Agenda item

Report of Behaviour Support Team Leader

Trish Haw, Behaviour Support Team (BST) Leader, introduced her report requesting de-delegation of funding for BST services for maintained mainstream schools to enable the local authority to deliver its statutory obligations, and approve an underwrite for the continuation of non-statutory functions, and highlighted the following points:

(a)  the BST supports mainstream schools to meet the needs of children and young people experiencing behavioural, emotional and social difficulties through a wide and innovative range of services;

(b)  in the majority of cases, BST support enables the children and young people to remain in their school and prevents the cost of a permanent exclusion place at a Pupil Referral Unit or special school;

(c)  the work is delivered in collaboration with the school and is monitored/evaluated at every stage;

(d)  in the 2013/14 academic year 58 out of 62 maintained schools and 31 academies (91% of all schools) used and benefited from the BST service, with 98% of the work being evaluated as very good to excellent.

The following comments were made during the discussion:

(e)  it would be useful to have the figures for the income generated so far for 2014/15;

(f)  the intention is to be a fully traded service for non-statutory services but the money for statutory services reduces each time a school academises so it may be difficult to achieve;

(g)  an income of £98,000 plus an additional £50,000 was generated in 2013/14. If the same is generated in 2015/16 and added to the de-delegation of £273,511 it is a lot of money to pay for staff and it isn’t clear what the expenditure of the service is;

(h)  some staff in the team are on permanent contracts and others are on temporary contracts;

(i)  any non-statutory services provided should be based on the income generated;

(j)  the work that the team does couldn’t be out-sourced within the city;

(k)  the service provided by the BST is good but there is uncertainty around what is statutory and what isn’t. This also means there is uncertainty in what schools should receive for the money they provide for statutory services;

(l)  some of the statutory services are partly paid for by the income generated from non-statutory services so it is difficult to provide one without the other;

(m)  if the money isn’t allocated the team could cease to exist from the end of March 2015;

(n)  the Forum can’t be asked to make decisions in an uninformed way on the expenditure of public funds;

(o)  the budget sheets for the BST service should be available so the Forum has more detail to base the decision on;

(p)  there needs to be business plans in place to support funding requests;

(q)  the service is needed by schools so it is important to ensure that the money is available for statutory services to be carried out;

(r)  the funding for Behaviour Support is given directly to academies by the Government so the team have to charge academies for the work they do.

RESOLVED to defer taking a decision until the December 2014 meeting to enable the following information to be provided:

·  the statutory services that the local authority are responsible for providing to maintained schools that only the BST can provide;

·  how much the statutory services cost;

·  how other authorities without a BST carry out their statutory services.