iLearn

Background

iLearn is a comprehensive application specifically designed for any local authority’s Special Education Needs (SEN) department to help manage the sensitive but crucial Statement Assessment and review process.  

In general terms, the financing of all child education is undertaken by the Local Education Authority (LEA) in which a child resides, and the SEN is a specialist department within the LEA responsible for the assessment, allocation, financing and review of special education provision for children with educational difficulties.   Its main task is to ensure that children from within its locality that have special learning requirements are specifically catered for and that adequate and relevant funding is applied.

Each child that falls within the responsibility of the SEN department will have a ‘Statement’ detailing the educational requirements of the child and an agreed plan best to meet them.   The ‘Statement’ is produced after the child’s exact needs have been ascertained as a result of undertaking a ‘statutory assessment process’ that conforms to national standards.  Key decisions are made by a panel of experts and it is the responsibility of the SEN to ensure this panel has correct and adequate information and to act upon decisions made by the panel.   Once a ‘Statement’ has been put in place, it requires regular reviews to ensure that it is still relevant as the child’s needs and requirements do change over time.

There is also a complex process of ensuring that the correct level of funding is made to each educational establishment, a process that is complicated by the fact that the authority may be paying another authority to deliver the care for a child or may be being paid by another authority to deliver the care of a child who lives in another authority’s area.

The whole process is governed by laws, procedures and a standard set out by central government and is separated into “key stages” which can be loosely defined as:

• Initial Assessment
• Mainstream Assessment
• Complex Assessment

 These ‘key stages’ must be completed within statutory time limits primarily for the sake of the child and family, but secondarily to avoid financial penalties for not completing tasks within set time frames.

The Process

The overall process is one of a start/stop nature spread over a six month period and the child may remain in the system as long as they are receiving child education (this may be as late as them reaching 19 years old). There are times when the SEN department processes the case a far as it can and is then waiting for the decision of the panel.

At other times the SEN department cannot progress further until it receives further information it needs and a significant amount of activity is ‘chasing up’ people who have been asked for various specialist reports. iLearn provides a strong date driven self-updating diary system to schedule, monitor, expedite and record the outcome of all these disparate events.

Although there are fixed guidelines that govern the advancement and work requirements of the assessment process, there are so many variables that in reality, each case will follow a unique critical path through the SEN.

There are several ‘entry points’ for a case into the Statement Assessment process.  Statements can be requested for from interested individuals such as Parents, Schools, Medical staff or Social services. There is a variety of people who might have a vested interest in a particular case.  These include Parents, Separated Parents, Social Services, Foster Parents, and Guardians and the like.  

The reasons for any child requiring assessment for a Statement are varied too and include Behavioural, Physical, Psychological, Medical learning difficulties and more.  Often specialist reports and advice is sought from specialist sources to make fully informed decisions and can include one or a combination of an eye test, hearing test, psychological report, physiotherapist report, whatever is relevant to the individual child and their assessment path.  The “Case” therefore has to record, progress and receive all relevant input in addition to any other appropriate contribution at the same time as presenting a consistent ‘overall’ view of each case.

iLearn achieves this by having a flexible and extensible workflow system that monitors and controls the entire life cycle of a case from the initial request for additional educational help until its successful conclusion.  The conclusion may be simply a rejection of the request or it may the successful implementation of a programme designed for the individual child. 

In either case, iLearn will record, manage and expedite the whole process to enable statutory timescales to be met, information appropriately shared between individual professionals, whilst keeping interested individuals fully informed at every stage and within statutory timescales. 

iLearn Package

There are a large number of letters that need to be written to various parties at different stages of a case.  It is vital to the process that the correct letter is sent out to all the individuals entitled to receive it at the correct time.  Often a letter can start the clock ticking such that a response is required within a certain time, which is required to comply with statutory requirements.

 iLearn provides standard letter templates which are built into the system complete with full mailmerge functionality.  Each template can be simply tailored to suite and individual authority’s requirements and each time a template is used it can be tailored to the individual case. iLearn achieves this by making a copy of the letter template and allowing the user to edit it online before printing. Each letter has a primary addressee, any number of carbon copy (CC) or blind copy (BC) can be added to its own distribution list of interested individuals.  The address of each recipient, the interested individual is copied onto the letter at the time it is created, therefore a particular letter will always retain the addresses it was sent to even if those people have changed and had their addresses updated.

To help keep the work load of the Local Authority’s own ICT Department down to a minimum, iLearn written completely as a dot.net web application.  The iLearn application program is copied to a standard Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and then Users simply access iLearn using a standard copy of Internet Explorer.   This means that no software other then the standard Internet Explorer is required to be installed on any of the User’s Laptops or Personal Computers.   All data is held centrally and securely on a standard Microsoft 2008 SQL server.

iLearn comprises several integrated modules:-

Initial Assessment .

The first module is Initial Assessment (IS). The prime function of this module is to record the basic initial details for a new request for a child’s special needs.  Appropriate letters will be produced for the case and automatically sent to interested individuals and a historical education report will be requested from the school.  The case is then assessed by the Special Needs Panel but may be rejected at this stage. 

If it is rejected an appropriate letter is automatically produced and sent to all interested individuals and the details and conclusion recorded in iLearn.  However before the Panel can make judgement additional information may be sought and this is also recorded in iLearn, setting the relevant triggers and dated reminders.  When the Panel finally approves the request for undertaking a statutory assessment it will then recommend the case be passed for either Main Stream assessment or Complex assessment.

In all cases, the system maintains a comprehensive record of activities, requests, responses, letters and diary’s to ensure the Initial Assessment is completed within its statutory time frame.

Main and Complex Streams:

The Main Stream (MS) and Complex Stream (CS) modules are similar in operation and receive all cases which have been approved by the Initial Assessment Special Needs Panel for further consideration.  Each case depending upon it’s complexity will be transferred to either one or the other and subsequently after review a Mainstream case can be upgraded or transferred to a Complex case and visa versa.  

The control of all the tasks, letters, reports and diary’s associated is attached to an individual case is carried forward through to each stage required to perform a section 167 assessment and / or produce a education plan and final statement.

These two modules achieve the same purpose the only difference is the volumes and complexity of each case.  

Once a statement has been put in place, each case is regularly reviewed, at a minimum annually.  The review process ensures that all establishments know the timescale of each child’s statement and ensures that timely notifications are issued.  If a review indicates that a child’s statement needs modification, the case is passed back into either the Main Stream (MS) or the Complex Stream (CS) module for reappraisal.

Finance:

Any statement that is in place will also exist in the Finance module. This module takes care of controlling the financial resources associated with each statement.

A complexity is the duration of the statement, and who provides the funding.  In a straightforward case the special needs provision will continue until the Child in question reaches the age of 19, or if the special provision has produced a successful outcome and therefore no longer required.  

It is possible that when a child reaches 19, his/her case is transferred onwards to another agency who will pick up responsibility for continuing. It is also possible that a child moves house and lives outside the originating LEA jurisdiction.  By law the provision goes with the child and until agreed otherwise this provision continues to be funded by the originating LEA.

Often a special needs provision can only be satisfied by the purchase of specialist services either from a private company or a neighbouring LEA. 

In all the cases outlined above money has to allocated and accounted for.  The Finance module of iLearn manages and tracks all of these transactions to enable each LEA and SEN to manage budgets easily and a timely manner. 

Conclusion:

iLearn has been designed to remove the drudgery of maintaining paper records and missing timescales.  It is a multi-users system that requires no special programmes to be loaded onto a caseworker’s computer and ensure collaborative working between caseworkers and their managers.

iLearn enables letters to be changed and automatically edited to reflect the individual situation.  Such an example is a standard letter sent to a Parent.  Based upon the information held in the child’s master data record the letter will be automatically cc’d and bcc’d to all interested individuals.    The letter itself will change based upon rules.  Such a basic example will be a change from your Daughter to your Son depending on gender, so hers will be changed to his and so on.  iLearn can hold a comprehensive set of rules of this kind all designed to be  a pro-active aid for the caseworker.

iLearn is easy to use and easy to understand and enables all statutory requirements to be met within a SEN Statement Assessment environment, removing repetitive routine work thus enabling precious resources to be deployed elsewhere dealing with more demanding and acute cases.