Prioritising Focus Areas
What are the key levers driving caseload and spend in the HNB?
What are the key levers driving caseload and spend in the HNB?
Once you have set up the practical elements of the diagnostic, it’s time to put this into action. However, to ensure you make a high impact change that you are confident will make a difference to children and young people with SEND, you need to take a systematic approach and:
This section looks at understanding why a significant proportion of local authorities have accumulated Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) deficits due to high needs block overspends. The DBV programme used a method that splits up the problem statement into smaller chunks, allowing local authorities to more easily identify areas to prioritise when conducting further investigation.
The primary aim of DBV diagnostic activities is to make best use of the high needs block (HNB) to meet children and young people’s needs and improve outcomes, while placing local areas on a stable financial footing. In order to systematically understand the pressures on the HNB, you should undertake analysis to understand the impact of individual drivers on HNB expenditure.
The aim is to understand the trends driving these variables to determine where to focus your approach. This requires a combination of both financial and operational data.
Given that the variables driving HNB expenditure growth have been determined, you now want to go a layer deeper and explore the key trends in the number of children who need support and the associated cost.
By answering the questions above, this should give you a clear view of the cohorts of children and young people where there is greatest potential to improve outcomes. This understanding allows you to prioritise cohorts for deeper diagnostic investigations such as case reviews and surveys to maximise the impact on outcomes and finances.
Explore case studiesWhat is it?
Using publicly available data from SEN2 returns and School Census, you are able to compare a local area’s key metrics with national averages as well as trends observed in statistical neighbours that are deemed to have similar demographic characteristics.
Why is it important?
Benchmarking analysis is a useful method to provide further context to support the key trends driving HNB growth. It can be used to identify potential outliers in the data and therefore steer the direction of further diagnostic investigation. For example, a London Borough might benchmark well above national average for mainstream unit cost, but comparisons with statistical neighbours could confirm if they are aligned.
Benchmarking can be used to analyse many forms of data, including but not limited to:
1. Understanding trends in EHCPs and high needs spend
2. Understanding expected future growth
1. Investigating age of start and primary need
2. Investigating EHCPs in Independent and non-maintained Special Schools
