Are SEN case workers to be trusted?

@Bluebell865 I sometimes think that some professionals in the field who have children with SEN are a bit dismissive of other parents. They don't realise that if they are a professional and the people who work with their children know this, they will be automatically treated a LOT better than non-SEN professional parents. Like when a doctor turns up to be treated at A&E. I was definitely given preferential treatment when I worked in the field, and believed straight away.

Also, they tend (and this is hard to say because it comes across as equally dismissive) not to have children with extremely high needs. They don't have the children who have stabbed their parents with a kitchen knife, or whose parents are talking about putting them in care aged 8 due to such challenging behaviour, or children who are admitted to mental health hospitals. This is because many parents who have children with these kinds of needs rapidly find they can no longer work. So when they are talking about LAs not being able to make placement decisions and instead waiting over a year for a tribunal while their child has nothing they're not really emotionally invested in it.

This is my experience, I am sure there are professionals with children in the system or are at edge of care stage or in mental health hospitals but, I haven't met any many. When one of my children had a crisis it nearly destroyed our lives completely and there was no way I could work.

I'm on two LA steering groups at work (AP development and EBSNA), work with the parent carer forum in my work LA as a link and my home LA as a parent rep. I volunteer my time to a group run by my local MP to lobby the government on SEND reforms, am the SEND Governor at my son's school as well as working 50 hours min a week and being parent to 3 SEND kids. What about you? Enough to leave me physically and mentally broken to be honest but if I don't who will? Someone bitching that their caseworker is a cow ...that's going to achieve sweet FA.

It's a lot more than someone who is in a couple of parent FB groups, reads special needs jungle and bitches on MN (not saying you but plenty on here clearly met that description).

Like many of you, I have navigated nearly 20 years of being a SEND parent with 3 children wth SEND (actually that's a lot more than some on here feeling like their nastiness should be untouchable)pre pandemic, during and post. Working in mainstream schools, special schools, SENCO roles and as an LA. Post-grad quals in SEND, Autism and a level 3 legal qualification.

I have a very broad view of the challenges of the system, the nuances and parental difficulties.
I have never posted the depths of my children's struggles on here, that is their business and not a means of me point scoring against some random on the interne. But according to some random up thread I have had an easy time of it in the SEND system ..Have I heck!! Because I have an ounce of intelligence I know that this is because of funding and government policy, not because only people who are untrustworthy and 'have the skins of rhinoceros' become SEND case workers.

Some people were nasty cows before they became a SEND parent, but they now feel they are justified. And brush off what my colleagues have experienced all you like. Just know that people who are abusive to them are completely contributing to the lack of stability in the workforce and the impact on delays etc. A bit like people who are awful to teachers then whinge that their child has a new one every term.

@CleverButScatty

So what would happen to all of the kids who are awaiting a plan or placement or get perm wxcluded etc during that process. Do we just write them off for the good of future generation? Do I take it we aren't including your kids in these written off cohorts?

A high number of children are excluded during the process. It is exactly our situation, and that of at least 6 other families I know locally (I recon there are far more). Our DC cannot cope in mainstream, mainstream is refusing to let my child attend. In the meantime, the EHCP process lead to nothing other than that the local authority agreed months ago to issue an EHCP (which stipulates a specialist setting) but the 'panel' of the EHCP is refusing to finalise and is not replying to emails or returning phone calls. Exclusion is, at least in my LA, standard practice whilst the LA takes 50/60/70/80 weeks to finalise. My friends DS's plan was finalised in week 85 - with mainstream even though the boy cannot attend mainstream and all reports made that clear. You are hugely naive if you believe if you think this isn't standard practice. It may not be in your LA but it is in many areas. We cannot even appeal, as nobody is finalising. EP report etc were all done on time. so it's not even the standard EP delay holding us up bit simply the EHCP team with their delaying tactics which only have one aim: to save money. Nobody has the wellbeing and education of our children at heart!

I agree many EHCPs are poorly written, but DC don’t get provision they aren’t legally entitled to and they certainly don’t get the best possible education beyond what is legally required. LAs don’t include provision beyond the legal requirement (and getting them to do that much is difficult enough). Neither does SENDIST - if they did, LAs would be quick to challenge.

LAs are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the SEP in F.

Yes, that is the EHCP concept. But we all know that their are poorly written EHCP's, which either underprovide, inappropriately provide or over provide.

As a team lead for paediatric physio, many new EHCPs in our borough which mention physio come to me for comment on whether appropriate provision (in line with national and local guidance, both SEN and NHS and in line with our assessment of the child's needs and potential) has been included. I have lost count of the number of tribunals I have attended to dispute an excessive recommended provision by a private therapist. There were some insane provisions which made it through when i first started, I came with a naive belief that no qualified paediatric professional would recommend extra to make themselves money, making recommendations which actually were not in the bests interests of the child's broader wellbeing or education, so I didn't go in prepared enough. Now though, the initial ehcps themselves are mainly pretty good, it's actually getting them fully implemented by schools which is the biggest challenge, as what the LA gives them does not fully cover costs of providing. And then the challenge of getting them updated in a timely way when needs change.

There are some dodgy therapists and advocates out there, who emotionally manipulate parents into believing 'if only your child gets physio/speech therapy every day they will walk/talk age appropriately, which for some children, no matter how much therapy they get, is not going to happen. And then we are left supporting the families through anger and grief when promises made by private therapists never happen, not because of a lack of input, but because it was medically pretty much impossible.

The system does need an overhaul to make it more family centered, more respectful of schools and more efficient use of resources.

The LA's statutory responsibilities would still have to be met in that event: the government would have to appoint another body to ensure that happens. Have a look at the Birmingham precedent.

How about thinking what would happen if all case officers insisted on obeying the law?

Do you think it might actually help, inasmuch as they would have fewer unhappy parents pestering them, and would be spending far less time on appeals?

Yes, the LA would probably go bankrupt, but maybe that is what it takes to bring the funding realities home to the government?

All of this arguing on here is a bit silly when we know, by virtue of the fact that so many Sen Tribunals go in favour of the child, that LAs are not properly discharging their legal duties to the child.

You must have the hide of a rhinoceros to go about your day to day job in full knowledge of the fact that you are being paid to deny children an appropriate education.

I have never been impolite to case workers and I've come across a few, I understand their remit, which is to gate keep LA spending. Most are over worked and doing a thankless task. But a few are just awful. It depends on the council.

Our council had the gall to tell me that they, an education authority, had no means to provide GCSE exams to a child on an EOTAS arrangement. I ended up having to speak to the head of Children's services to unblock that one in time for my son to actually gain GCSEs. It absolutely beggars belief.

Would you take the experience of tribunal judges? They have regularly pointed out that defences to appeals filed with the tribunal demonstrate that LAs have not been following the law on their own admission. For example, the reasons they give for refusing to assess a child bear no resemblance to the statutory criteria.. They have also said publicly more than once that, when LA decision makers appear in front of them, it is astonishing how many apparently simply do not know the law and change their mind once it's pointed out to them. Hence the success rate for the JADR process. I wish it could be extended further.

I strongly agree about regulating the advocacy industry. Too many are taking parents' money in return for doing a poor job. But that is not the magic wand to solving what is wrong with the SEND system, because if they all disappeared overnight we would still have LAs making blatantly unlawful decisions and sticking by them, and we would still of course have serious underfunding. LAs would certainly discover that parents are unhappy for good reason, not because they are being egged on by advocates or indeed other parents, but because too many LAs are doing a very poor job.

Do you actually have experience at the sharp end of making decisions about whether to appeal tribunal decisions? If you did you would know that LAs tend not to appeal because they know that their evidence wasn't strong enough, that they never had a strong case in the first place, or simply that the tribunal didn't get the law wrong. One factor is whether the point of law in question has relevance to other cases, so the reality is that this is decision making for thousands as Upper Tribunal decisions set binding precedents.

You have said you support children in care. Do you support them in appealing to the tribunal, and do you refer them and carers to solicitors and charities that could help them to do so?

On the contrary, most judges in SENDIST are very good. The relatively low rate of appeals to the Upper Tribunal demonstrates this. The judge doesn't have to have expertise in a particular field to know what they are doing: they have to rely on the evidence presented. If the LA doesn't present adequate evidence, that's down to them, they can't expect the tribunal to fill in the gaps.

In that situation the cost of the extra teacher should have been funded by the LA, not the school. If your school didn't insist on it, it's down to them.

So your evidence did not persuade the tribunal that admitting the child would be incompatible with efficient education of others, and that there were no reasonable steps that could be taken to avoid the incompatibility. That does mean the tribunal was wrong. It can only decide on the basis of the evidence given to it.

Did your LA appeal against the decisions in these cases? I'm guessing not, or if they did they were not successful, as there are relatively few reported decisions in this area where the LA was successful. So even they didn't think they had a strong enough case.

I believe that, generally speaking they don't do it just to amuse themselves though there are a few who do seem to believe the false narrative about grabby parents and take some pleasure in thwarting them. However, that doesn't mean that they don't use games and tactics in order to promote their employers' dodgy policies and tactics. Some very obviously do.

And this is a hallmark of LA SEND dept behaviour tbh.

We had a phone tribunal a couple of years ago and the Judge was angry that the LA people dialled 10 minutes late into the call. He was like ‘Why are you late? This isn’t acceptable and you aren’t taking this seriously’

You simply cannot make such absolute statements in relation to every LA, because you do not know. The simple fact is that there is ample evidence that LA use things like tribunal delays tactically. Indeed, the tribunal itself has had to intervene in relation to LAs arbitrarily demanding that Refusal to Assess hearings take place in person rather than on the papers, because it is obvious that they are doing that to buy time and save money in providing for the needs of children. You cannot dismiss the experience of hundreds of parents as just those of a "toxic" group. Why do LAs put resources into defending hopeless cases, time and again, if they are not prepared to put time and headspace into defending? Why do they regularly concede so late? Every person who works in SEND has countless examples of cases where it is blatantly obvious that the LA's case is hopeless but they are doing their utmost to string things out as long as they possibly can.

Just one example: the LA has named a school which has said unequivocally that it cannot meet needs and has explained why. This is not stuff that is debatable, it relates to things like the requirement for facilities which the school just does not possess. The LA was ordered by the tribunal in its original directions, as usual, to file a witness statement from that school. It didn't file a witness statement, and ignored four emails from the parents asking them to do so. So the parent applied to the tribunal for an order that they file the statement. The LA still did nothing. The tribunal ordered them to file the statement last week. At that point, the LA suddenly sprang into life and claimed it couldn't obey because it's the school holidays, FFS. Is that really just down to overworked caseworkers, or are they delaying because they know the school witness statement will go against them?

Your refusal to believe things just because you do not have personal experience of them is incredibly frustrating. It does not help your case to call people childish simply for recounting their actual experiences.

You’re getting a hard time because of your contempt for the legal framework.

It's also really annoying when professionals make out that parents are well meaning but stupid and just don't understand the system or pressures of lack of resources. We absolutely do, we just don't agree with the actions the local authorities take and the law is on our side.

People keep mentioning the best. DC aren’t entitled to the best possible education or the best possible outcomes. They don’t get provision just because their parents ask for it or want it. Provision is only included in EHCPs if it is reasonably required.

Yes, all DC should have their needs met. That is why all parents should be supported to advocate for their DC, appeal when required and enforce DC’s rights when that applies.

All those parents who are fighting for support for their children want is the basic ability for their child to be able to access education appropriate for them.

Nobody should be having to fight for a suitable school placement or the right support in school. It should be a given for all children but the system we have makes it so that’s not the case

It's got nothing to do with what parents want, and everything to do with what the child is legally entitled to!

Absolutely, it's a case of those which shout loudest get the most. And I don't blame the parents for asking for more, everyone of course wants the best for their child. But the system needs to balance the needs of all children fairly. That may mean some getting less than they ask for, but it does need to be more equitable for all children, both those with and without SEN.

The frustrating thing is, if people put this much energy and vitriol into challenging the government we might get somewhere. Calling Sandra in The LA down the road a cow because she forgot to phone you back at the end of a rammed day is not.

No, the frustrating thing is that LAs themselves do so little to challenge the government. When there have been challenges about inadequate government funding, unlawful funding decisions, safety valve agreements etc, LAs are nowhere to be seen, whether in terms of joining in those challenges or just offering evidence. When ideas about improving the system are sought, LAs are asking for rights of appeal to be curtailed, for making it much more difficult to get assessments, for cutting down the rights of over 18s, but not for better funding.

And the really frustrating thing is the LAs who effectively condone the lack of funding and simply seek to pass it on by operating unlawful policies which their staff meekly follow. How else can you explain arbitrary decisions to take away support despite there being zero evidence that it is not needed, or the number of decisions which LAs themselves reverse just before tribunal hearings? Sometimes they don't even do that - I've seen the decision in a refusal to issue case where, during the hearing, every single witness on the LA side fully agreed that the child needed an EHCP, and the LA representative could only say "I'm instructed to oppose the appeal" but blatantly didn't agree with their instructions. That can't be passed off as a one-off mistake, that was a prolonged course of action.

How much lobbying are you and your colleagues doing, @CleverButScatty?

Posting the actual legislation in response to inaccurate ‘paraphrasing’ that changes the meaning completely isn’t ’kicking off’.

Calling unlawful behaviour unlawful isn’t the same as calling any one individual a criminal.

Looking at the case you mention specifically, @Bushmillsbabe, the school could pursue JR if the LA has named their school unlawfully. This very rarely happens because the bar is high. It isn’t enough for the school to disagree with the decision. It is worth remembering for most ARPs the school should be named in I and the provision included in F. And the LA is ultimately responsible for the SEP detailed, specified and quantified in F. That includes ensuring there is sufficient funding. The school could look at JR if there isn’t, the school could support the parents to do the same if the SEP is being provided. If the problem is the SEP isn’t detailed, specified and quantified in F, the school could support the parents to appeal.