Measures to tackle the "disproportionate" number of children with special needs who are excluded from school are to be made a priority.Will there be funding for these authorities, and the political backing, if they decide that the policy of inclusion in mainstream schools doesn’t work, and these children should be educated in facilities appropriate to their special needs?
New government guidance will call for local authorities to deal with the issue and tackle behavioural problems early.
Not that I can see:
Currently children with special educational needs (SEN) are eight times more likely to be excluded, Education Secretary Ed Balls said.Because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place!
It’s unfair to the teachers, unfair to the other pupils and unfair to them. As well as being a huge drain on resources. All for some pie in the sky ideology…
"It is still the case that children with SEN are more than eight times as likely to be excluded, that some parents can find it hard to access the right support for their child and that pupils with SLD (severe learning difficulties) and PMLD (profound and multiple learning difficulties) need even more teachers with the right level of expertise. These measures will tackle these concerns", Mr Balls said.No, they won’t.
7 comments:
A few things in every child's education are self evident.
We should never trouble Ministers when we can have confidence in our children to resolve the most obvious for themselves.
Depends what those 'needs' are. Head of a mainstream school I was refurbishing categorised special needs pupils into 'missing a chromosome' and 'missing a father.' He also labeled the special needs unit 'the slammer' and wanted obscured glass in the windows so the inmates couldn't see out. Admirable man.
Labour have been squeezing the frontline funding of SEN schools for some time now, which is part of the reason they want them in mainstream schools.
In a way I can understand their thinking, as special needs isn't just some block, it's a spectrum, but typically Labour, no actual sensible thought went into it.
Pause here just to remind ourselves that Ruth Kelly cheerfully authorized the closure of several SEN facilities, insisting that those needs could be met in mainstream schooling.
Then her boy turned out to be dyslexic (yeah, right) and since she wanted him to be able to get in to a pukkah school/university like she did (she went to Westminster), she sent him to Bruern Abbey, which specializes in preparing dyslexic children for the Common Entrance examination.
Then she got the Times archive edited because Libby Purves pointed out that this was a CoE school, not a Catholic one, which made one wonder how many other deeply held ideals she would dump in her own case but insist on other people following. (Purves sometimes writes on religious issues, although she's mainly interested in education.)
Even more outrageously, the council was going to pay for, or at least contribute to, the place at Bruern Abbey as it has the scope to meet its obligations from the private sector. As the news leaked out, Kelly became frantic and sought injunctions left, right and centre, hypocritically claiming that the child's security and privacy was being compromised.
I don't remember them being so worried when it turned out Ian Duncan-Smith's boy had won a scholarship to Eton. Then they were only too ready to use it politically. Now, since IDS didn't seek public funding, if he had wanted to he would have had reasonable grounds to tell the world to push off, it was a private matter. He did not. He was perfectly open about it.
What Kelly meant was "This could cost me my career, and that's not fair because Hatty and Tony kept theirs, even though they used forms of selective education".
She ended up having to refuse the funding and paying for it herself, rather than the taxpayer forking out for her family for what they aren't allowed to claim themselves.
Just reminding anybody who might be feeling sympathetic what an unutterable shower of hypocrites the likes of Kelly are.
"Head of a mainstream school I was refurbishing categorised special needs pupils into 'missing a chromosome' and 'missing a father.'"
I'd hope what they meant was the very, very severely disabled or troubled.
There's ways to sort out the other type, the ones who are labelled just to get rid of troublemakers.
"Labour have been squeezing the frontline funding of SEN schools for some time now, which is part of the reason they want them in mainstream schools."
Oh, yes. Follow the money, as always. How depressing.
And of course, the support they need (assuming they GET that support) is often more expensive that purpose built accommodation would be...
"Pause here just to remind ourselves that Ruth Kelly cheerfully authorized the closure of several SEN facilities, insisting that those needs could be met in mainstream schooling.
Then her boy turned out to be dyslexic..."
Oh, yes!
God, I hate these people with a vengeance.
"Just reminding anybody who might be feeling sympathetic..."
Pretty small chance of that.
"S.E.N", "S.L.D", "P.M.L.D", WTF is THAT shite all about?
They are thick, disruptive bastards, in need of some good old fashioned cuffings around the head or caning, PERIOD.
""S.E.N", "S.L.D", "P.M.L.D", WTF is THAT shite all about?"
Some of them are indeed as you describe, and misdiagnosed with the alphatebet soup in a bid to disguise it.
But a lot are severely mentally disabled and quite incapable of remaining in an environment like a normal school classroom.
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