11 July 2025 weekly update

Dear Colleagues,

Kent's approach to supporting literacy development difficulties including dyslexia

Just over a year ago KCC published this guidance which had been developed through a collaboration between Kent Educational Psychology Service and 47 Kent primary and secondary schools.

We had an exceptionally busy year already planned for 2024-25 so agreed on a low key, small scale implementation project with three primary schools and one secondary school. The implementation was supported by the EP service and a specialist consultant, Nina Birch. The schools were asked to identify a research question under the framework of the guidance, then work on addressing this question with support, tracking the impact.

On Monday I was really privileged to spend some time finding out what work the school teams had been doing over the last year and planning for dissemination. It was fantastic to hear about the very individual approaches taken to address issues in individual schools as well as the feedback from focus groups of pupils, staff and leaders in the four schools gathered by the EP service. This intelligence will be used to inform the planning for dissemination.

We will be sharing more with you in the next academic year, ready for a launch in early 2026 as part of our promotion of the National Year of Reading. A huge thank you all involved this far and I look forward to finding out more in the autumn.

This is Me - PINS briefing meeting for Swale schools

It was very heartening to see such a big turn out for this week's briefing meeting, a big thank you to all who attended as well as to colleagues for presenting. I wrote about this work last week so I just wanted to share some of the evaluation evidence which is emerging in this PowerPoint presentation (PPTX, 106.9 KB).

Changes to SEND funding

In January CYPE cabinet Committee considered a proposal to make changes to SEN funding for schools  which was agreed by the then Cabinet Member, the report is available 

Phase one has been implemented and that involved redirecting the £22m individual schools were claiming for SEN support to create the Community budgets and work is ongoing on phase two.

A big shout out to the KsENT Executive, special school leaders and staff as well a officers who have been hard at work on developing the simplified funding descriptors for children and young people with EHCPs - of whom we now have 21,400 in Kent - and matching those pupils and students onto said descriptors. We have agreed an ambitious aim of going live with the phase two EHCP funding model for 1 September 2026 and thanks to the huge effort that is being put in, we are confident this will be achieved.

Communities of schools and KsENT

Discussions have been underway for some time to understand how best the special schools can interface with mainstream schools to make effective use of the fantastic level of expertise there is in our special schools. Agreement has been reached that individual special schools joining a particular local community is not really going to work, so instead the special schools will become part of the professional resource group that has been created to support schools.

The SEMH school leaders have been meeting and are helping LA officers understand how we can be more strategic in our planning to develop the school sector and the role of the variety of SEMH schools within that. This model has acted as a pathfinder and the other KsENT schools are now planning to form groups by type, working with officers. This will be an exciting development over the coming year and a big thank you to all involved.

Committees

Two Committees next week - CYPE Cabinet Committee on Tuesday 15 July  and Scrutiny Committee which is amongst other matters considering the quarterly SEN report

And finally...

For anyone with an interest in the great outdoors and bird life, or looking for nature related resources to use in school, I highly recommend the Merlin Bird ID app

It listens for birdsong then flashes up a photo and information on the particular species. It's my new toy and I love it. Despite living in inner city London my record so far is 11 different types of bird in one session!

Have a great weekend.

Christine McInnes
Director of Education and SEN