There are more than 1.7 million children and young people in England’s schools who are recognised as having special educational needs and disabilities (or Send). When you factor in their parents and carers, it highlights the huge number of people who anxiously watch this area of policy. All of them know that the systems those kids depend on are dysfunctional and broken. And they are also keenly aware of something else: that whereas their experiences once tended to be ignored and overlooked, they have now crossed from the online world into Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The One Show, Good Morning Britain and all the rest, as a huge conversation about the politics of all this gets louder and louder.
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...nothing other than a determination to keep their hands firmly in the taxpayer’s pocket, that is!
Late last year, whispers from the top of government began to circulate, about drastically restricting the number of EHCPs. Ministers, meanwhile, have refused to be drawn on whether or not EHCPs and the very clear rights they enshrine will survive their reforms at all.
Is no one investigating the reasons for the growth in these then? No?
Whatever the government’s answer to the Send crisis, the report says: “The solution cannot be to remove the statutory entitlements from a system which lacks accountability in many other areas and in which parents already have so little trust and confidence … The Send reforms must not be based on any withdrawal of statutory entitlements for children and young people with Send.”
Any project that rules out a conclusion from the very start before it's even looked at the issue is a waste of everyone's time...
It feels as if there is a mounting realisation in Westminster that existing Send rights increasingly look like a precious wall of defence against the cruelty that would be let loose if Reform took national power. And I increasingly sense something else: a rising aversion to standing anywhere near anyone who believes in the modern myths of “overdiagnosis” or the idea that changes to the Send system ought to start with snatching away rights and entitlements.
Why would anyone believe that this would be a priority for a Reform government?
5 comments:
Or, given that the latest published stats say there's 12m individuals between 5 and 19...
*WHY* do 14% of kids have "special educational needs"?
"*WHY* do 14% of kids have "special educational needs"?"
That would be down to the "myth of overdiagnosis. I find it interesting that the system for all this is admitted to be totally dysfunctional and yet is still considered to be essential. The state needs to do more of what the state is really bad at.
Stonyground.
My children’s first primary school headmaster - a woolly, ineffectual left-winger* - introduced his first talk to new parents by saying every child would have special educational needs at some point in his or her school career.
In a similar vein, a colleague attended a course for qualified teachers to become SENCOs (SEN coordinators) at the start of which participants were asked to stand up in turn and describe their own personal special educational needs.
My colleague, alas, fell for it all hook, line and sinker, and, on her return to school, set about making new SEN diagnoses with great enthusiasm, building the list from 60 pupils to 150 by the end of the school year. This had the effect of increasing her clout with senior management and enabled her to justify bringing in a friend to work with her and increase SEN teaching provision - a clear case of ‘cui bono’ which may apply in many schools.
*It was the only local option and most of the individual staff were competent so we stuck it out for a few years until - inevitably - his management methods spectacularly failed an ofsted inspection and we reluctantly dug into the savings for school fees.
Perhaps there's a proportion who, either themselves or their parents, realise there is money to be claimed? Cynical? Moi?
Penseivat
*WHY* do 14% of kids have "special educational needs"?
Because SEN is the biggest money pit in any school. With all that moolah sloshing about, those with their snouts in the SEN trough are free to opinionate their own pay cheques by setting ever wider the requirements for SENship.
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