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A top-up funding tool which could transform the market Fairly allocating top-up funding for children and young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan (ECHP) and Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) is an issue many local authorities grapple with. Additionally, increasing numbers of ECHPs being issued means the system and budgets may soon be unable to keep up with demand. Redesigning and transforming how top-up funds are allocated is now possible – even necessary – and there is new technology available to help.
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uman-centred design agency Social Kemistri has built a digital decision support system to help local authorities allocate top-up funding awarded to children whose care within school or college reaches more than £6,000 a year. The tool uses clustering technologies and applied artificial intelligence to accurately assess what a child or young person’s needs are and then suggests a support package which can be adjusted by a support worker for a better fit. It is designed to make fairer, more consistent and accountable decisions about funding and eliminate many of the disparities and inequities found in current models. The initial project was funded by Better Futures
for Children (BFfC), a not-for-profit organisation which delivers children’s services in Reading (see box). Social Kemistri is now looking for one or more local authorities with large numbers of children with SEND and ECHPs to invest and take the prototype to product stage. “The brief was to explore and investigate the potential of using of data analytics and applied artificial intelligence to improve BFfC’s SEND Top Up Funding model,” explained Tom Penney, CEO and Change Architect at Social Kemistri. “The current model is driven by the place where children or young people attend. There is a consensus that the model
should be needs driven and that the funding should follow the child. Joining up a child’s assessed needs with outcomes and costed provision is difficult to say the least. It requires expert judgement and the ability to summarise, analyse and interpret complex facts and evidence. All this data is of course encapsulated in a child or young person’s EHCP. “Our challenge was to find a way that would enable BFfC to perform that complex analysis fairly, accurately and consistently,” he added. “Matching funding to a child’s assessed needs is crucial. Overfunding implies waste and underfunding risks unmet needs. Our approach is always to check how
Pictured: Social Kemistri's needs profiler output example.
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