Local education authority ‘not getting the basics right’,says council boss

North Northamptonshire’s fourth director of children’s services in four years, says her department needs to get its house in order and declares a funding crisis

By Sarah Ward

The new director of children’s services at North Northamptonshire Council has rung the alarm bell about the state of her local education department.

Charisse Monero, who took up the role last month, says her department has missed opportunities to get the basics right and that ‘immediate corrective’ action is needed. She says the local education authority has lost the trust of schools.

In North Northants a record number of children are being pulled out of mainstream education by their parents and being home schooled, with more than 1,050 children at home. This is against a backdrop of a rapidly growing number of children who qualify for educational health and care plans. (There is a similar number of home schooled children in the West).

At a meeting of the North Northants school’s forum last week, Charisse Monero laid out the ‘significant challenges’ facing her department and her new assistant director for inclusion David Paice, said the authority could not fund all of its EHCP requirements. He said the schools budget was in danger of going bust, which would have serious consequences.

The designated schools budget comes from central government to the local education authority. The general schools budget has been raided for a number of years to put more money into paying the high needs budget - which pays for schooling for children with specialist needs. Unlike other council budgets the schools budget can go into the red, although the previous conservative government said this would stop from March 2026 and would be placed in the council’s overall budget.

Unusually the North Northants schools forum decided at this meeting that it would not have a report on the current high needs deficit, as chair James Birkett, who is head of Wollaston School, said it would be better to have a report for the next meeting when an action plan would be in place.

However the assistant director for inclusion David Paice said the deficit on the schools budget was £25m this year and ‘likely to be considerably higher in the next year.”

He said:

“We have raised this at a critical red flag level with DfE - I think we have gone to the very top. Let’s see where this conversation goes.”

He gave a damning assessment of the department saying a ‘number of our processes are non-existent or not functional.’

He said there were a number of high cost packages in place that should not exist and had ‘slipped through the net’. The partnership in Northamptonshire, which is made up of schools, social services and health, he said had been ‘weighed and measured’ by official inspectors (such as Ofsted and the CQC) and had been found to be wanting.

He told the forum, which is mostly made up of senior school bosses:

“If we continue to operate as we are as a system - we will go bust and that will have very serious implications for everybody”. He said legislative changes were needed as the system simply did not work currently.

His boss Charisse Monero called the situation a ‘crisis’ and said central government intervention is needed. The local authority does not manage its social care, after government in 2019 that decided the political leaders in Northants were failing local children in care and set up an independent trust.

She said:

“This demand that is increasing is not just in one place, it is widespread. We have increasing numbers of children coming into care, we have an increasing number of contacts going via the MASH (multi agency safeguarding hub). It is an interconnected crisis. When you try and solve one, you evacuate to another part of the system.”

Echoing what has been said in Northants for several years she said the county did not have a ‘robust early help offer’. She said parents and carers are frustrated by the system, and a transformation needed to happen to create a ‘financially stable service.’

She said she had hit the ground practically ‘sprinting’ and that her department now had ‘no option’ but to work at pace and acceleration. A home education summit will be held next month to address the rising number of parents choosing to take their children out of schools and educate their children themselves.

Forum chair James Birkett said due to a number of interim staff at the local authority, plans to change the SEN system had not come to fruition.

Forum member Richard Wheeler, who is deputy chief executive of the East Midlands Academy Trust said there ‘has been an inertia’ and the situation had got out of control. He said changes needed to happen fast and not in a couple of years.

It is clear from the meeting, that four years on from its creation North Northamptonshire Council has not improved the local education authority service it was inherited from the former county council.

Cathi Hadley, who was appointed by the previous council, was the first director of children’s services and in place when the council began in April 2021. Nine months later she was replaced by her deputy Anne Marie Dodds, who proclaimed she was a ‘woman for action, not chat’.

She resigned in summer 2023 and for 12 months the authority’s director of adult services David Watts held the statutory children’s post on an interim basis.

Local parents of children with special education needs will go to Westminster tomorrow to meet with Northants MPs and explain how badly the local service is performing.

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