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