SEND - children’s needs to be reassessed from year 6 2029?

That £4 billion is actually -£2 billion when you account for the fact it doesn't happen until 2029, by which time there is a predicted £6 billion shortfall. This is all about saving money by reducing the number of kids eligible for serious support.

I asked ds1 yesterday (now 23 but who had an EHCP and attended special school from age 10 to 16) what made the difference between being totally overwhelmed in primary and being able to cope now and currently employed and in receipt of no benefits. He said in primary he was not able to predict what other children and teachers would do and was confused a lot of the time. He said it was probably not till he was in year 9 / year 10 that he thought he could start to read people. What helped were small class sizes - I guess the fewer people there are the more predictable things were and things like Forest School and Equine Therapy where they did a lot of discussion about body language and meaning etc. Of course it may also be that he simply got older and matured and he simply needed the safe space to allow him to do so without causing harm to himself ot others.

Even when he went through the diagnosis and assessment process CAMHS were nigh on useless probably because of cost saving measures. Before he got his EHCP a heck of a lot of other services were involved all costing money - not least the Police who were called to search for him when he absconded or help school deal with meltdowns on more than one occasion. Once he got his EHCP none of these other services were needed for him because what he needed was provided by school. Could his school fees have been cheaper - most probably if the LA run its own school that was suitable to meet his needs. It certainly would have saved on taxi fares. But to be honest like most parents I do not know what his education cost because I was not asking for the most expensive education I was asking for a school that could keep him safe and provide him with an education that would not close off options for him latter in life.

I think all restricting EHCP's will do is pass the problem onto a different agency be it PIP, income support, mental health services, prison services etc etc.

But they have to provide for all SENs regardless of labels put on provision and are going to be paying£4 billion more. They know they can’t ignore SEN because it causes a bigger cost on MH services, police, prisons, benefits etc. Also other parents lucky enough not to have kids with SEN don’t want their dc’s education disrupted and already over stretched teachers stretched even further.

Unless they are going to repeal the Autism Act, they're going to have a hard time justifying any discrimination on the grounds of the type of disability they meet the needs of.

@playingvideogames maybe you want to read about the parents that have children who feel a burden to society like you do infact.
How some of them feel so bloody unworthy and worn out they committed suicide.
The children that have tried to commit suicide and there parents are 24/7 on suicide watch!
How bad does it have to get for these children to want to end there life!

Look up Michael Charles on Facebook, this is the reality for a lot of parents with needs that you deem not worthy!

Yep.

Just because my son is a wheelchair user, it doesn't automatically make him more disabled than a child who might be able to walk but is unable to cope in mainstream. It also doesn't automatically mean that wheelchair user = special school either.

Liebor and all govt tbh can look forward to building more prisons and ploughing more
money into mental
health support in ten years then.

it drives me insane that they cant see that by providing solid evidenced based support early will save so
much later on both
in monetary terms and in the outcomes of these poor kids.

homeschooling will also continue to go up.

absolutely disgusting.

The government decide. They’ve decided to reduce EHCPs and therefore specialist provision, and have hinted it will only be for physical disabilities and severe learning difficulties. Because they know the current model is wildly expensive and unsustainable and it can’t carry on as is.

We don't disagree. You are ignorant of the realities of SEN and have swallowed the rhetoric without applying critical thought.

I just wanted to say that i really hope your daughter is doing better now. We're currently at the 'unable to get out of the house' stage of shutdown. Still our 9yo dd isn't considered disabled enough for some people.

"I think pushing a narrative that a child who has SEMH problems is ‘as disabled’ as a child that requires a feeding tube and wheelchair is a false narrative that is becoming damaging to society."

If a child is able to negotiate their physical environment in their wheelchair, is able to cope with their tube feeds and is able to learn, they are not as disabled as a child who needs huge preparation to step into a building, be able to engage with people around them, and learn. It's just fact.

Some people who use wheelchairs are unable to move themselves, some can play basketball in their wheelchair. Some people who are tube fed are completely dependent on others. Others are independently able to manage their tube. That is why we have EHCPs which assess the individual needs of a child.

That’s fine. We can agree to disagree.

The reforms are heading in this direction.

Well. Fortunately you don’t get to decide what disability is or isn’t, or if someone is disabled or not.

That is quite far outside of your place.

So it comes back to children simply looking disabled again despite you previously saying that isn't the case?

Those adults are unlikely to be the children we are talking about here who will likely always need some form of support, including my son. You seem to think he somehow 'deserves' it more because he's a wheelchair user and I disagree.

EHCP's are about need, not diagnosis. My son doesn't even currently have any diagnosis. A diagnosis can be helpful but when it comes to a child needing support, their diagnosis if they have one is irrelevant other than maybe helping to decide what kind of support they may need.

PIP and the LA disagree with you. DD3 is one of the most intelligent young people I know. She decided to learn to knit and three days later she had knitted a complex jumper using circular knitting needles and two colours of thread, by watching a YouTube tutorial whilst watching TV. She was on course for grade 9 GCSEs. In fact, 7 months after she had completely stopped going to school, I was still getting emails from the school saying that she had been selected for trips because of her Oxbridge potential. She was trapped in her room with OCD, unable to leave the house. The OCD was a result of her ASD and ADHD needs not being met and bullying by another child with complex mental health needs. She is very much disabled by it. It took a year for her new school to gain her trust.

You are ignorant. I don't mean it as an insult. I mean it in the true sense of the word. Ignorance isn't the terrible thing people say it is. I don't mind ignorance if an ignorant person is willing to be educated. I do mind people who are ignorant who refuse to consider that maybe they just don't understand. Try meeting a few people who have the needs you refuse to acknowledge?

They’ll have to be, whether I like it or not.

No, if they are disabled or not.

I think pushing a narrative that a child who has SEMH problems is ‘as disabled’ as a child that requires a feeding tube and wheelchair is a false narrative that is becoming damaging to society.

At work I’m surrounded by adults who think their ND is a reason to give up on life and not work and claim benefits. And I mean surrounded. I don’t work in benefits or disability, so they’re wildly overrepresented. This will only get worse if we continue to embed the narrative.

Nothing - nothing - has improved under this current model.

Because brains are split into sections called lobes. Some lobes deal with motor function, some with sensory function, some with communication, some with speech and language, and some with intellectual function. There are crossovers between them.

Many, many children have developmental disabilities that don't have a physical origin. Take DD1. It took until she was 2 years 9 months for anyone to listen to me. Until then I was told that I was neurotic, that I was 'reading the text books' and 'being a nurse'. She was falling over for no reason. I was told she had inner ear infections, that she was wearing sandals which caused unsteadiness.

I couldn't control her. I had to barricade her room with two stair gates stacked on top of each other, then I had to add a plank of wood at the bottom to stop her sliding out from underneath it. I had to use reins at all times. I had to get an electromagnetic lock for the front door and mount the switch high up in the architrave so that she couldn't co-ordinate pressing the button and pulling the handle down, because she had learned to climb over the stair gates on the porch door and escape towards the main road.

When she got to preschool, they scoffed at my concern that the door to a ramp was open, and the ramp ran alongside the building, so she was likely to walk off the edge of it. When I returned from her taster session, the door was shut and they said 'I see what you mean'.

She was quickly assessed as needing 1:1 support in preschool and the LA funded that immediately. But she only got seen at the hospital when she had witnessed falls at the preschool that couldn't have been trips or slips. Bear in mind that I had been taking her to the GP, telling them this for almost a year.

Even when seen at the hospital, they weren't going to give her any scans. However, they did do an EEG which showed epilepsy. That EEG showed uneven discharges in the brain, so a scan was recommended. The CT scan came back 'normal' and the paediatrician smugly wrote 'as expected'. However, he also ordered an MRI, which showed her brain malformation.

My point is that DD1 was 'able bodied' (although developmentally delayed and wobbly). If it was not for her epilepsy, we would never have got a scan and we would never have known that she has a brain malformation.

DD1's geneticist is convinced that she has a genetic syndrome. Genome mapping was in its infancy when she was young and she was entered into the Deciphering Developmental Delay genome mapping project. They couldn't find it. Then she was entered into the 100,000 genomes project. They still can't find it. The Baylor Institute wrote to the geneticist, asking for her records a couple of years ago. They had found a handful of genetic codes that were similar and wanted to compare the symptoms. I don't know if that will go anywhere.

Ultimately, DD1 is hugely disabled. She has no independence. She has just 10 minutes ago come to me to confess that she 'poured too much cereal' - she has massive impulse control difficulties - at the age of 20. DDs 2&3 get frustrated that she 'gets away with' certain behaviour, but the reality is that if I told her off for everything she did wrong, I'd be telling her off all day.

My point, if you get to the end of this, is that being able to walk, being able bodied, is absolutely no marker of ability to function. DD1 does use a wheelchair and is physically disabled now. But it is by far the least disabling aspect of her SN.

They may not be disabled in a way that you recognise, but I can assure you that those living with it find it every bit as debilitating as having a physically disabled child. Those mental health needs you reference are very often secondary to undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, unmanaged, unsupported neurodivergence.

"But we have to move away from providing specialist provision for what are ‘SEMH’ conditions."

I don't think you will be happy with those children being in your child's class in mainstream.

Would you like more of those SEMH children in your children’s school?

The ones I worked with set things on fire, daily. Climbed on the roof to throw things at people. Brought weapons on site because someone owed them money.

How long before mainstream parents start rightly saying their kids can’t be kept safe because there’s an influx of challenging children, in their potentially already difficult schools?

Not long, I’d wager.