York is well placed to deliver its SEND Local Area Reform Plan and to develop an integrated coherent 0–25 system in which children and young people are supported to achieve and thrive within inclusive local settings, enabled by strong and effective partnership working across York. The reforms have been welcomed and support from our partnership co-production event was evident. York’s strength lies in being a small city with ambition, creativity and a shared determination to improve outcomes for children and families. This ambition is demonstrated by the way we have approached the Families First Reforms and our approach to the delivery of the Best Start in Life Plan which is building the infrastructure to transform the lived experience of children and families in York. This creates real potential for system-wide alignment and rapid improvement. We operate within significant financial constraints, being one of the lowest funded local authorities and school’s system in the country. This places sustained pressure on our SEND system and schools and has required a relentless focus on prioritisation, collaboration and making best use of available resources.

City of York Council is a small unitary authority within the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, and our Integrated Care Board operates across six places. This wider system context adds complexity but also provides an opportunity to strengthen alignment across education, health and care and to develop more consistent, place-based approaches to support.

We are already on a positive improvement journey. Following a Written Statement of Action in 2019, we successfully came out of formal monitoring in 2022. We are now preparing for the next phase of inspection, building on our Outstanding ILACS judgement achieved in March 2025.

We recognise that too many children and young people are currently not attending secondary school regularly, and that the lived experience of families is not yet always positive. While there are examples of strong practice across the city, the experience of support can still feel variable and fragmented for families and for our children and young people.

York’s 0–25 system is currently operating in a context of rising demand for SEND identification, increasing referrals for neurodevelopmental assessment, and sustained pressure on specialist provision and high needs funding. Over recent years, demand for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), specialist placements, and early intervention support has grown at a faster rate than system capacity. This has contributed to pressure on inclusion in mainstream settings and increased reliance on specialist and independent provision.

We will build from our position of strength.  We have evidence of impact of practice in Early Years, EHCP timeliness is strong, there is an established and effective system of mainstream outreach (our Learning Support Hub) to adapt to Experts at Hand (EaH), and York benefits from an in-house Educational Psychology service. Relationships between settings and wider partners are constructive and provide a strong foundation for further development.

Over the next three years, we will build on these strengths to establish a clear and consistently understood model of inclusion across the 0–25 system.  In order to deliver the SEND Reforms we need to ensure that our ambitions focus on the Early Years through our Best Start in Life approach. This will build the strong foundations to deliver improvements in the lived experience of children and families through early identification and intervention.  Importantly we recognise that to get this right, we must go back to the building blocks for change.  In York, reflected in our self-assessment, this means focussing on reviewing the key workstreams and ensuring that they are well attended by the right people, by allocating the funding to enable settings and families to be leaders within the change, and convening events that support our settings and the wider partnership, to really understand the universal offer of inclusion, to layer in the experts at hand model and the Inclusion bases. It will mean working with our teaching schools, our universities to support workforce reform and it will mean reaching out to partners who may not have been as engaged in our system to ensure it is 0-25 in scope.   We will spend the time building this together in year one. 

We will know we are making progress through our quantitative and qualitative measures in this plan and because of the work we will have implemented, there will be more children in mainstream settings, engaging in learning.

 Most importantly when children and young people increasingly feel a strong sense of belonging in their local schools, reflected in improved attendance, participation and pupil voice. We will also see growing family confidence, stabilisation in EHCP request rates, and an increasing proportion of children and young people supported successfully within mainstream settings. Alongside this, we will see a stronger culture of celebrating inclusive practice across York.

The Local Area is committed to delivering the principles articulated in the White Paper, so that every child and young person receives high quality support from birth, enabling them to thrive at home and within their local early years settings, schools and colleges.  Building on our Best Start in Life, three key pillars, our response to the SEND reforms commits to build a system where families can connect, feel supported, and that they truly belong. It will be shaped by the voices of parents, carers, practitioners and community partners. To do this we will build a highly skilled, confident workforce across education, health and care that can identify needs early and respond with timely, professional support in partnership with families. Through quality-first teaching, an appropriately challenging, rich and diverse curriculum and welcoming environments where everyone belongs, children and young people will be suppor[PC1] ted to achieve their potential. This includes building employability skills which support clear pathways to employment post 16.

Through our Local Area Reform Plan, we will build on what works in our place, to adapt and expand the Learning Support Hub model, creating a clear, well understood and flexible pathway to a robust and responsive Experts at Hand offer. This approach will adapt to changing demands and unite education and health professionals alongside experts by experience. Together, they will develop evidence-informed support and interventions with measurable impact and value, preventing escalation of need and enabling children to remain successfully within their local settings.

The Experts at Hand will be the foundation of our system development building on successful models in our area e.g. Early Talk for York and Let’s Make Sense Together. This will drive a stronger and more sustainable approach to mainstream inclusion and ensure that families have greater confidence in the support available in their local settings and schools.  The offer will build tiers of support and develop provision within mainstream settings through inclusion support bases and helping to ensure that children with SEND can thrive in their local school.

Our maturity assessment has further highlighted the need for our plan to strengthen co-production with families and children and young people, to build on the effective partnership working, to enable the universal offer of inclusion in settings. This will also move to a neighbourhood model of four targeted clusters where professionals will wrap around schools and identify emerging needs early and have greater shared accountability for outcomes  This is a system shift for settings in York.   This will form our building blocks in the first year of reform.  

Our goals to improve outcomes for our children are that:

·         Our Children and Young person’s voice, telling us that they have a strong sense of belonging in their local school and that they are achieving, happy and feeling safe

·         There is an inclusive mainstream offer in York across all phases, and an Experts at Hand offer that is embedded and shaped by the voices of parents and carers. This will reduce requests for alternative provision and risks of persistent absence.

·         We have a financially stable SEND system that invests has achieved the right balance between mainstream inclusion and specialist provision.

This will deliver the following desired outcomes:

·         The number of children accessing alternative provision will have plateaued by 2029

·          Attendance for children with education, health and care plans will be better than national by 2029

·         Requests for EHC needs assessments will have plateaued by 2029

·         Tribunals caused by disputes about placements will have reduced by 2029

·         More children are travelling independently to school/college by 2030 through the work of the York Independent Travel Training service (YILTS)

This will also be evidenced by a self-assessment that we will be within the maturing section for Co-production, Leadership and governance and in Effective Partnership working. (Feedback from service users).

We want to move towards a financially sustainable, inclusive 0–25 system in York where children and young people with SEND are supported to achieve and thrive within their local communities, leading to improved outcomes in education, health, wellbeing and participation.  This change process must include a focus on Early Years in upskilling our workforce and increasing parental confidence from the beginning. To fully implement the SEND reforms the change programme must have a strong focus on the 0-5s.

This vision will be continuing to be underpinned by our Children and Young People’s Plan, the Inclusion and Belonging Strategy, and the Autism and ADHD Strategy, Best Start in Life Plan and our Families First implementation. Strategic oversight and accountability will sit with the independently chaired SEND and AP Board, ensuring system-wide alignment, delivery and impact. The SEND Local Area Reform Plan will replace the current SEND and AP Partnership Action Plan, providing a more integrated and ambitious framework for change and pulling together Families First and Best Start in Life workstreams. We will introduce a SEND Local Area Reform Plan steering group in addition to new workstreams to build on existing structure. Schools Forum will also have oversight of key progress metrics.

Our maturity assessment shows that York is building from a developing but strengthening foundation of co-production, supported by increasingly strong leadership, governance and accountability arrangements. The building blocks to this will be through the year one work with settings and coming together in neighbourhoods, clear transparent funding pathways and an effective SEND communication plan.  We are realistic and transparent about the areas we need to strengthen, particularly the consistency of inclusive practice across mainstream settings, the further development of a skilled and confident workforce, and the need for more integrated and intelligent use of data across the partnership.

Across the system, we recognise several key areas of pressure and need:

·         Rising demand for SEND identification and Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs)

·         Increasing neurodevelopmental assessments and growing complexity of need

·         Severe absence and disengagement in secondary education

·         Variable family experience and confidence in the system

·         Increased reliance on independent and out-of-area provision

·         Financial pressures within the high needs block

·         Inconsistent inclusive practice across mainstream settings

In response, our ambition over the next three years is to create a more coherent, preventative and inclusive system. By the end of this period, York will have:

·         A clear, consistently applied model of inclusion across all settings

·         Strong neighbourhood-based partnerships enabling earlier identification and support with collective accountability for resources

·         Mainstream settings that are confident and equipped to meet a wider range of needs

·         Specialist support deployed earlier and more strategically, rather than at the point of crisis

·         A joined-up, system-wide data approach that enables proactive intervention and shared understanding

·         Families who have confidence in the system, understand pathways, and can navigate support effectively

We will know we are making progress through measurable and experiential change across the system including qualitative and quantitative data metrics. This will include increased meaningful inclusion within mainstream settings, improved attendance and a reduction in severe absence, stronger family confidence and lived experience, reduced use of out-of-area and independent specialist provision, and stabilisation of high needs expenditure in line with available funding.

Overall, this represents a shift from a fragmented and reactive system towards a more joined-up, preventative and inclusive model where children and young people are supported earlier, closer to home, and with greater consistency of experience and outcomes.

250 words

A focus early on clear communication of reforms to the SEND Partnership and the right events will support everyone’s role and responsibility in our reform work in York.  We will identify funding for settings and PCF to help us enable some of the workstreams.  We will ensure that the new workstreams are set up with clear Terms of Reference and membership to take forward the work, in inclusion in mainstream, Experts at Hand, Effective partnership and communication and data and resources.  We have advertised for a SEND Transformation Manager who will manage our change programme and the delivery of the Local Area Reform Plan.  YSAB has agreed to oversee the move to neighbourhoods.  The funding allocated will be used to increase support to Finance team, Business Intelligence, Parent Carer Forum, Youth Voice as well as including shared funding to an advanced speech and language therapy post.  A steering group will be in place under the SEND and AP Board to drive forward the workplan and Schools’ Forum oversight

For 2026-27 City of York Council has agreed a 0.5% transfer from the Schools Block to the High Needs Block following detailed consultation with all state funded schools and extensive discussion at Schools Forum during 2025. The approx. £0.691M transfer is made following the DfE’s guidance on block transfers.

The High Needs budget continues to experience significant pressure due to rising numbers of pupils with SEND, increasing levels of complexity and sustained growth in demand for support. The combined impact of the ending of the Safety Valve agreement and the freezing of the High Needs allocation at 2025-26 levels creates a challenging financial position for 2026-27. Despite these cost pressures the transfer is not being used to offset any accumulated High Needs deficit and is instead planned to fund the levels of High Needs by strengthening mainstream inclusion and supporting schools to maintain pupils in their local settings.

This reflects the shared commitment at City of York to provide early, effective support and to reduce reliance on costly specialist placements leading to a more sustainable High Needs budget.

For the financial years 2025/26 and 2026/27 York has received just over £4 million of additional High Needs capital. The use of SEND Capital in York is evidence-led and is being used to deliver the priorities in the city’s Inclusion and Belonging Strategy, through the local SEND Reform Plan. Our SEND Capital Strategy is designed to deliver on the priority to provide the right support at the right time. Capital investment will focus on creating learning environments that promote inclusive practices and strengthen the confidence, skills, and capacity of mainstream schools. This also includes ensuring high-quality, sustainable, and diverse SEND provision, with sufficient specialist places available where necessary.

Priorities for York for SEND Capital investment over the next three years are projects that:

·         Improve access and inclusion and reduce severe absence in secondary schools

·         Capital investment in assistive technologies to support both accessible mainstream provision and reintegration for children and young people who have experienced periods of absence.

·         Developing inclusion bases on mainstream primary school sites which support children who are unable to successfully transition to secondary school due to their sensory or social, emotional, mental health needs.

·         Ensuring sufficient specialist places in mainstream settings.

Our approach builds on the knowledge of what works well in adapting mainstream environments to meet predicable needs in mainstream. Over the last 4 years we have successfully opened additional enhanced resource provision places in both primary and secondary and continued to enhance sufficiency in our three specialist settings. This has been achieved through the strong partnership between the local authority and schools and academies. We have several good examples of adaptations to internal and outdoor spaces that have been made across the city’s schools which are supporting children and young people to be able to access mainstream provision. This includes the development of inclusion bases and sensory regulation areas. The development of more inclusive mainstream provision will improve parental confidence and will ensure that there is greater consistency across schools in being able to demonstrate inclusive practice. The schemes being supported in this first phase of capital allocations are designed to build the capacity to meet predicable areas of need in mainstream and builds on the successful models that have been developed particularly in primary schools. We are also using capital to ensure sufficiency in our in-city specialist provision to ensure that those children requiring a specialist place can access provision close to home. This is to address existing sufficiency issues based on the over-subscription of our special schools. We are realistic that for some low incidence but complex need there will remain a need to commission out of area places, but we are determined to keep the numbers of these places low as we use capital to support in-city provision.

York has a well-established and effective approach to co-production across its SEND work, and the process of bringing partners together to develop the Local Area Reform Plan within a tight timeframe has been positive and productive.

We have strengthened our understanding of the regional voice group work, which has provided clear and consistent feedback from children and young people about the changes they want to see. In addition, our SEND Youth Group will play an active role in the reform programme, helping to shape opportunities for meaningful involvement and ensuring that young people’s voices are embedded throughout delivery, not just consultation.

The maturity assessment has been co-produced from the outset, developed in phases as a collective exercise with City of York Council, the Integrated Care Board, the Parent Carer Forum, primary and secondary SENCO forums, and the York Schools and Academies Board CEO group. This has ensured shared ownership of the findings and a common understanding of both strengths and areas for development across the system.

An externally facilitated event on 30th April brought partners together to ensure alignment on the change journey, reflect on York’s progress, and to agree the next steps. The session focused on strengthening genuine co-production, improving communication, and developing a more skilled and confident workforce. Our Department for Education adviser is supporting this work, helping to ensure clarity, pace and alignment with national expectations. Importantly, the wider SEND and AP partnership has come together to respond to the formal consultation process, and council’s Executive group and the SEND and AP Board will provide strategic oversight and accountability for the Reform Plan.

School Forum has contributed to the discussions and helped shaped the building blocks around year 1 work and our family session reiterated the need for clear communication and transparency around the reform work, the need for more training for staff in schools and remembering to build on what works already.

Alongside this, we are running a series of engagement sessions with families across York to build a shared understanding of the reforms and to ensure feedback directly informs the next stages of development. This is helping to strengthen transparency, trust and shared ownership of the change programme.

Looking ahead, we plan to complete a stakeholder engagement exercise to provide further information about who else we must engage further with and we want to spend more time with our Early Years sector and Post 16 sector.   We will establish a Steering Group under the SEND and AP Board, bringing together a wide range of partners and stakeholders to hold delivery of the Reform Plan to account. From this governance structure, we will develop a set of focused delivery workstreams aligned to the key pillars of the plan, alongside existing SEND workstreams. These will include:

·         Inclusion in Education and settings

·         Sufficiency

·         Partnership and communication

·         Targeted monitoring of data and resources

The actions in our first year will strengthen system coherence, deepen co-production, and ensure that delivery is both accountable and focused on improving outcomes for children, young people and families in York.

The implementation of the local Best Start in Life Strategy is a central pillar to the successful implementation of the SEND reforms as the system change needed will come from the experiences of those children currently 0-5 and their families. Early identification and intervention in the early years is crucial to supporting children to successfully access the mainstream school offer. Building on the award-winning Early Talk for York, the local area has an evidence-based approach to identification of speech, language and communication needs. The innovative integrated partnership approach that Early Talk for York exemplifies also demonstrates the innovative use of Experts at Hand to build workforce skills and capacity in early years settings and schools. In York, as a small unitary authority, mapping the synergies between the different areas of national reform, Best Start in Life, Families First and the SEND Reforms is crucial for the successful implementation of a reformed children’s system. Our size whilst creating some unique challenges also creates opportunities for whole system working due to the advantages of services working in a discrete and compact geographical area. Relationships across education, health and care partners are strong and co-production is central to the partnership plans that are being developed to support the children’s system reforms. The development of SEND Central, York’s SEND family hub, is an example of the way that multi-agency working is making a difference to service delivery and to the experience of children and families. This hub and spoke model is being adopted as the blueprint for the family hubs in York. This will see SEND Central being joined by a Centre for Excellence for childhood development.

As one of the lowest funded local authorities in England, York faces continuing challenges which are replicated across education and health partners. The implementation of the SEND Reforms would be severely impacted by the speed of legislative reform and for the next three years the current legislation will apply whilst at the same time trying to fully deliver the SEND reforms. This could have a significant impact if parents and carers lack confidence in the proposed reforms, leading to a continued growth in requests for statutory assessment.  Another key risk is workforce skills and capacity. Nationally there are already shortages in Experts at Hand, and this could be significant in building confidence in mainstream practice.

Some Local Area Partnerships hold data in a central SEND operational dashboard. This is used by teams on a weekly basis to identify trends in demand or inform conversations with local school or setting leaders.

In some Local Area Partnerships, a view of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is reviewed monthly by a SEND Board to take decisions on prioritisation, resourcing and delivery of services informed by regular data.

The local SEND and AP Partnership Board currently has a data dashboard which provides information about key performance indicators and trends. This is supported by City of York Council’s Business Intelligence team through the corporate KPI machine database.  The board currently receives a data report each time it meets and includes a wide range of data drawn from the SEND case management system, health providers, the Synergy education database and the social care MOSIAC case management system. York has also implemented Study Bugs which provides access to daily pupil level attendance data from all schools and academies, and we are now extending this to tracking attendance at AP settings. The dashboard is being refreshed through a workstream focused on the delivery of the SEND Reform Plan. This includes new neighbourhood dashboards to support the school neighbourhood clusters, building on the inclusion scorecards which are used by the city’s fair access panel.

 New indicators will be added including:

·         Delivery of capital projects and number of places created, including Inclusion bases

·         Admissions data to evidence the shift to mainstream

·         Experts at Hand data – workforce numbers, deployment and impact data – this will build on the evaluation reports produced by the Learning Support Hub. We intend to develop a quality assurance framework to support the SEND and AP partnership’s board’s scrutiny of the implementation of the Experts at Hand offer in York.

·         Attendance and exclusions data – with regular reports being shared from the Attendance Improvement Board.

·         SEND Hub key performance indicators including footfall and service quality indicators including parent and young people voice and satisfaction surveys

·         Maturity assessment reviews that can demonstrate how we move from emerging and developing to maturing as a system

The local authority has an established programme of quarterly reporting to the Council’s Executive and Corporate Management Team which has been in place throughout the period of the Safety Valve agreement. This will continue to be used to ensure leadership oversight of the delivery of the Local SEND Reform Plan and central to this will be the use of the revised data dashboard to ensure that the trajectories outlined in the one year and three years plans are on track and that clear mitigations are being implemented to address any variances.

Governance

Mechanism

This may be a governance group, or an individual (e.g. SRO).

Purpose/ Responsibilities

What is the function of this governance mechanism? What are they accountable for overseeing? What information is reported to this governance mechanism?

Membership

Who does this governance mechanism comprise of? [should include health and PCF representation] What stakeholders are represented at this governance mechanism? Please indicate who chairs this.

(Include n/a if an individual).

Cadence

How regularly does this governance mechanism meet?

Decision Rights

What decisions can this governance mechanism make?

Escalation Route

Where can this governance mechanism escalate issues or decision to?

The SEND and AP Board

The board holds the SEND transformation work to account through the SEND action plan ( to be SEND Local Area Reform action plan and through the risk register

The York LARP Steering group will report here

A clear set of KPIs is discussed across the partnership at each board

Chaired independently.  Includes full EHC partnership 0-25, Health Social Care, Families, young people and settings

Every 6 weeks

The Board is support and challenge approves strategies, and makes decisions on approval of the Local Area reform plan and holds partners to account through data measures

Independent Chair offers a clear route of escalation through to DCS and Lead ICB if required

York Local Area Reform Plan (LARP)

This is new group.  This will focus on holding all the Work streams to account ensuring the alignment of all the workstreams and will report to the SEND and AP Board it is responsible for the monitoring of the detail of the LARP

Chaired by independent role agreed by partnership TBC

Attendance by different members to the Board including PCF, young people, settings and health and Care, and voluntary settings

Every month

The group will be decision making on implementation of the LARP

SEND and AP Board and independent chair of board

Workstreams:

WS1 Inclusion in settings and Education with sub group EaH

Responsible for Strengthening Inclusion across Education settings

Includes Inclusion culture and belonging

Universal Offer of inclusion, Experts at Hand

Chaired by Head of Inclusive Education

Include seconded setting roles, membership across EHC partnership different from the above steering and board membership

Every month

This group will lead on the

Inclusion and Belonging culture and work including  Universal offer in mainstream schools

Experts at Hand offer

To the York LARP steering group

WS2 Sufficiency planning

 Ensure planned growth address demand equitably Access to specialist support and local placements

Chaired by the Specialist Teaching Team and SEND Sufficiency Manager

Every month

This group will lead on delivery of sufficiency strategy, alignment of EaH to the universal offer and Inclusion bases

To York LARP steering group

WS3 Effective Communication and partnerships

Including Neighbourhood working

Inclusion and Belonging culture (link to WS1)

Includes partnership governance and oversight of disagreement resolutions mediations and digital processes (link WS4)

Outcome alignment including BSIL, FF and Post 16

Joint ways of working including neighbourhoods and pooled funding (links W1,2&4)

Communication strategies

Data transformation (Wf4)

Joint workforce development (Wf1)

Success measure

Chaired by the Head of SEND

Includes, EY and Post 16, SENCo and heads, PCF, Health and voluntary sector and Social care

Every month

This group is decison making and will lead on partnership and governance, including ensuring that York system understands alignments of reforms, neighbour hood working and agree an effective communication plan, linked to all the WS1,2 &4

York LARP steering group

WS4 Targeted monitoring of data and resources

 targeted monitoring of data and resources includes data sharing across partnership (linked to WS3)

Finance monitoring to Schools Forum and DFE

Performance dashboards

Pooled funding for settings

Transparency in funding systems

Risk management

Quality assurance

Aaron Thiara (Finance lead) sub group Ian Cunningham BI

Includes Settings representatives 0-25 Health, PCF,

Every month

This group is decision making will lead on the development of the finance monitoring work, including developing a transparent system of pooled funding and transparent funding system for HNB allocations

Data will form a sub group of this workstream

York LARP Steering group

PFA strategy delivery group Group

This is an existing group that is responsible for delivering on PFA vision and Strategy and 5 year action plan

Head of Disabled Children’s Service & DSCO

Post 16, SEN teams, PCF, Social Care, Adults, Health

Every month

This group is decision making and approves the action plan under the strategy it will be linked to WS1

Reports to the SEND and AP Board

Best Start in Life Delivery Groups

This group sets out the delivery of BSIL in York

Sub groups sit within this Neighbourhood group links with WS1 & WS3

Leading on neighbourhood model of integrated EY support with family hubs and Increased proportion of children achieving a GLD (to 79% by 2027/28 and beyond to meet our local ambition)

- Increased GLD for children eligible for FSM (to 58.1%)

-Improve and Reduce inequalities in early childhood and maternity outcomes

- A sustainable, integrated early years system closer to home that delivers better outcomes for all children

Local Evidence lead,  EPs, SEN, Families, Social Care, Health, Early Years, Voluntary sector

Every month

Sub-groups are decision making

Raise York steering group & SEND and AP Board

Families First Delivery group

This group is delivering on Families First agenda through

Family Help (right help, right time

Multi-Agency Child Protection Team

Family Group Decision Making

Chaired Director of Safeguarding, Children’s Services

Wide range of sub groups with

Education reps, wider social care, SEN teams, Health, Police, Youth Justice,

Every Month

Decision making group

In order to implement our plan effectively central government support would be helpful in ensuring that there is a requirement for all partners to work together at place and that the various elements of reform are brought together at system – level through the articulation of a clear narrative which brings together the Best Start in Life, Families First and SEND Reforms in a single national vision for reform.

Facilitation of regional collaboration, particularly to deliver sufficient specialist places would also be a helpful area of central government support. This could build a regional commissioning unit which would standardise placement decisions and manage place planning. It would also help to ensure best value is achieved through a consistent pricing structure for commissioning low incidence, high need specialist provision.

As mentioned earlier navigating the current legislation whilst implementing the reform plan is also an area where central government support and guidance would be very helpful. The planned revision of the Code of Practice would be helpful practical support – particularly to ensure that the mainstream presumption is supported by the clarity provided by the planned National Inclusion Standards as early as possible in the implementation timeline.