Specialist Provision
Bradford offers a range of educational provision to meet the needs of Children and Young People with Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
This includes provision in both Local Authority Maintained Schools and Academy schools including:
- Mainstream Schools
- Special Schools
- Resourced Provision led by the school (RP-SL)
- Resourced Provision led by the Local Authority (RP-LA)
- Additionally Resourced Centre – Local Authority Led (ARC-LA)
- Early Years Enhanced Specialist Provision (EYESP)
The planning of provision for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities within the District is guided by a number of principles including:
- The Council will ensure that suitable provision is available for all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities aged 0-25 and will provide appropriate services to encourage, enable and assist relevant young adults aged 19-25
to engage and remain in education and training. A child or young person has SEND if they have a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special educational provision to be made for him or her.
- The Council will seek to make such provision for those up to the age of 19 through local mainstream nurseries and schools, if necessary with additional resources or equipment. For children whose needs cannot be met in this way, the Council will seek to
make appropriate provision through its special schools, Resourced Provisions (RP's) Additionally Resourced Centre (ARC) or Early Years Enhanced Specialist Provision (EYESP) where this is possible. For young people aged 16-19 provision may be at a school or
college and for young people aged 19-25 provision is likely to be college based.
- The Bradford District has experienced a significant increase in demand for SEND provision in the last 10 years and has invested significant resources to develop specialist provision within the District to avoid the need to place young people out of District
enabling them remain part of their local school community. It is acknowledged that there are exceptional cases where this is not possible. It is projected that the demand for SEND provision will continue to grow and that additional specialist provision in
the Bradford District will be required for 2021-2023.
Over the last 3 years Bradford have increased capacity at a number of Special Schools and have increased capacity and created new Resourced Provisions across the District.
Our current projection is that we will require an additional 100 to 120 specialist places between the academic year of 2021 to 2022 and a further 100 to 120 between 2022 and 2023. With these places being delivered across both the Special School sector and
in Resourced Provisions.
This is the minimum number of specialist places required to be developed in order to meet demand and to control (and not increase) the reliance on more expensive out of authority placements
Strategic Plan 2022 - Sufficiency of Specialist Places for Children and Young People in Bradford
click here for the full Strategic Plan 2022
The Strategic Plan 2022 contains a full list of specialist provisions in appendix 1 (pages 51-55)
This report sets out the analysis process that we undertake to enable the Local Authority to plan and ensure the sufficiency of specialist places across the district and provides an overview of the following information:
- The current specialist provision available.
- The number of children and young people with an EHCP.
- The most prevalent primary needs of the children and young people with an EHCP.
- The projected growth of children and young people with an EHCP based on local and national data.
- Whether or not there are sufficient specialist places for particular primary needs within each constituency, to meet current and projected demands.
- The type of provision that is projected to be required for example Resourced Provisions, Special Schools or Enhanced Early Years Specialist Provision.
This report highlights the projected scale of growth and the number of specialist places required to meet projected increase in demand. In order to assess and ensure that there are sufficient specialist places for statutory school aged children, this report
primarily looks at school aged children and young people with an EHCP.