Part 4: Allocating resources for supporting students

4.1
In this Part, we set out our findings about how the Ministry:

• allocates funding and resources to support students;
• makes sure that students receive timely support; and
• trains and supports its staff who provide support for students.

Summary of our findings

4.2
The Ministry pools funding for ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund nationally, and distributes it to districts for allocation to students. For the Severe Behaviour and Speech Language Initiatives, districts receive funding allocations based on the total student population of each district. The allocations may not match the level of need in a particular district.

4.3
The Ministry had processes for allocating resources and funding to students. These processes and the timeframes for providing services varied across and within the districts we visited. Managing the balance of teacher aide hour allocations for ORRS and the School High Health Needs Fund was putting pressure on some district budgets. The Ministry was implementing a National Moderation Plan to achieve better consistency in its approach to the ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund allocation process. The Ministry was also implementing processes for more timely delivery of its services for Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative support.

4.4
Staff capacity problems in some districts caused significant delays in providing Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative support to students. The Ministry was working to improve this through closer contact with schools and RTLBs, and also improving its waiting list data. Ministry staff received regular and appropriate training.

4.5
We have made four recommendations in this Part, for the Ministry to improve:

• the consistency with which districts allocate and moderate ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund teacher aide hours;
• the timeliness with which students receive services;
• its checking of the integrity of its waiting list data; and
• its management of staff capacity.

Allocating funding and resources to students

At the time of our audit, the Ministry’s approach to allocating funding and resources to students receiving support through the four initiatives was not nationally consistent. This meant students with similar needs and circumstances could receive different levels of support in different parts of the country.

Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Schemes and the School High Health Needs Fund

4.6
When students are verified as eligible for ORRS and the School High Health Needs Fund, they generate a set funding figure. The Ministry pools this funding, and allocates some funding directly to “fund holder” schools.¹¹

4.7
The rest is allocated to the Ministry’s district offices. Each district office then allocates funding to students who are assessed as eligible and enrolled at schools in its district. This funding is for specialist services, teacher aide hours, and extra resources and materials.

4.8
Districts receive weekly notification from the Ministry’s national office, confirming which students are to receive ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund support. District offices then allocate and co-ordinate specialist Ministry staff and teacher aide hours according to staff capacity and the student’s level of need.

4.9
The individual circumstances of the student are also considered, such as whether resources are already in place in the school for other students with high special educational needs, the degree of support from the student’s family, and the student’s current learning needs. In districts we visited, the allocation occurred through regular team meetings, or was decided by the service manager, or was agreed at meetings that included staff from different service centres within a district.

4.10
Most of the district funding for ORRS students (70%), and all of the funding for School High Health Needs Fund students, is made as a contribution to funding teacher aides to support the student in the classroom.¹² The funding supports an estimated 17.5 teacher aide hours each week for a student with very high needs, and an estimated 10 teacher aide hours each week for a student with high needs (for both ORRS and the School High Health Needs Fund). The hours are then pooled at a district level.

4.11
The teacher aide hours are allocated by district offices to students each year (usually in October or November) for the next calendar year. This occurs through the Ministry’s rating and allocation process (known as “moderation”), which includes these steps:

• schools submit requests for teacher aide hours to the Ministry based on the needs of the student, and with the help of the lead caseworker;¹³
• these requests are considered by a team who assess each student’s learning, sensory, and physical needs using the Ministry’s national descriptors and rating scale, which generates the number of teacher aide hours the student is likely to need;
• the Ministry district moderation panel considers the individual student’s current needs and circumstances, and decides whether the student needs fewer or more hours than the rating scale has indicated; and
• regional moderation meetings compare allocations between districts (further adjustments may then be made by districts).

4.12
Students who need fewer hours are called “unders” and those who need more are called “overs”. This process allows the district to balance the level of resource for individual students against the regionally moderated level of resource for students with that level of need and in similar circumstances.

4.13
At the time of our audit, the approaches to “moderation” were many and varied. Approaches in the districts we visited, and other approaches that were reported to us, included:

• in several districts, involving only Ministry specialist and administrative teams;
• in one district, involving parents/caregivers, educators, and the student’s lead caseworker to a greater or lesser extent;
• in some districts, using the student’s Individual Education Programme (IEP) plan as the basis for allocation;
• in one district, adapting the Ministry’s national rating scale; and
• in some districts, involving either teams or the whole staff in decisions about allocating teacher aide hours.

4.14
The risk of districts using different approaches to allocate teacher aide hours is that students with similar needs in different parts of the country may receive more or fewer hours. The number of hours they receive could depend on how the rating scale has been adapted or interpreted in their district, who has been involved in the rating and allocation process, and whether the student’s IEP plan has been used.

4.15
In several of the districts we visited, Ministry staff estimated that there were generally more “overs” students in their districts than “unders” students. They told us that in the past few years this had made balancing the distribution of hours difficult within a fixed budget. In some cases, they had relied on the School High Health Needs Fund and other funding sources to supplement the ORRS funding.

4.16
In 2008, the Ministry surveyed staff about the arrangements for ORRS, and became aware of variability in nearly all aspects of the funding and moderation processes. The Ministry has now implemented a National Moderation Plan, in response to those survey findings. The National Moderation Plan includes re-establishing national criteria for funding, nationally consistent annual moderation processes and rating scales, and nationally consistent letter templates explaining how teacher aide hours are allocated and what the funding is provided for.

4.17
The National Moderation Plan also separates out the School High Health Needs Fund and the ORRS process and funding, which will enable the Ministry to be clear about the differences in figures between projected allocation and actual surpluses or deficits. The Ministry expects that, once national consistency has been established and the next moderation round has been completed in October 2009, it will be able to determine with greater certainty whether districts have a greater number of students needing more teacher aide hours in each district. The National Moderation Plan includes reviewing and co-ordinating district’s budget management strategies.

4.18
In our view, the Ministry needs to give priority to implementing its National Moderation Plan for ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund funding and moderation processes, to ensure that funding and resources are allocated as fairly and equally to students throughout the country as possible within fixed district budgets. The risk of continuing with varying approaches to rating students’ needs is that the number of hours allocated to students with similar needs and circumstances in different districts will be different.

Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative

4.19
There are no nationally prescribed processes for funding and allocating Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative support services. However, allocation decisions are usually made in a similar way by district offices, with variation according to budget constraints and demand. Districts receive funding allocations for both initiatives from the Ministry’s national office in April of each year, for specialist Ministry staff, based on the district’s student population.¹⁴ Because it is based on population, the funding allocation for a district may not match the district’s actual level of need for these initiatives.

4.20
Districts then allocate their specialist services and support worker hours depending on their staff numbers and according to the number of students they are supporting. In most districts, specialists make allocation decisions in consultation with the service manager, according to their caseloads. Referrals are prioritised for allocation to specialist staff according to the level of need, assessed against the national criteria used in that district, and also according to waiting times. The Greater Wellington district also adds a decile weighting to its allocation methods.

4.21
The Ministry told us that it balances capacity with quality and quantity of service delivery, to avoid spreading its services so thinly that they are ineffective. For the Severe Behaviour Initiative, the Ministry told us that it considers more intense interventions to be the most effective, and bases the allocation for support on depth and intensity rather than quantity. The Ministry also told us that, as research shows that interventions for severe behaviour are more effective when children are younger, the rating scales used to assess need in the allocation process are weighted toward children in the younger age groups.

4.22
District offices have a limited amount of flexibility to determine staffing levels and capacity within their funding allocations. Ministry staff in districts we visited told us that they have, or were setting up, close contact with schools and RTLBs, in accordance with the RTLB–Ministry protocols discussed in paragraphs 3.26 and 3.40. Using this contact to understand likely trends and patterns of need is expected to help districts to prioritise better and avoid the risk of having little or no staff capacity when needs arise.

4.23
We encourage the Ministry’s district offices to continue to work actively with RTLBs, schools, and early childhood centres, gathering information that will help with more accurate forecasting and planning for funding and resources within district allocations, and staff capacity. This is important for providing a consistent level of support to students receiving Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative support throughout the country.

Making sure that students receive timely funding and resources

At the time of our audit, the Ministry did not have clear or consistent processes to ensure that funding and resources are allocated to students in a timely manner. The Ministry did not have reliable data about the numbers of students on waiting lists for the Severe Behaviour Initiative and the Speech Language Initiative.

All four initiatives

4.24
Ministry staff record information about students who have been referred or verified, allocation of staff to cases, services provided, and closure of cases for all four initiatives in the Ministry’s national reporting and work outputs database, Te Pātaka.

4.25
The district offices we visited managed the allocation of resources differently. They had different schedules for how regularly they met to decide on referrals and the allocation of resources, different methods for making those decisions, and different patterns of communication with early childhood education centres, schools, and RTLBs.

4.26
Some district offices we visited had combined early intervention and school teams, and managed the change of support easily when children move from an early childhood education centre to a school. Other district offices had protocols or tools such as “transition plans”, which they used with the early childhood centre or the school where the student will go.

4.27
Some of the districts we visited were having trouble recruiting and retaining psychologists and speech-language therapists. Educators we talked to as part of the audit commented that they sometimes received services between one and two terms after referrals for support were accepted. By this time, the student’s behaviour could have changed, or the student could have left the school.

4.28
The Te Pātaka User Manual sets out a 10-day timeframe for acceptance of a referral, but states that cases should not be allocated if services are unlikely to start within six to eight weeks of acceptance.

4.29
After our audit, the Ministry introduced an expectation that there be no more than 90 days (about one school term) between referral (or a successful application) and receiving support through ORRS, the Severe Behaviour Initiative, or the Speech Language Initiative. The Ministry is currently working to ensure that students receive services within 90 days of acceptance after referral. (We discuss this further in paragraphs 4.33 to 4.39.)

Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Schemes and the School High Health Needs Fund

4.30
At the time of our audit, the Ministry had not set a required timeframe for allocating specialist staff time or teacher aide hours to a student eligible for ORRS or the School High Health Needs Fund. However, Ministry staff told us that most Ministry offices did this within two or three weeks, or sooner if the school already had a teacher aide whose hours could be extended to cover the student.

Severe Behaviour Initiative

4.31
The Ministry provides services through the Severe Behaviour Initiative either as an immediate response to a severe situation or after receiving a referral from its early intervention staff or RTLBs. The Ministry has a policy of responding quickly to requests for severe behaviour support, with a 24-hour response time to a situation that poses safety risks to an individual or group.

4.32
At the time of our audit, staff in many district offices and RTLBs worked together in consultation or according to Ministry protocols so that children received support quickly (immediately or within two weeks). As noted earlier, protocols for RTLBs, schools, and the Ministry working collaboratively are now in place nationally. Most districts have interim intervention measures, especially for urgent cases, to provide support while staff consider the referral. staff in the district offices also keep schools informed about waiting lists.

Speech Language Initiative

4.33
At the time of our audit, the Ministry had not specified how long it should take to allocate a specialist after an eligible student was referred for support through the Speech Language Initiative. District offices took similar amounts of time to process referrals through to their acceptance, but their timeliness in providing support depended on staff capacity and the level of need.

4.34
The Ministry has recently implemented a standard timeframe for referral decisions, and the allocation and delivery of support, to ensure that students receive services no more than 90 days after they have been referred.

4.35
In our view, the Ministry should ensure that it implements and monitors its standard timeframe for the allocation of funding and resources for all four initiatives, to ensure that all students receive support in a timely manner. If students are not supported within a reasonable timeframe, their situation may worsen and they may be more difficult to manage when support is provided.

Severe Behaviour Initiative and the Speech Language Initiative

4.36
The Ministry has identified three points in the referral process for the Severe Behaviour Initiative and the Speech Language Initiative where referred students might be placed on a waiting list:

• after the referral is received and before it is accepted;
• after the referral is accepted and before resources are allocated; and
• after resources are allocated and before the student receives any services.

4.37
Ministry staff are required to enter data into Te Pātaka at each point for each case, and also when cases are closed. At the time of our audit, the Ministry was not able to accurately determine how many students were waiting at any of these points, because the information in Te Pātaka was neither complete nor reliable.

4.38
The Ministry was not able to give us reliable waiting list data for all districts. However, it knew that the Manukau district had a particularly high waiting list for the Speech Language Initiative, estimated in mid-2008 at about 800 students. The Ministry told us that this number could include duplicate entries, and the names of students who were no longer in the district.

4.39
After our audit, the Ministry told us that it was checking the integrity of the data in Te Pātaka. The Ministry is confident that implementing the Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative referral criteria will result in accurate record keeping and better data within Te Pātaka, and provide the Ministry’s national and district offices with accurate waiting list figures.

4.40
In July 2008, the Manukau district office made a project of its efforts to reduce its waiting list. It reviewed all the student files on its waiting list, limited the service period, closed some cases, and used private speech-language therapists to deliver services. This reduced the waiting list significantly (by about 75% by February 2009). At that time, it was still the largest waiting list in the country, which reflected the level of need for speech language support in the area, and also the difficulties in finding specialist staff to work in the district.

4.41
After our audit, the Ministry put in place monthly monitoring reports based on the upgraded data in Te Pātaka. These reports provide districts with more accurate waiting list figures at each point of waiting. These figures also provide a clearer overall picture for informing management at the national level.

4.42
In our view, the Ministry needs to further improve and regularly check the integrity of data held in Te Pātaka, so it has more certainty about the demand for its services. Without this certainty, it is difficult to plan and prioritise resources. The Ministry should also actively review and manage districts where staff capacity to provide support services is not meeting this demand. If district offices are not able to manage staff capacity, services may reduce and the waiting times for students may become unacceptably long.

Training and supporting staff who provide support for students

The Ministry’s staff who provide support through the four initiatives are appropriately experienced. The Ministry provides staff with access to appropriate training and support.

All four initiatives

4.43
The Ministry’s specialist staff responsible for providing support to students include educational psychologists, speech-language therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, special education advisors, advisors on deaf children, Māori and Pasifika liaison staff, and behaviour and communication support workers. The Ministry’s specialists work with students, their schools, and parents/caregivers in both an advisory and facilitative role, particularly when a student is receiving support from other staff, or needs to access support from other agencies.

4.44
As part of the audit, we spoke with several Ministry staff who were responsible for providing support for students with high special educational needs. Most staff had many years of experience in special education.

4.45
The Ministry prepared service standards in 2006 and provided staff with training about those standards. The Specialist Service Standards document sets out guidance for staff responsible for providing support to students. It includes an expectation about the quality of service that should be provided, professional practice standards, good practice guides for each standard, and specific behaviour standards.

4.46
District offices provide induction, training, and study programmes that include training and mentoring for specific disciplinary groups, training in technology and the use of assessment tools, and training for teacher aides and support workers. District offices have also produced guidelines for staff about internal management and managing client cases.

4.47
staff are supervised by the service team leader within their service teams, and by the lead practitioner within their specialist discipline. The lead practitioner (there is one for each of the four initiatives) is primarily responsible for practice support for specific students, and training staff on new systems (such as the new speech language assessment criteria).

4.48
Ministry staff and educators we talked to as part of the audit told us that there was a lack of training for classroom teachers and teacher aides who teach and support students with high special educational needs. While schools are mainly responsible for the professional development of teachers and teacher aides, the Ministry has run training programmes for teachers, teacher aides, and special educational needs co-ordinators. The Ministry’s Positive Behaviour and Learning plan includes providing more robust initial teacher education and teacher development programmes to build teacher competency in effective behaviour management.

4.49
Behaviour Support Workers and Communication Support Workers are trained teacher aides whose hours are allocated under the Severe Behaviour Initiative and Speech Language Initiative respectively. Ministry staff and educators commented that is important to have adequately trained teacher aides for students receiving ORRS and School High Health Needs Fund support, because the teacher aides are often the main support in class for the students. This was reflected by educators in the 2008 resourcing survey, and is also reflected in the Ministry’s Positive Behaviour and Learning plan. Educators told us that they find it hard to attract and retain experienced and trained teacher aides with the funding they are allocated.

4.50
We encourage the Ministry to continue to work with schools and training institutions to ensure that classroom teachers and teacher aides are appropriately trained in working with students with high special educational needs, and to improve teacher and teacher aide competence and confidence in this area.

11: About 2000 ORRS-funded students (20% of all ORRS-funded students) receive support through “fund holder” schools.

12: Teacher aides are seen by educators as highly important for ensuring continuity and direct support for the student. The Ministry told us that higher demands for teacher aide hours may reflect the need for schools to “top up” both the hourly rate paid to teacher aides and the number of teacher aide hours, in order to provide the support needed.

13: The lead caseworker is the person (usually a Ministry specialist staff member) designated as the leader for the wider support team that works with a particular student.

14: The funding is based on the targeted population – Year 1 to Year 3 for the Speech Language Initiative; Year 1 to Year 10 for the Severe Behaviour Initiative – and allocated by the district’s total student population.