15 November 2023 weekly update

Dear Colleagues,

Headteacher briefings

A big thank you to those that attended the recent online headteacher briefings and I hope you found them useful. Next term we will revert to four in-person meetings as we want to have a focus on localities, modelling how they could work as well as a health, education and community services market place to raise awareness of the wide variety of services available to support schools. In the summer term we intend to have a hybrid, with two in person meetings and one on line.

For those of you who would like a longer briefing on the schools budget issues, Karen Stone, our KCC finance business partner is organising a follow up session for next week.

Visits

Yesterday I was delighted to join a group of Members from the SEND Scrutiny Sub-Committee at Turner Free school to meet with a group of parents whose children attend schools across the Trust. A big thank you to Seamus Murphy, CEO; Kristina Yates, Executive Principal and Director of Inclusion and the rest of the SEND team who supported.

SEND Monitoring Meeting

Well, the reams of evidence have been sent in advance and today is the day that the DfE and NHS England are meeting with us to review the Kent SEND system improvements following last year’s re-visit and the issuing of an Improvement Notice in March 2023. Our aim is to develop a sustainable, effective system rather than being driven to make a series of quick fixes to improve performance against KPIs in the short term. The focus has been on building an infrastructure with solid foundations that can sustain improvement and development. This inevitably means there is a lag in seeing the impact of improvement in our services to children, young people and families and to schools and other education settings, so thank you for your continued patience. We will be given some limited feedback at the end of the day to be followed by a letter and I look forward to sharing the judgements with you in the future.

And finally…

I am very much looking forward to seeing some of you at the Kent Association of Leaders in Education (KALE) conference tomorrow.

Have a good week.

Christine McInnes
Director of Education and SEN