From Carrie White, Early Years SEND Lead Teacher

Welcome to the new academic year! What a monumental start it has been - a change of Prime Minister, the sad passing of Queen Elizabeth and the announcement of the new King Charles III. 

This academic year, the Early Years SEND team and I are keen to rebuild the networking between nurseries that happened before Covid.  We are restarting our SENCO cluster briefings and look forward to seeing you all there the dates of these are below.

We have looked closely at the feedback that we have received from you and planned a training package which will remain free and all will be face to face. I have met with the providers of the new Level 3 accredited SENCO training, and we have plans to support those of you who have signed up for this. This is an amazing opportunity for SENCOs in Medway and will be of great benefit to our children.

As a team we are focussing on how to ensure that the paperwork supplied for funding and the EHCP process is as watertight as possible to ensure that the correct children are receiving the additional support an EHCP brings and, where needed, an appropriate specialist placement can be found.  It is still true that not all children with SEN require an EHCP and not all children with an EHCP require a specialist placement. We have been liaising with other teams within the Council in order to ensure the advice we are giving to you in regard to The Graduated Approach is the best information which hopefully will ensure that you do not have to produce endless pieces of information to support your requests.  One way in which we are planning on doing this is to ask you to please have your EHCP needs assessment request proofread by a member of the EY SEND team before you send it to the SEN assessment team.  

The council are still very keen for as many children as possible with an EHCP is attend their local mainstream setting and school when the time comes and are committed to supporting settings and schools to achieve this.

With the cost-of-living crisis looming, I am committed to ensuring that I stay on top of funding being paid and addressed quickly.  We have now interviewed for the post of Senior Administrator for the EY SEND team - this is the person who will take over the funding. Once this person is in post, I shall include her contact details and introduce you all to her via our bulletin and cluster briefings.

For EHCP advice, settings can receive this free of charge from your EY SEND Practitioner and parents can receive this from SENDIAS.  Medway Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Information and Advice Support service (SENDIAS) provides a range of free and impartial help to parents/carers, children and young people. They hope to make children and young people with SEND more aware of what they are entitled to, the options available to them, their parents and carers.  Through the provision of information, advice and support, they promote informed decision making. The service is free to access, accurate, confidential, comprehensive and easy to understand. You can contact SENDIAS at 01634 566303 or medwaysendias@family-action.org.uk.

Many of our settings are operate term time only, however things such as mediation, tribunals and the EHCP process still happen year-round.  Please do not tell parents to delay appointments with these teams as they can then lose their spot and may have to start the entire process all over again which can lead to frustration for the family.

September Cohorts

I would really like to be able to have an overview of the cohorts of children you have and the level of need of those children.  Please can you let me know how many children you have in your setting and how many of them you feel have some level of Special Educational Need or Disability. I would like to know a rough breakdown of all of you children in age groups for example:

Age of the child	Number of children in cohort	Number with SEND
School September 2026
School September 2025
School September 2024
School September 2023
School aged child not yet attending school

I would like to collect this information from you regularly to shape my discussions with other members of the council as I am often asked what’s the level of need looking like for us.  I am aware that we have movement of children so I would like to collect this from you 3 times an academic year.  Please can you email me the information on carrie.white@medway.gov.uk by the end of September 2022?

Training

Our training offer is free to our settings and open to all members of staff - it does not have to be the SENCO who comes along to the training.  We do have a limit to the number of people at the training session, but we are planning to run the sessions a few times over the year. To sign up, please email Tina Newman at tina.newman@medway.gov.uk with the name of who will be attending. May we ask that if you are already confirmed to attend a session and you are not able to attend anymore, please contact Tina via email or at 01634 334016 so we can give your slot to the next person on the waiting list.

Title of training	Date and venue	Maximum Number of Delegates	Timings
New to Role of SENCO	Monday 10th October 2022 at Oaklands Children and Family Well-being Centre ME5 0QS	20	9:30 am - 2:30 pm please bring your own lunch
New to Role of SENCO	Monday 17th October 2022 at Oaklands Children and Family Well-being Centre ME5 0QS	20	9:30 am - 2:30 pm please bring your own lunch
Provision Maps	Friday 14th October 2022 at Twydall Children and Family Well-being Centre ME8 6JS	12	10 am - 11:30 am
Behaviour which challenges	Friday 11th November 2022 at Twydall Children and Family Well-being Centre ME8 6JS	12	9:30 am – 12 noon
Using Everyday Resources	Thursday 19th January 2023 Gun Wharf Chatham at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Provision Maps	Tuesday 24th January 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	10 am - 11:30 am
Sensory Workshop (not suitable for settings who have previously attended sensory training)	Tuesday 31st January 2023 at Gun Lane Children and Family Well-being Centre ME2 4UF	10	9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Using Small Steps to Support Learning	Thursday 9th February 2023 at Medway Council Gun Wharf Meeting Room 1 ME4 4TR	20	9:30 am - 11:30 am

Cluster Briefings

These are by invite to area only - you will receive an email to invite you to the correct briefing for your area.

• Thursday, 10th November 2022 9:30 am - 11am at Gun Lane Children and Family Well-being Centre, Gun Lane, Strood ME2 4UF
• Monday,14th November 2022 1 pm - 2:30 pm at Saxon Way Children and Family Well-being Centre, Ingram Road, Gillingham ME7 1SJ
• Tuesday, 22nd November 2022 9:30 am – 11 am at Oaklands Children and Family Well-being Centre Weedswood Road, Chatham ME5 0QS

The cluster briefings will be held 3x a year in the terms 2,4 and 6.  There will be a chance for networking with peers and some information sharing.

Level 3 SENCO training

As a Local Authority, we applied to NASEN to deliver this training over a year ago.  The DfE then paused the training offer and has since released who their favoured provider is.  This Level 3 SENCO accreditation award will be delivered by Best Practice Network.  There are some funded places available for settings.  To apply for your space, go to: https://www.bestpracticenet.co.uk/early-years-SENCO

An overview of the course is below taken from the website:

The Level 3 Early Years SENCO qualification is delivered over 4 months through Online Taught Sessions and Online Study Units.

The Online Taught Sessions are 3 hours long and consist of live tutor-led training, incorporating pre-reading tasks, breakout room activities, group discussion and group training. Participants can choose to complete the Online Taught Sessions on either weekday mornings or afternoons. There will also be a limited number of Saturday sessions available.

The Online Study Units are delivered through the Canvas Virtual Learning Environment. Login details and induction training will be provided before the programme starts.

SENCO Surgery

Please find attached to the bulletin the SENCO surgery checklist. Please can you ensure you have the relevant documents with you when you come to SENCO surgery?  We really appreciate how busy nursery settings are. However, for a rich discussion, it is really important that the SENCO from the setting is able to concentrate on the discussion and so should not be counted as part of the ratio during the time of the meeting.  Please can we also ask that if you realise you are unable to make the meeting due to lack of time or having to be in ratio that you contact your SEN practitioner to rearrange rather than rush the meeting.  Please also note that if a child needs to be observed by the SEN practitioner that this needs to be a separate meeting and we as a team need a different parental permission form completed for this.

All SENCo Surgery forms are available to download from the elearningatlast website. From the homepage https://www.e-learningatlast.org.uk/, click on Early Years Information and Guidance, click on Referral forms for Practitioners. It will ask you to log in but if you don’t have log in details, you can just click on ‘Log in as Guest’ and you should be able to access all the forms there.

Funding

Applications for SENIF can only be processed the term after the child turns 3 years old.  To make an application, you need to complete an application form and a provision map.  Please include additional evidence such as therapy reports, IEPs, observation information, notes from SENCO surgery etc as this allows panel to cross reference the support and ensure you are receiving all the child actually needs.  Please remember that you can claim for up to 15 hours funding.  All funding applications are to be sent to eyhighneeds@medway.gov.uk. 

Invoicing

Please invoice for the previous month/months you can invoice for a month from the first of that month.

Invoice numbers are delaying the process a lot of the time. Please can you ensure you are using the child’s initials, the month and the year, e.g., CW09/2022?  Invoices with just a number e.g.,56 are rejected by the finance team as the system believes it has already paid that invoice.