum Condition and Sensory Needs in the redesigned Learning Support Service, although these teachers will not be paid on the Teachers’ Pay and Conditions of Service. The NUT will continue negotiating about pay and conditions of service for the specialist teachers in the new Learning Support Service.

However, the Local Authority has made no commitment that there will be specialist teachers/SEN advisers for children in the Early Years within the new Learning Support Service.

All NUT representatives for the existing Learning Support Services, along with the NUT Divisional Secretary and the NAHT Brighton and Hove President, urge the Local Authority to include specialist pre-school teachers in the new Learning Support Service. There is a very clear rationale for having Early Years as a specialism, even though this is an age phase rather than a specific need. The rationale for maintaining specialist Early Years SEN teachers/SEN advisers includes the following differences between the early years and the school years:

1. Pre-school SEN teachers work in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Need-specific SEN teachers work in the National Curriculum years. The Early Years Foundation Stage legally requires practitioners in the early years to provide education holistically. The skills, knowledge and experience required for delivering the Early Years Foundation Stage teaching and learning are very different from those required for statutory school age teaching and learning.
2. Pre-school SEN teachers work with a very large number of children whose specific needs have not yet been identified. Need-specific SEN teachers currently work mostly with children whose needs have been identified.
3. Pre-School SEN teachers work predominantly in private, voluntary and independent pre-school settings. Need-specific SEN teachers work in maintained schools. The skills, knowledge and experience required for supporting workers in pre-school settings, whose level of qualification is mostly at level 3 (87%) of the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RGF), is very different to the skills, knowledge and experience required for supporting teachers in schools, whose level of qualification is mostly at Levels 6 and 7 of the RQF. Those with RQF level 3 qualifications require a much higher level of support to work with children with complex special educational needs and disabilities.
4. Pre-School SEN teachers are ‘Area SENCos’ who co-ordinate SEND provision in Private, Voluntary and Independent settings when statutory processes are required, such as the statutory assessment of children’s needs under the SEND Code of Practice 2014. PVI SENCOs do not have the necessarily qualification to co-ordinate this assessment. Need-Specific SEN teachers do not need to coordinate SEND provision in the schools in which they work, as maintained schools have Special Educational Needs Coordinators with RQF Level 7 qualifications, who coordinate statutory assessment themselves.

For these reasons we urge the Local Authority to include pre-school specialist teachers in the design of the new Learning Support Service.