Agenda item

Report of Director of Education and Director of Commissioning and Procurement

Lisa Lopez, Commissioning Manager, presented a report on the Information, Advice and Support Services for Children and young people with SEND and their Families highlighting the following points:

(a)  Services providing support for children and young people with SEND and their families are reporting annual increases in demand, a trend that is expected to continue;

(b)  joint commissioning with Nottinghamshire County Council taking the lead allows Nottingham City Council to benefit from joint services and the efficiency and value for money of a single combined service;

(c)  the proposed services aim to deliver further, indirect savings by increasing families self-efficiency and reducing the need for formal assessment where families are considered of a lower level of need;

(d)  these services have previously been heavily reliant on non-recurrent funding such as the SEND funding and funding from NHS Nottingham City Clinical Commissioning Group which is not agreed beyond March 2018, the joint commissioning process has allowed savings of £38,000 to be established and stabilisation of the service;

(e)  contracts for the existing services offering Advice, information and Support all end on 31^st March 2018 and all new services must be in place by 1^st April 2018.

RESOLVED to:

(1)  approve expenditure of £811,000 over the 5 year contract term for the provision of the Information , Advice and Support Service (IASS) detailed in exempt appendix 3. This will include £121,000 from the SEND reform Grant 2017/18;

(2)  approve the procurement of the Information, Advice and Support Service detailed in exempt appendix 3, jointly with Nottingham County Council, through an appropriate procurement process, and to award the contracts for the services based on the outcomes of the procurement process. The approved contracts would commence on 1^st April 2018, for a three year period with an option to extend on an annual basis for a further  two years (i.e. 3+1+1) to a maximum of 5 years in total;

(3)  delegate authority to the Director of Commissioning and Procurement to approve the outcome of the procurement processes and award contracts to providers that are deemed most suitable to provide these services;

(4)  delegate authority to the Head of Contracting and Procurement to sign the final contracts and agree annual extensions on the basis of performance and budget availability.

Reasons for decision

The services discussed in this report are statutory services,in order to fulfil statutory duties towards children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities these services must be provided.

The proposed recommissioning and tender process allows for continued development of seamless support to these families across the City and the County including Education and Health and improves access to information for children and young people with SEND where as previously the focus was delivering information to parents/carers.

The proposed new Information and Advice Service will use engagement activities with service users to further develop the service and will encourage a culture of participation and engagement’s.

With the increasing numbers of children and young people with SEND expected to continue to rise, improved access to advice services can increase self-efficiency by assisting families with lower levels of need to access suitable services without the need for formal assessment reducing demand on services.

Other options considered

There is the option to recommission the services at full 2017/18 costs and make no change to the services. This option was rejected as not all of the resources for the current provision will be available from April 2018 due to non-recurrent funding streams, There was also dissatisfaction expressed by families following the Whole Life Disability review 2015 around the current pathways available for children and young people;

The option to remodel existing services whilst reducing cost was considered, however, given the lack of capacity in current services, increased demand, enforced funding reductions and obligations of future providers to staff existing services it unlikely that a service model with further reductions would be viable. For this reason this option was not recommended and was rejected.

The last alternative option to be considered was to do nothing, to allow the current contracts to end and not to recommission services. The SEND Code of Practice 2014 requires that these services are provided for children and young people with SEND and their families. If the Information and Advice Service was not commissioned the Council would still be obligated to provide the information though in-house provision which is likely to incur further cost due to TUPE obligations from existing services. There is also the risk that this provision would be considered non-compliant with the requirement for the information and advice services to be impartial. This option was rejected for these reasons.