SEND joint local area re-inspection report
Joint statement from Cllr Kate Booth, cabinet member for children’s wellbeing at Birmingham City Council, and Paul Jennings, chief executive of Birmingham and Solihull Clinical Commissioning Group.
“We acknowledge the service has not been good enough and we have let our children and families down; for this we are genuinely sorry and we must do better and are determined to get this right.
“We fully accept the findings of the report. More progress should have been made, more quickly, for the sake of the children and families in Birmingham who unfortunately have not received the service they should.
“Working with parents and carers and listening to the voice of children and young people is fundamental to improving the service. We must get better at listening to and acting upon feedback, so we will be setting up a series of further parent/carer meetings from the late summer to hear direct from our parents, carers, families and our schools. We will work closely with our Parent Carer Forum as we plan the next steps.
“The delivery of good services to children with SEND and their families relies on a strong partnership between health services, council, mainstream and special schools and families themselves. As partners we have been working together and some transformation of the service is underway but we acknowledge and appreciate things are not moving quickly enough and we need to start seeing our service improve for our children and families.
“Together we intend to address the fundamental weaknesses in the system that Ofsted/CQC have identified whilst building upon those showing promise, including joint commissioning, the better quality of more recent Education Health and Care Plans, and the work we are doing with mainstream and special schools.”
