17th November 2025
Dear Colleagues,
As part of our continued commitment to keeping you informed about the Inclusion and Learning redesign, I’m pleased to share an update on the Inclusion Partner role.
Over recent weeks, our new Inclusion Partners have been transitioning from their previous DCC roles and are now ready to begin connecting with schools. Each Inclusion Partner has been allocated a group of schools within their locality and is keen to begin building relationships with you.
You can expect an introductory phone call or email from your Inclusion Partner in the coming weeks. They’ll be looking to arrange an initial meeting with you, ideally in your setting, alongside the headteacher and any other senior staff you feel should be involved.
This first meeting is designed to be informal and relational, focusing on four key questions:
- Can you tell me about your School?
- What’s working well?
- What are you worried about?
- How can we work together?
The purpose is simple: to begin building a shared understanding and partnership. We’d love for you to take your Inclusion Partner on a short tour of your school—help them get a feel for the space, the community, and everything you’re proud of. We know that you will support these colleagues to develop how this role supports you and your community.
This is the start of a new way of working together, and we’re excited to see how these relationships grow.
Best Wishes,
Jack Newton
Firstly, please accept our apologies for the delay in sharing detailed updates on Devon Education Services. We are currently undertaking a review of the DES offer and look forward to continuing our work with you over the coming months.
As part of the wider redesign of the Inclusion and Learning Directorate, we will cease delivering some of our service areas from January 2026, including English and Maths support, and PiPs training. This change means that a number of valued colleagues will no longer be working with us full time. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them and other colleagues for their outstanding contributions to Devon Education Services and to schools across the county over many years. Their impact has been significant and deeply appreciated.
Importantly, we will be retaining their expertise through project-based work, including support for Moderation and Monitoring, and annual updating of our ‘BookWrites, and BookBuds’ resources. We’re pleased that their knowledge and experience will continue to benefit our schools and communities.
Current Service Level Agreements
Please be assured that we remain committed to delivering our current service agreements wherever possible. We understand how important these services are to your school and will keep you updated throughout the term as we navigate this transition.
If we’re unable to fully deliver a service, we’ll notify affected schools promptly. Any unused portion will be refunded after delivery concludes, with further details on the refund process shared in the new year.
DES Service Directory 2026/27 – Have Your Say
The DES Service Directory for 2026/27 will be available in digital format only, with release planned for early 2026. You’ll be able to download it directly from the DES Shop.
This digital approach reflects the evolving nature of our offer and enables us to shape DES in collaboration with you, it will be a live document and updated regularly.
We are committed to ensure the services we provide truly meet your needs and therefore we invite you to share your views by completing a short survey via the link below. Please complete by 21st November 2025
Your feedback is critical as it will underpin our planning of the new service so please take the time to help us build a responsive and relevant DES offer which provides school high quality, impactful services.
Devon Education Services Support you would like going forward – Fill in form
We would like to reassure you that the following service areas are not affected by the re-design:
- Schools Library Service
- Outdoor Education
- Dartmoor Centres
- Music
- Governance
- GDPR/Data Protection
- HR One
- Health & Safety
- Payments and Revenue
- Payroll
- Media
- Legal
- Trade Waste
- Devon Assurance Partnership
We appreciate your understanding and continued support during this period of change. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
We’ve been talking a lot in recent months about work we’re doing to review the way that funding is allocated to children and young people with Education, Health and Care Plans, (EHCPs).
It’s because the current system for deciding how much funding a child receives does not always work as well as it should.
Families and schools have said that the current system is inconsistent, with decisions varying between children’s schools or panels.
They say that it’s hard to understand why one child gets one level of funding and another doesn’t.
And they say the current system can lead to long waits, appeals and confusion.
We’ve appointed experts, Peopletoo, an independent organisation with years of experience in helping local authorities across the country to improve the way we work, to review our current EHCP banding framework.
Over the last year, as part of the Restoring Stover Park Project, we have been busy developing and enhancing our educational offer.
We would like to invite you to one of our virtual and / or drop in sessions to see the new educational activities we’ve added to our learning programme, as well as show you the most popular sessions we already offer, which we feel could complement your teaching programmes.
Our sessions are suitable for reception up to year 6, in a variety of subjects including: Science, Geography, History and English. We can also adapt sessions for older, and SEND students.
Online Sessions
We will be running two online sessions to give you an overview of what we have to offer:
- 9am-10am on Wednesday 19th November
- 7pm-8pm on Thursday 20th November
Drop in times
We will be providing opportunities for you to visit the Park and see the facilities and resources we have available:
- Tues 2, Wed 3, Thurs 4 & Sat 6 December.
Spaces to hire
You can also independently hire our spaces to deliver your own school visits, or for staff training days:
Using Stover as a venue - Stover Country Park
If you would like to find out more, book onto an online session, or join a drop in slot, please contact the Restoring Stover Park team: restoringstoverpark@devon.gov.uk
We look forward to meeting you and exploring how we can support you and your pupils’ learning journeys at Stover.
We are delighted to let you know that our Winter 2025 Holiday Activities & Food Programme is now live and there are plenty of spaces available for children in Devon. This year we also have some opportunities for family pantomime tickets available to book via the booking system and, as always, a wide range of fantastic provision for all eligible families. We're now taking bookings for the Holiday Activities and Food Programme for this Winter - News
Here is the link to the Booking System https://eequ.org/devonhaf please have a look - you can also view the schemes using a map as well.
Some schemes this year also include hampers, and all provide either a hot or cold nutritious meal, alongside a variety of physical activities.
I would be most grateful if you could spread the news far and wide within your teams and with those working directly with the families, so that as many eligible children can access schemes as possible.
If you have any questions, please get in touch via haf@devon.gov.uk
As in previous years, we would like to invite students in your school to participate in the Christmas Card Competition. Every year a picture drawn or painted by a student is used by the Leader of the Council (Cllr Julian Brazil) as his printed Christmas card. The runner up pictures will be used as online/electronic Christmas cards sent out by the Chief Executive (Donna Manson) and the Children's Leadership Team.
Should you wish to participate in this competition, please email the school priority alerts email address (educate.schoolspriorityalerts-mailbox@devon.gov.uk) and we can provide you with more details.
The winner will receive printed copies of their design on a Christmas card for their own use.
The deadline to send in your Christmas Card designs is Tuesday 25th November 2024. Please send a scanned copy of your entry(ies) to the school priority email address. (educate.schoolspriorityalerts-mailbox@devon.gov.uk).
Good luck to everyone!
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