Context: This case study looks at a ‘process mapping’ exercise carried out by a small borough as part of their deep dive analysis. Process mapping is a qualitative method for understanding the processes within your LA and allows for the identification of where the main challenges arise in the process. The key to making a process flow is to ensure each step included is crucial for the process to take place successfully. As part of the process mapping discussion, it is often important to ask where things are working well and where challenges lie in the process and to identify the overarching themes.
What they did: In this local authority’s scenario, professionals in case reviews identified that a lack of evidence of a graduated response was a key barrier to children achieving their ideal outcomes. The ‘graduated response’ approach is a way of meeting needs through effective implementation of support before moving a child or young person onto higher levels of support.
As a result, they chose to conduct process mapping workshops to explore the LA’s understanding of their current graduated response process, what needed to change and what the blockers were to executing this correctly.
They ran two workshops that focused on the graduated response process. One focused on the early years transition point and the other on secondary transition. A range of different subject matter experts (SMEs) were involved to ensure the promotion of a multidisciplinary team (MDT) response.
Next steps: Once the change or blocker was identified, a more consistent framework for next steps across schools in the LA could be actioned. It was outlined that transition of children and young people hinders a graduated response as there is not enough communication and data sharing between different schools within the local authority.
Root causes were identified as being a high number of ‘feeder schools’ into a small number of secondary schools and there being no data sharing framework currently existing on children and young person data between each setting.
Variational analysis allows you to compare two or more different variables in a data set. The most common comparisons found helpful by DBV local areas were across schools, regions and levels of deprivation to then build insight into where support is working well and where there are points for improvement.
This case study focuses on a local area that supports a larger proportion of children with EHCPs in mainstream settings. Outputs from their case reviews highlighted that variation in mainstream settings is leading to an inconsistent experience and a measurable impact on the long-term outcomes of children and young people. Therefore, the LA investigated this variation further by visualising it, identifying barriers to understand what is driving this inconsistency, and the best way to improve.
Graph 2 represents the LA’s investigation into rates of SEND exclusion in mainstream secondaries and how this varies depending on the number of children with EHCPs being supported in that setting. Each blue dot represents a mainstream secondary school in the local authority.
Learning from schools that have lower rates of exclusion relative to the number of EHCPs could be used to understand better practice regarding inclusivity. These settings are highlighted in green. This could subsequently be used to help develop a new approach in schools highlighted in red, which represent higher exclusion rates compared to the number of EHCPs.
Graphs like these can provide valuable insight and have been used to inform where pilot programmes would be best utilised as part of implementation plans in the DBV programme. With that said, it is important not to draw definitive conclusions from this and worth noting that the results can vary between different local areas.
