What is the Transforming SEND and Inclusion in Leicestershire (TSIL) programme?
Together partners are working across health, care, education, the voluntary sector, and with parents and carers to improve how we support children with SEND and their families.
As partners, we want to work together to ensure every child with SEND has the right support, at the right time, in the best setting for them to succeed and thrive in their education. By working together, we want to deliver positive and lasting changes across special educational needs support.
Partners have identified four key areas where positive improvements can be made:
- Inclusive Practice – ensuring everyone involved in supporting children and young people takes action and gives the right support where needed. That could be ensuring schools have the right support and services available to help all children, working with Early Years to ensure children are getting the best start in their early years, making improvements to our structure so that it embraces, supports, and treats all children equally.
- Service Transformation – ensuring all teams across the council have the appropriate resources and capability to understand the needs of children and young people, so they can make the right decisions about how children move through their education. This will include how the EHCPs are delivered, working more closely with schools and reviewing plans to prevent future escalations.
- Accurate information and data – ensuring that correct and timely information about children and young people is shared. This will help drive and improve operational performance and allow for evidence-based decisions to be made.
- Communication and Engagement – helping all partners carry out their roles effectively and provide better understanding and consistency across our service. By improving communications, we can build better relationships and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to work together to improve the offer available to children and young people, and that everyone understands the part they play in making a difference.
Updates
To gain an understanding of the programme and what the partners are looking to achieve, see the:
As we start to put changes into place across the system, we will continue to update you keep you informed of what’s happening.
- Transition into school form is available for early years settings. You can listen to some of those involved in the design, speak about the benefits of this work in the Early years transitions interview.
- Best practice guide - a toolkit is being produced to provide clear expectations about what a school should be doing to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND, and where they can get additional support. This will be available for schools at the beginning of the next academic year.
- We’ve identified that the shortage of educational psychologists is the biggest cause of delays to EHC needs assessments. Leicestershire County Council has appointed temporary educational psychologists for 6 months to reduce the current backlog.
- Synergy - Leicestershire County Council is implementing a new system which allows for portals within the system for stakeholders (such as schools, parents and carers) to look at relevant information for their child or young person. The schools portal is currently being tested and it is our aspiration to be able to fully launch a pilot to all schools and academies in Leicestershire by September.
Leicestershire SEND Hub (education, health, and social care)
The Leicestershire SEND Hub will help to ensure parents and carers are actively involved in this work, and that messages are reaching families. The SEND Hub are impartial and work to represent the voices of parents and carers across Leicestershire.
The SEND Hub have already been influential in designing the event held in October and the format of the follow up events which they also attended.
Parents, carers, children, and young people’s voices, their experiences, wishes, and needs are at the centre of this work. By working together, we hope that everyone feels listened to, heard, and involved in making improvements to the way we work together.
The Leicestershire SEND Hub also support the:
- Leicestershire Local Area Written Statement of Action
- joint commissioning work
- attendance at the SEND and Inclusion Board
- other work with the council
The Leicestershire SEND Hub are the officially recognised Parent Carer Forum.
Frequently asked questions
We will be regularly updating our TSIL - frequently asked questions. If you have a question, please contact us using the email address above.
Staying up to date
As further developments come out of the different work areas, we will provide timely updates to keep everyone informed of any changes to current ways of working. These will be consistent across all information on the Local Offer.
Further events will be held over the coming months, giving more in depth information into each work area. View the latest all system event (YouTube).
There will also be surveys available for you to tell us about your ideas for change.
If you have any questions, you can contact us directly using the email address above.