Tag Archives: DfE

THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

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A handful of Oxbridge ponces from management consultants Newton Europe have arrived at the Counts Louse to cut £65m from Children’s Services in exchange for £7.5m.

Among the things the overpaid twits will be working on is the time it’s taking the council to provide EHCP plans to SEND children. It’s currently taking the council an average of 51 weeks to supply a plan. The legal requirement is 20 weeks and the council is delivering just three per cent of plans to that timescale.

In late 2023, around 47 per cent of EHCPs were delivered on time. This changed after February 2024 when former Children’s Services boss, Asher “The Slasher” Craig cancelled the council’s £5.5m non-statutory top-up budget that funded SEND children in schools without the need for an EHCP plan.

Without this funding, more children are, predictably, going through the EHCP process. This cut was made as part of a Dept of Education’s (DfE) ‘Delivering Better Value’ (DBV) plan for SEND. 

So, who got a £19.5m contract from the DfE to develop the DBV programme? Please step forward, er, Newton Europe, who are now charging us £7.5m to clear up their own shit.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

UNSAFE

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Council bosses’ Safety Valve SEND bailout from the Department of Education has gone tits-up in less than a year.

The story was that it would eliminate the SEND budget deficit by 2029/30 in exchange for cuts to services. Recent news to the council’s education committee is that the deficit is expected to reach £41.5m by 2030!

Meaning the city ends up with brutal cuts to SEND services and a huge deficit.

SEND WATCH: GRANT NEWS

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At the scrutiny meeting where councillors discussed SEND spying, senior council boss, Vikki “Mata Hari” Jervis also tried to convince councillors that refusing to sign-off funding for the Bristol Parent Carer Forum, who council bosses hate for supporting parents and encouraging some to take legal action against the council was fine. 

Instead, explained Jervis, the money and work could be split among the 22 groups that make up a new so-called “Community of Groups” selected by the council to best represent the interests of SEND parents by never mentioning legal action.

Jervis’s claim is not true. Contact, who actually administer this grant Jervis is trying to award, say on their website, “Contact administers, and pays a grant of up to £17,500 available to ONE parent carer forum in each local authority area of England, funded by the Department for Education (DfE).”

Is anything council management say about SEND true?