Decision details

SEND Capital

Decision Maker: Corporate Director (People)

Decision status: Approved

Is Key decision?: No

Is subject to call in?: No

Purpose:

The Council has a statutory responsibility to ensure sufficiency of Special Educational Needs school places within Bath & North East Somerset. Due to increased numbers of children and young people with SEND local area needs to develop more SEND school places. This Capital Project will award grants to education providers who have demonstrated the capacity to expand and develop existing provision to ensure an increase in local education places for children with SEND.

A process was opened up with all education providers to develop proposals which would ensure the development of additional SEND provision against a set of defined strategic aims that were developed for this capital program. Particularly we need to ensure that the Local Area becomes less reliant on high cost out of county independent school and college places, currently the High Needs Budget that funds SEND Provision is under significant pressure. This capital program is one of several planned local SEND capital projects and is part of a strategy to address these pressures on placements and resources.

The funding for this project will support the development of Aspire Special School to expand its provision for children with social, emotional mental health needs from 23 spaces to 54 spaces. The works on this project will start after May 2019 and will look to be completed in summer 2019, with the additional places being available in the academic year 2019/20

Decision:

To fully approve capital amounting to £577k from the provisional capital programme item SEND Capital of £577k.

Alternative options considered:

Aspire Special School are the only provider of this type of SEND provision in B&NES. This type of school place is limited in B&NES. The School is rated good and parents and carers provide positive feedback on their children attending this school.

Publication date: 13/05/2019

Date of decision: 09/05/2019