6 January 2015 weekly update

Happy New Year. I hope you and your staff had a relaxing Christmas break.

As we begin 2015 we have a number of ambitious plans to improve what we do in Education and Young People's Services.

We are moving forward with our re-organisation of Early Help and Preventative Services and have recently made appointments to senior posts for the four Area Heads of Service. These are:

Nick Fenton will hold overall responsibility for the North and West Areas until Stuart Collins takes up post in March.  In addition Ming Zhang is the county Lead Manager for Attendance and PRUs, Nick Wilkinson is the county Lead Manager for Youth Offending and David Weiss is the county Lead Manager for Troubled Families.

We are moving to a single district management model and district managers will be appointed to these posts in the coming weeks. In the coming months, through effective and safe early help, we  aim to ensure there is at least a 10% reduction in the numbers of children in need and those with a child protection plan, and at least 80% of children supported through an early help programme achieve a good outcome.

As you may know we have been achieving success with the Troubled Families programme. A key development from January is to roll out phase 2, which will provide support to over 8000 families in Kent, and as we do so we will ensure it is well integrated into the models of family support provided through Early Help. Most families supported through Early Help will meet the new broader criteria for this programme.

We have refreshed the 14-24 Skills and Employment Strategy, to ensure we make further progress in developing links with employers and improve the vocational offer so that more young people take up and successfully complete apprenticeships. We aim to see a significant drop in the number of young people not in employment, education or training and an increase in youth employment. This continues to be a challenge for vulnerable groups of young people, and we continue to give this top priority.

We particularly want to make a significant improvement to outcomes for Children in Care and markedly reduce the number of CiC who are NEET and in the youth justice system.

We are making good progress delivering the SEND changes required by the Children and Families Act and the priorities in the SEND Strategy. As you know we aim to speedily move to education health and care plans and will be introducing a new arrangement for funding high needs pupils from April. We also have plans to increase our range of SEND provision in Special and mainstream schools and improve pupil outcomes in Kent, so that there is a reduction in out of county places and their cost, and a reduction in SEN transport costs.

In the coming months we will be making significant headway in delivering seven new Primary schools, and nearly 600 additional places in Primary and Secondary schools for next September, as well as making further progress with the capital  improvements to ten Special schools.

As you know we have reviewed our Pupil Referral Units for pupils with health needs, and we will be moving forward with a new Health Needs Service, which will include improved support for pupils with mental health needs.

We are continuing with the tendering process to seek other providers to deliver an expanded Edukent services for schools, to achieve even more success as  a trading organisation delivering good value support services to schools at competitive cost.

We continue to implement the Early Years and Childcare Strategy to ensure there are sufficient high quality free places for two year olds, yet more good early years settings achieving positives outcomes, more children are well developed to start school and there is better integration of the work of children's centres, early years settings and schools.

At the same time we continue our core work to ensure educational standards improve, achievement gaps narrow and we have more good and outstanding schools in Kent.  We are just about to publish our updated Bold Steps for Education and Young People's Services,  which sets out our plans and targets to 2018.

We must all remember that engagement with learning and a good education is one of the best protections and guarantees of success for children and young people, now and into the future, and that is our core mission. I wish you all the best for a successful term.