NHS refusing treatment to child who attends private school.

It is still a health service. Would you say anti-epileptic medication was not a health provision because taking it enables a child to carry out their school work?

Councils (who are the local education authority) have responsibilities to all children. They are still required to provide services to children whose parents have opted out of one specific aspect of council provision (education). Just because a child has gone to private education or home education does not mean a council can choose to withdraw social work protection, carer services, library services, refuse collection, access to leisure centres, etc.

It’s all public money

The Daily Mail twisting facts to suit their agenda? Shocked.

Fucking rag that it is.

As my DS OT said, occupational therapy is provided in this case to enable school children to carry out their occupation i.e. school work.

Other OTs are employed by occupational health services. Should those who don't work for that company also be able to access them?

The LEA has no budget for private school pupils. It loses an average of £6k for each child removed from an LEA controlled school.

It is exactly the opposite - if a child goes private the LEA saves ~£6k that it receives in funding that no longer needs to be spent on education.

Neither of those are educational.

Occupational Therapy is a health service. Occupational therapists are Allied Health Professionals not teachers.

The NHS pays for vaccinations for all children. However this OT service is not paid for by the NHS but by the local education authority as a commissioned service for its own local authority schools. The LEA has no budget for private school pupils. It loses an average of £6k for each child removed from an LEA controlled school. As others have said, state educated kids can’t just rock up to the local private school to demand to use its facilities, and vice versa. To access NHS services, the child must go through their GP.

As a lot of people have said, it depends on how the service is commissioned and paid for. Vaccination isn't paid for by the school. In-school OT, SALT and Ed Psych services are paid for by the school.

Private schools can commission services for the pupils there. They can commission them from the NHS. But these services have to be paid for from the school budget.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but the children aren't being denied NHS services that the parents have "paid for". It's a school-based service paid for by a school they do not attend. E.g. I can't expect my child to access services in an out of county school that they don't attend. They aren't entitled to those services even if the service is provided by the NHS. My child isn't the responsibility of that LEA. It's the same for independent schools. The pupils there are not the responsibility of the LEA if they aren't enrolled in a state school.

But that’s immunisations which it suits wider society for private school kids to have so it’s provided.

As we didn’t opt out of any NHS services whatsoever in choosing a private school!

It looks like a misleading headline and I haven’t read all the responses. However -

a) At my local hospital’s paediatric unit, they always ask where your child attends school. Mine are at a private school and I have detected some raised eyebrows at this. I had an awful experience with one particularly awful doctor who I had the misfortune to encounter as my eldest was being diagnosed with epilepsy, which was a terrifying time. She was awful for many reasons and one of them was her barking at me ‘well you can always leave and go private’ when I dared to question something she said.

b) forgive me if this has been addressed but I don’t think the NHS services in schools exist solely in state schools? The NHS nursing teams come into our school to administer injections (eg HPV).

And if said private schools don’t it can be accessed by the child’s GP.

But state schools buy into the service, private schools would need to do the same.

I think they should be available to all pupils as they are a tax paid for service, not directly accessible for schools without referral to a specialist setting. Therefore they are not part of the standard service, I would expect from a private school.

Here’s the scenario. You have a knee replacement privately. You then have pneumonia requiring hospital admission as a post operative complication. Are you no longer eligible for the NHS as you’ve used private services? where are you going to draw the line?

I don’t believe your hypocrisy. Two scenarios, one parent, millionaire, lives in a £2 million house, attends state school , ofsted outstanding, academically excellent, gets free school breakfast. Scenario 2, average wage, average house, child been failed by state school or local state school poor. No free school breakfast. Parents opt for private but it’s a struggle financially. Both children need OT and SALT input, one gets it for free, the other not and according to you the poorer family are hypocrites for asking for the same services as the richer family. OT and SALT services are in different circumstances provided within NHS hospitals. They are health related issues, the funding just happens to be via education. A cost cutting exercise from the Tory government no doubt.

Ecelt on this thread, actually people are saying exactly that these ser ices, funded by the LEA should be available to non LEA funded school attenders

I agree that is 100% true but 100% irrelevant, since no-where in this situation are any health service being provided to anyone. They are all education services, not funded through health in any way, which is why the are available to those who are funded to be educated by the state and not be those who are not.

It isn’t possible to obtain any of the services the woman in the article wants on the nhs unless a child goes to state school and even then equipment can be shared between many students.

However most good private schools do provided some limited funding / burseries for things like this for disabled without a plan but they need to be diagnosed first and it’s the diagnosis bit that currently is a problem in the UK. NHS or private you’re looking at a 3-5 year wait

You have no idea how funding works. Firstly the service is provided by education therefore, it will be 0% NHS funded. The parents haven't opted out of the NHS, but not opting out of the NHS doesn't affect education funding.

The central government get all the tax payer's money. From this they allocate a budget for Education. A sizable proportion of this budget is then divided up to individual Local Authorities, based on the following criteria:

1. A amount per child
2. B amount per child with SEN
3. C amount to cover the support for those children with EHCP plans.

The LA will then keep a little of this money to fund services it provides to support the work of all schools, for example that to cover funded transport, or to cover LA advisors to help schools, or clinics to support children with particular needs.

The larger amount will divided out to each school, allocated using the above criteria, A & B to form the each schools' general budget and C to enable schools to pay for particular support for their highest needs children.

This clinic, yes will be tax payer funded in that it will be funded by Government Money. However NO money will be there to fund it for this child because when the LA was funded for the services it needs to provide, this child was NOT counted in 1 or 2 or 3, because they are not in LA education.

Taxes, including those paid by the child's parents, will go partly into education funding, but the fact that these parents have removed their child from LA education will mean that the LA receives less funding than it would have done if their child wasn't removed. So yes while they still pay tax, removing their child means less money for the LA, which means less money for services for that LA. It makes sense that the child who's parents decision has meant less money is spent on education feel the pinch of less money being spent of education.

In some areas but not all. There are areas with no community SALT or OT at all for children over 5, where home ed kids can’t access these services via GP or school nurse. An ECHP is the only way to access them,

Nobody is asking for them to be provided in the non state education setting, they would simply like them provided at all.

This isn’t true, though. The private schools could also pay to commission the services should they chose to. More money coming in wouid mean more OTs to allow them to serve all schools.

and someone with more resources than the average family who has no other choice wants to stretch it even more using funding they opted out of.

Now that's unfair.

But if they went to their NHS GP and had a referral and waited it would be free - that’s how private healthcare works