“The restructuring is part of further investment in SEND services by Wirral Council – £1.1 million this year and £2.8 million next year – to improve the support offered to young people and their families and includes the recruitment of additional staff.

“We have engaged fully with the unions throughout this process and sought to address any concerns they have raised. This action is being undertaken by a union, with a small number of staff members, seeking additional guarantees on salary protection for staff affected by the restructuring.

“They have indicated six separate days of action – not a ‘three-week strike’ as stated – and we estimate that fewer than five members of staff could potentially take part. We are therefore confident that any impact on families supported by SEND services across Wirral will be minimal.

The strike is linked to pressure on the local authority’s SEND service, which is seeking to comply with an improvement notice issued by the government earlier this year. It said the council had made little progress following a critical inspection in 2021 which found the council had been “too slow”, its plans lacked “sufficient detail” while families and caregivers declared that “the system is failing”.

A key issue linked to this is delays in the delivery of Education, Health and Care Plans, also known as EHCPs. Statistics released earlier this year showed 427 plans were completed, with only 72 completed within the required 20-week time frame. Seventeen percent were issued within 20 weeks while 33% were approved between 21 and 30 weeks. Twenty-eight percent were issued within 31 to 52 weeks and 22 percent, or 94 families, issued plans after one year.

Bora Oktas, of the NEU, said staff members “feel like they are letting their families down every day due to the overwhelming number of cases they deal with. For example, meeting the legal deadline of 20 weeks to submit a final EHCP is completely unworkable in their current working conditions, with some staff managing a surplus of 100 files each.