View the Milton Keynes SEND strategy 2021-2025 2024 Action Plans

What is a strategy and why is it important?

A strategy is a document that's created by a  partnership to identify what they agree needs to change or happen and how they will get there. Agreeing a strategy allows partnerships to ensure that they are all focusing their energy on the things that are most important to change or improve and help them work more effectively together.

What is the "Area SEND Partnership"?

The "area SEND partnership" is a name used to describe all of the services that deliver support for children and young people in Milton Keynes. The partnership includes:

• All of our schools, colleges and early years providers
• The Parent Carer Forum, PACA MK
• Services that provide health support like therapies, paediatric clinics and school nurses for children and young people with SEND, including Milton Keynes hospital.
• Local authority education services including our SEND and inclusion teams who support children being successful in school, and our place planning teams who look at how many school places we'll need over time.
• Local authority social care teams that support children (like the children with disabilities team), and social care teams that support adults (like the working age adults team)
• Milton Keynes public health team, and the BLMK integrated care board (ICB) who plan, buy and monitor health services in the area.

The number of people working across all of the services mentioned above is huge, and so the partnership has named representatives who help to make plans and share messages. Four times a year, a group representing all of the services above meets to discuss how things are going and to check that we are working to improve things that we agree need to get better. This meeting is called the "SEND Strategic Partnership Board". The SEND Strategic Partnership Board uses something called the 'SEND Strategy' to ensure we are keeping focused on improving our services.

The SEND strategy and the Milton Keynes Area SEND Partnership.

The Area SEND Partnership understands that SEND brings some unique challenges for families, and that navigating the maze of services can be difficult and confusing.  We're always working to make things better for children with SEND in Milton Keynes.

Aims and purpose of this SEND Strategy

This document is a Local Area strategy, and its delivery is the responsibility of education, health and care services. It describes our strategic vision and the outcomes we want for our children and young people with SEND. It describes the context in which we work, the principles underlying how we work and our strategic priority areas for the next 4 years. It aims to:

• Meet the requirements of the Children and Families Act in a way that is aspirational for all children and young people

• Set out how we will work towards our vision for children and young people with SEND in Milton Keynes

• Develop the effectiveness of the Local Area in:

• Identifying children and young people’s special educational needs and/or disabilities 
• Meeting the needs of children and young people with SEND 
• Helping to deliver improved outcomes for every child and young person with SEND in Milton Keynes

•Build on areas of acknowledged strength in Milton Keynes services for children and young people with SEND

• Progress areas for development through a clear and shared focus on key Priority Areas, identified through both the 2018 inspection and our on-going partnership work

• Promote inclusion whilst being realistic in a challenging financial context

In Milton Keynes, we have identified 5 key areas which will underpin our SEND strategy. These are the areas that the partnership has agreed need some focus. This was done by taking information from feedback and data, including the PACA MK parent questionnaire and the outcomes of the SEND event held in June 2023. The 5 key areas are:

• Inclusion
• Complex needs
• Transition and preparing for adulthood
• Emotional wellbeing and mental health
• Autism and cooccurring difficulties.

What happens next?

The partnership has created 'working groups' for each of the areas above, making sure that people from education, health and care backgrounds are on each of the working groups and that every working group has a parent or carer sharing views of families. The working groups have agreed on goals that we want to achieve in each.

We are currently in the process of identifying how we'll measure that we're making a difference in the areas above, and the specific pieces of work (or projects) that will deliver the above strategy. We expect to have completed this work by Christmas and intend to share the action plan in February 2024.

We will shortly be republishing the SEND strategy.