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Agenda item

Actions arising from previous meetings

Minutes:

July18 – Ac1, unspent funding in the Schools in Financial Difficulty Fund: Ian Pearson reported that this had been discussed at the Heads Funding Group on the 2 October 2018 and it had been agreed that it would be appropriate to apply a £200k cap on the fund. 

Ian Pearson reported that Jane Seymour had provided a written update on the following two actions as follows:

July18 – Ac2a, High Needs Block – Invest to Save Proposals, SEN Equipment for children attending nursery schools and resourced units: It was agreed at the previous meeting of the Schools’ Forum that, although mainstream schools were now expected to fund their own Special Educational Needs (SEN) equipment, £10K would be set aside for funding equipment at nurseries as they did not have delegated SEN budgets and also at resourced schools. (It would not be fair to expect schools which hosted resourced units to fund all SEN equipment as they were taking children from across the local authority area and would have disproportionate equipment costs compared to other schools). This funding was being well utilised. There was a risk that demand might exceed the £10K budget so this would need to be considered when setting the 19-20 High Needs Budget.

July18 – Ac2b, High Needs Block – Invest to Save Proposals, Setting up on line forum for SENCOs:£1,600 was set aside for this, which was the balance left from the £100K allocated for invest to save projects once the Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Training and Behaviour projects had been funded.The most logical way to set up an on line forum for Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) would be through the Council’s Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Local Offer website as this was where all SEND information was held and effort was being made to encourage parents and professionals to use it more.

The software provider for the Local Offer website was a company called Open Objects. The price they had quoted was £3,900 to set up the on line forum, which exceeded the available budget of £1,600. There would be no ongoing running costs. It was suggested that the Schools’ Forum might wish to defer consideration of this until the budget setting process began for the 2019-20 HNB.

July18 – Ac2c, High Needs Block – Invest to Save Proposals, Review of resourced school funding: An initial report on this would be brought to the next round of meetings in November/December 2018.

 

 

 

 

Supporting documents: