By Cllr Prue Bray
When the Liberal Democrats began running the council last May and I became the lead councillors for Children’s Services, we were faced with rising demand for school places, for accommodation for care leavers and, especially, a demand for more Special Educational Needs provision.
Too many of our children with special educational needs and disabilities have to travel a long way out of the borough for their education.
A new special school in Winnersh was on the way, and is due to open in September, but it had been obvious for a while that this would not meet all the extra demand for special school places.
But there were more issues than that for Special Educational Needs.
The funding comes as part of a government grant via the council to schools. Wokingham Borough is the third worst funded area for education in the country.
The SEND budget has been overspent every year since 2017, and the overspends are getting worse. By the end of this financial year, the accumulated deficit in the Dedicated Schools Grant will amount to a colossal £16.5 million.
For the time being, we are allowed to carry that deficit forward, but there are signs that the government intends to stop that happening. If they do, the council will become liable to find the money to fill the hole.
Trying to find £16.5 million would be hard enough. But the real problem was that if the upward spiral in the size of the deficit were to be allowed to continue it would risk literally bankrupting the council within the next five years.
I talked about the overspend in my budget speech last year, when the Lib Dems were in opposition. The Conservatives knew about it. But they had not made any plans to deal with the problem.
So it falls to us to try to sort it out.
And we are tackling it.
But – and I cannot stress this enough – we are not tackling it just because of the money. We are tackling it because we have to improve our SEND service for the sake of the children.
Wokingham Borough is not the worst performing local authority on SEND, but we can, and should, be better. We need more specialist provision locally. And we need better support for children in mainstream schools.
By supporting children more effectively and much earlier, we will do better by the children, the parents and the schools, but also, save money through preventing escalation of need.
That’s why we will be working with our partners in education and health, and with parents and carers, to completely overhaul SEND services. This will be genuinely transformative for the service and ultimately it will also transform the spending, gradually bringing it back into balance over the next few years.
To enable this to happen in the long term, we need to invest now. That’s why this council budget – the first one set by the Liberal Democrats for 20 years – has committed 1% of Council Tax to go towards supporting our SEND system this year – with the intention being to do that for the next five years.
We are only at the start of the journey and there is a long way to go. It will take time to reconfigure services and make the badly needed improvements. But we hope that children and their parents will welcome these much-needed changes to a system that has not been good enough for far too long.
Cllr Prue Bray is the executive member for children’s services, and ward member for Winnersh
