I moved on to the Specialist Inclusive Provision Group who were meeting at the East SILC...

Graham Newell who is leading this work for us had invited me to the meeting to support the colleagues who are helping us reshape and refocus our specialist and inclusive provision to build on the fantastic work that is going on across the city; in schools, learning support centres, pupil development centres, nurture groups, rainbows, bridges, partnership bases, resourced provision, PRUs, SILCs,and in our central SEN provision. We need to put this all together and see how we can organise and arrange the pieces to create real efficiencies and build a 'centres of excellence' model which retains and builds on the foundations we have so successfully laid over the last five years.

We need to ensure that we maintain real excellence around specialist provision for children with complex needs, sensory needs, physical disabilities, learning needs, emotional needs and behavioural needs. We also need to outreach training, support and expertise in these key areas from locality, area and city wide provision as appropriate. We also need to develop a new language and a new vocabulary to describe the new and exciting world we are building for our most special children and those who might need us at some point during their school years. And we need to build trust and confidence throughout the system to ensure that young people, their parents and carers and our partners understand and support the work we are doing to build truly world class provision for all our children and young people... whatever it takes!

We certainly live in interesting times!
Chris