We are SEND Emergency South Glos. A group of parents raising funds to instruct a Solicitor and a Barrister to advise on the merits of challenging this decision in the form of a Judicial Review against South Gloucestershire Local Authority.

Our aim is to STOP the closure of the Chipping Sodbury Access Centre and demonstrate the risks of rationing SEND funding in South Gloucestershire on our schools.

The Access Centre is co-located next to Chipping Sodbury School is a unique, very small and highly specialist provision in the local area. Autistic young people of mainstream academic ability, whose extremely high anxiety levels and environmental sensory impacts act as a major barrier to mainstream secondary school attendance.

This life-changing provision is now at significant risk of closure. The centre is run by a highly experienced and skilled specialist teacher, whose expertise, skills and vision alongside her specialist skilled staff, have been instrumental in turning around the lives of highly anxious autistic young people since 2014. Who have gained qualifications and gone on to additional education, training and internships or apprentice roles.

Students whose lives are in the process of being turned around will be asked to transfer to alternative placements, with all manner of expectations that these students simply will not manage. Some of these students would even have been embarking on their GCSEs in the first year of closure. Autistic individuals in general find any change a challenge, especially so in their teen years at such a vital time in their education.

Chipping Sodbury School, it is part of the Athelstan Trust, in a letter to parents that South Gloucestershire Local Authority has made budget choices resulting in an unsustainable model for funding the Access Centre, so it is proposed to close in 2024. Students due to start in September 23 have been told there is no place, now. There is a shortage of spaces in Specialist SEND schools in South Glos.

This is because the Council put in place a banding system based on need types to standardise costs for Special Education Needs and Disabilities. SEND Emergency parent campaign group had told the council in 2019 this would not be a suitable method to allocate funding as ultimately children would not get the SEND help they need to access education. Now 4 years and a pandemic later, the standardised Banding has now impacted many schools including the Chipping Sodbury School Access Centre.

In 2022 South Gloucestershire Council also agreed with Department for Education (DFE) a safety valve agreement to reduce overspending on SEND budget. The aim was to reduce spending on SEND and get a financial bonus for cutting costs on a targeted plan.

As a result of this rationing a year later EHCP funding for children is so low schools are struggling and using mainstream school funding to keep the specialist school Access Centres and Resource bases open. This is not right nor sustainable, more inclusive schools support children with the greatest need as part of the school community.

Last week the Department for Education published its paper on the future of SEND support in the UK, it included Safety Valve agreements and National Standardised Banding. We hope that before such policies are in place across the UK lessons are learnt from what is happening at Chipping Sodbury Access Centre and the impacts on good practice in our most Inclusive mainstream schools.

The DFE vision of the future of SEND also included Specialist school placements just like the Access Centre, a place where Autistic students have a successful & happy education. We question the closure in light of these plans for the future of SEND education in the region.

The funds we are raising will help us to instruct a solicitor and a barrister and get advice on the merits of challenging this decision by way of judicial review. The legal team will review the paperwork, advising us on how to challenge the decision, and if there are merits to proceed with a challenge then we will be sending pre-action correspondence to the local authority in advance of potentially issuing proceedings in the High Court.

THANK YOU for your donation – every pound adds up and is a BIG help!

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