Further education for young people with complex needs is under-resourced. There is not enough investment in growing specialist expertise or in developing or maintaining specialist facilities. Some local authorities are placing young people with more complex needs in unregulated provision where there is no independent assessment of quality at all. This cannot be acceptable.
It is the young people who suffer from this insufficient investment in specialist FE. Some are missing out on essential therapies or behaviour support or being denied a broad and challenging curriculum. Others are learning in sub-standard buildings or cramped conditions. Increased demand for specialist FE provision cannot be met when there is no resource to support growth, leaving some young people with no appropriate FE place at all
Natspec is calling for:
Sufficient funding
- Reform of the high needs funding system so that it works more effectively for FE providers and provides them with a more proportionate funding allocation that better reflects the balance of learners with SEND across schools and colleges.
- Introduction of a consistently applied mechanism for funding young people aged 16 to 25 with the most complex needs, who may need regional or national specialist provision that is not efficient to duplicate in every local area.
- Introduction of a one-off capital improvement fund for publicly-funded specialist FE colleges and thereafter grant them eligibility for future FE capital funding rounds from which they are currently excluded.
Invest in workforce development
- Government support for colleges to recruit sufficient staff with appropriate expertise to meet the needs of learners with learning difficulties and / or disabilities, e.g. through a national campaign about working in SEND/ALN in FE.
- Investment in specialist hubs to support the continuing professional development of specialist staff, including those working with young people with the most complex needs.
- Inclusion of the benefits of working with young people with SEND in FE in government-funded FE recruitment programmes.
Stop the use of unregulated high needs provision
- Require local authorities to inform the Department of Education of all post-16 providers they fund for provision to meet the needs of young people with an EHC Plan.
- Require Ofsted to inspect that provision and resource it do so.
Support for partnership working
Systemic changes to enable partnership-working between specialist and general FE colleges to support the sharing of expertise.
