NatSIP has been working with Local Authority services nationally to collect and analyse outcomes data of children and young people with sensory impairments in mainstream schools, since 2011. This annual exercise has grown and since 2015 there are over 100 participating services. The overall aim of the OB collection exercise is to improve provision and outcomes for children and young people with sensory impairments. There are three elements, for children with hearing impairment, multi sensory impairment and vision impairment.

The first release reports of the last excercise (2017 -18) were circulated to participating services on 25th June and the summary report will be available from September. Services are provided with rich data which gives valuable information about their CYP and enables them to benchmark their provision against other services submitting data.

Until this year NatSIP has been able to undertake this valuable exercise through DfE grants and contracts. The focus of government during 2018 - 19 is to further support children with SEND through the Schools' Workforce contract, led by Nasen and UCL and NatSIP is a partner within this consortium.

This year The Ovingdean Hall Foundation has, through grant funding, enabled the start of a NatSIP-CRIDE longitudinal study for children and young people with hearing impairment. This project represents collaborative working between NatSIP, University College London, City, University of London, and CRIDE (the Consortium for Research in Deaf Education) and the 2018 data collection has already commenced.

Whilst the SEND 2018-19 contract does not lend itself to SI data collection NatSIP and DfE are actively seeking to identify funding which will enable the VI and MSI elements of the outcomes benchmarking exercise to continue without a gap. If we are successful we hope that we will be in a position to ask services to submit data from September.