Ten years spent watching the SEND system fail, here is what we’ve learned - Michael Smith

With my team, I have spent ten years growing and running Pivot Group, an independent specialist provider working with children referred by Leeds, Kirklees, Bradford and Calderdale councils.

Most of our learners have been out of education for months or years by the time they reach us. School had become something to fear. Some of them are recovering from trauma. Some have complex needs that mainstream provision, under current pressures, could not keep hold of.

What they share is a family who has fought for them, and a system that has moved too slowly to catch them. When we opened our first Pivot centre in Leeds in 2016, we had a handful of learners and a small team. We now employ more than 170 staff, and 82 per cent of our learners' EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) targets are met or exceeded, with every leaver going on to a confirmed place in education, training or work. That growth, and those numbers, are the visible edge of a demand curve that has been rising across our region for a decade.

The last few weeks have seen the SEND conversation come, briefly, into national focus. The Government's consultation on special educational needs reform has closed. A white paper is expected. Its direction of travel is, in several respects, correct, better outcomes data, earlier intervention, less reliance on crisis-driven plans. If it delivers, the system will be better in ten years than it is today.

But ten years is a long time. Longer than the school career of most children currently waiting for it to catch up with them. Nationally, only 46.4 per cent of new Education, Health and Care Plans last year were issued within the 20-week timeframe the law requires. For most families, the system misses its own deadline before the real waiting even begins.

That gap is not abstract here. In North Yorkshire alone, the number of children with an EHC plan has risen from 1,700 in 2015 to more than 6,000 today. In Kirklees, one of the four authorities we work with, the council's own reporting describes a cumulative high-needs deficit of £43.7m. Its own words were blunter than anything I would have written myself: the system is broken.

Our answer is a slow, deliberate expansion into a regional hub network, small settings, rooted in the communities they serve, close enough to home that no family needs an expedition to reach us. We have established hub sites in Wakefield and Bradford and are locating others as part of our outreach programme. Our Open Day in Wakefield drew families from four local authorities, several on their second or third search for provision that would actually work for their child.

We've had good company along the way. MPs, business leaders and sports personalities; all Yorkshire figures whose interest in what we do carries weight beyond the commercial and sports pages, have visited our Kirklees and Leeds Academies this year and spent time with our staff and learners.

Themes that resonate with our learners were spoken about, such as setbacks, how resilience is built, and why asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. It matters more than a photograph. It tells families still fighting for a placement that this work is worth their attention, and it tells the wider county that this is a Yorkshire responsibility, not a Westminster one.

What policy cannot do is build the relationships that make specialist education work, a member of school support staff and a child who has not spoken in a group for 18 months, until the day, quietly, she does. Those take years, and you protect them fiercely when the system around you changes.

None of this is a contest between kinds of school. Independent, mainstream, specialist, alternative, or whatever label comes next, the name matters far less than the job. We are all here for the same reason: young people who stand apart, whose needs are real and specific, and who are better served when every part of the system pulls in the same direction. It's why the Pivot 2030 Charter, the public commitments we published this year, describes us as specialist alternative education. Not a substitute for the system. Part of it.

SEN reform will come, in time. In the meantime, Yorkshire's children are still going to school, or trying to, or waiting to. What they need is not another five years of national conversation. What they need is Yorkshire itself deciding that this matters and acting on it.

We think it does. Because children deserve better. Always have. Always will.

Michael Smith is founder and chief executive of Pivot Group, an independent specialist SEND provider based in Leeds and Kirklees.