Tuesday 11 February 2025

A message from Sara

We end the half-term with our Together, Local First Inclusion Summit and I look forward to welcoming many of you to County Hall for the event on Friday. We're joined by Lee Owston, National Director of Education for the DfE and Mark Vickers, who chairs our LFI Board. The day gives us a great opportunity to discuss together how we can create a more inclusive education system in Norfolk so that more of our children with SEND can flourish.

Thanks for your patience and support last week when the national LiquidLogic case management system went down. It meant CADs could only respond to the most urgent calls and teams couldn't access our electronic records. Thankfully, we were back up and running fairly quickly. We've updated the schools webpages this week about the Children's Advice and Duty Service (CADS) with a reminder on which of our numbers to call for information, advice and support. Please do take a look and share the flow charts that we've created widely within your organisations. As part of our ongoing work to ensure that routes of communication are clear, we will be sending out a wider contact list for schools shortly after half term, so please do look out for it

In other news, you may have seen on Wednesday that the Deputy Prime Minister announced that Norfolk has been approved to be part of the Government's priority programme for Devolution, as well as confirming plans for local government reorganisation. The latter will mean the end of the current two-tier system of county and district councils across parts of England with unitary councils. It's very early days in this process and too soon to know what it might mean for Norfolk but I will keep you posted as more details emerge.

Thanks

Sara Tough OBE

Executive Director of Children's Services
Norfolk County Council
Chair of the Children and Young People Strategic Alliance