The EA Plan of Arrangements

EA works with schools and educational settings to help to reduce the barriers to learning that children and young people with special educational needs may experience.

Our dedicated teams of professionals have a clear vision: to help and support every child to be the best that they can be. The support that the EA offers is detailed in the EA Plan of Arrangements for Special Educational Provision. This plan sets out how we support educational settings and schools, and their children and young people who have a Special Educational Need (SEN) and/or Disability (SEND). It is published each academic year.

• Provides important information for schools, young people with SEN and their parents or carers about EA SEND Services.
• Signposts to the resources available for children and young people with SEN, their parents or carers and educational settings or schools.
• Details the advice and support that each SEND Service provides.
• Explains how schools can access EA SEND Services to support a child or young person with SEN who attends their setting.
• Advises schools about what training is available each year for their staff who may be supporting children and young people with SEND.

If, during the academic year, a SEND Service makes a change to the way in which it supports our children and young people, the Plan will be updated on this website.

Schools will also be made aware of any changes or updates to service delivery and have a duty to keep staff and parents or carers informed of any changes.

The Plan will be reviewed annually and will be published each July in time for the new academic year.

In accordance with the SEND Act (NI) 2016, the EA must publish its Plan of arrangements for Special Educational Provision on or before 31 July each year. This is to help ensure that anyone and everyone likely to be affected by the Plan are aware of it and can easily access the information.

The EA Plan of its arrangements must include the resources and the advisory or support services which the EA proposes to make available each academic year for the purpose of discharging its functions in relation to special educational provision. There must also be a description of the arrangements for securing training for staff in grant-aided schools (which is also required for EA to effectively deliver its Special Educational duties).

In addition to preparing, reviewing or revising the plan, the EA will publish a draft plan for consultation by the end of March preceding the school year to which the plan relates.

Information gathered from the stakeholder workshops that were conducted and the online questionnaire, provided positive feedback. In general, stakeholders expressed their views that the new website is a helpful improvement to the website that was previously available.

Whilst positive, there were some key recommendations provided by a range of stakeholders for further improvements to be made to the website, PDF version and Easy Read document. The recommendations contained within this report reflect on the information provided from workshops and responses to an online questionnaire for each resource, have been broken down into key areas:

• Layout and design
• Accessibility and navigation
• Language and terminology
• Clear, useful and sufficient information.

These recommendations have been clearly signposted in section 2 of the consultation report below.  

The longer-term recommendations will inform future plans but a number of the short-term recommendations have been incorporated in time for the 2023 Plan. These include:

• “ReachDeck” added to the entire website to provide accessibility services, including translation and screen reading.
• Confirmation that, although some aspects of the revised legislation are in place, schools are still operating the 1998 Code of Practice.
• Improved information on criteria and timelines for accessing support services, including graphical representation.
• Messaging relating to current limitations added to support services pages, in order to manage expectations.
• “Training” added as a dedicated tab.
• Clarification that children and young people are the audience for the Easy Read documents.