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

I just hope that he would be in the category if 'only those with the most severe needs'. He deserves his place in mainstream and I pray it continues, but like you I would be very scared of it being removed. All trust has gone. We are battered and exhausted. My son is at a special school and the idea he could be better served mainstream in a hub is delusional.

But i dont think they said noone would get an ehcp. I think they are looking at the rise in ehcps and are saying SOME of these children could be better supported without having to go through a slow bonkers legal process that breaks them as genuinely some of the stuff you need an ehcp to access really was available without an ehcp before.

I want a better system. I dont trust this is it.

The principle of the changes is good. We have to wait and see whether it is implemented properly and with enough funding. That is why people are nervous about it! They have had bad experiences.
The NHS is palatably better right now, so hopefully same will apply to state education.
In my LA we now have a ridiculous situation where most parents who get an EHCP simply pick and choose the Ofsted outstanding schools and with transport on top. It is too expensive. All secondary schools should be funded to the level that they have SEND specialist support so all schools can cater to all children.

I hear you but when the number of kids being legally entitled to such adjustments is so huge, it becomes impossible to implement. The system wasn't designed to work like that. That's why I think they want to move back towards something more universal.

I'm pretty concerned about this, this is the year my DC3 will be transitioning to secondary.

I'm hoping by the time it comes around then things are more settled but yes I was under the impression that the whole EHCP could be removed at this stage in lieu of other kinds of support.

Although our EHCP often feels like it's not worth the paper it's printed on.

I don't want bespoke provision, I simply want my child to be able to access mainstream education. He can do this but only with an EHCP.

I don't think that's too much to expect.

I agree with you but the Government are trying to save money. It would be wonderful if every kid had bespoke provision, I suspect most would do better not shoehorned into a huge, chaotic, one size fits all secondary school. But that is unaffordable.

Although I imagine that there will u-turn in a couple of weeks!

I don't see how the support he needs would be available without an EHCP as it includes him having 2:1 support, personal care etc. He has no learning disabilities or behavioural issues, the support he needs is largely physical.

But presumably if the support he needed was available without needing an ehcp it would also be fine.

I believe Labour think they are trying to achieve a system where a lot of things that can only be accessed via an ehcp now, become accessible in other ways which are quicker.

I have worked in education since ehcps started and when I first started work there were children who were supported without an ehcp who would now need an ehcp as the external support we used to have dissapeared.

For example, we had access to salt for any child that needed it! We could refer direct and then when they visited, regularly, we could say 'what do you think about Bob over there' and get an opinion on Bob too. It then got more and more rationed and eventually could only be accessed via an ehcp and basically only during the assesment process. So now you had to have an ehcp to get salt and as a parent id be terrified of it being stripped away! All us sen parents are scared and bruised.

But actually as a society I think its better if we just had schools being able to request salt or OT for any child that needed it regardless of ehcp status and ehcps were for a layer of complexity above that (which might be your child's level still). I mean its quite mad we have been put in a position where we need a legal document to outline what is often some pretty basic healthcare delivered in school and then have to enforce it through court!

I just dont have trust it will be delivered and i dont think they have understood the issues really. Its very sad.

It’s just another opportunity for them to take the support away.

If some money was going to be put into paying teachers to work in resource hubs, then I would feel very differently, but it won’t be. The lack of money means that experienced teachers are being hounded out of the job on support plans once they hit UPS so that new teachers can be hired on £20k less. Those same school budgets aren’t going to pay for teachers in a job, when TAs on minimum wage will do.

You are right to be scared-if you’re not, you’re not paying attention.

The only reason I'd consider going through that process is if they took his EHCP away in the first place. Do you think parents want to have to go through all of that just so their child can access education?

If less time was spent on setting children up to fail in settings that weren't appropriate for their needs and parents didn't have to go through that process in the first place, a lot of money would be saved anyway. The issue usually starts with sending children to inappropriate settings in the first place.

Or in my son's case, if they decide that a EHCP isn't necessary because he is currently in mainstream with an EHCP and ignore the fact that it's only due to his EHCP that he can be in mainstream.

The word "Detectable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence when it takes years of fighting to make the powers that be agree to attempt any such detection. In many cases the attempt to "detect" doesn't happen until long after the y7 transition so those cases wouldn't be directly affected by the proposal to reassess for y7 (though would indirectly cause worse problems by tying up limited EP resources in reassessments so that the waiting lists for initial assessments get longer).

SEND often go undetected in yR-y5 because the schools are focused on getting every child up to a baseline of literacy and numeracy and a lot of neurodiverse kids with real and complex difficulties that won't become overwhelming until the more complex senior school years are quite capable of learning to read and do basic maths whilst being entirely incapable of surviving a mainstream secondary school all the way to y13.

If a child's SEND is detected before the end of y6 their additional needs are not going to have disappeared at any point so reassessment (beyond the existing annual review) is not going to reveal them to have got better. Meanwhile for many children the increasing demands of schools that ramp up gradually between y5 and y13 will obviously mean that some children will reach the limit of what they can cope with at different times. SEND doesn't imply low intelligence and a highly intelligent child with significant and complex SEND can get quite far through the mainstream system before everything collapses and falls apart.

I hope you get what's right for her <3

I'm thinking about the children who have massive behavioural needs being shoehorned into mainstream classrooms, or even units, leaving absolutely everyone stressed and unhappy.

I bet you are. My heart goes out to the mainstream-appearing children, it really does.

My son has very obvious disabilities too but not a learning disability and is in mainstream with a EHCP and my concern is that because he is mainstream, they will deem him not disabled enough and decide he doesn't need one any more.

If that happens and I don't even have the right to appeal it, I honestly don't know what I will do. I assume send him until school say it clearly isn't suitable and then go through the EHCP process again? What a waste of everybody's time (and again, money).

I'm scared too.

For DD I'm hoping for learning 'adjacent to' her peers, rather than actually in the class with them all the time. Neither she, nor they, would like full integration. So I need a proper unit within a mainstream school, rather than a SEN school (none of which are 'right' for her).

But that is what I think the Government want to stop. Its nuts to have half a million kids going through the process that you describe. The school system is based on the vast majority of kids being educated roughly the same way in classes of 30 odd. Sounds to me like they think EHCPs are getting out of control and want to move back closer to that. Maybe with a under resourced "hub" somewhere on site.

I am actually scared. Both my children have very obvious disabilities (e.g. severe learning disabilities) and so we never got the 'they don't need an EHCP' thing.

That said, we have still needed to assert our rights many times over the years and have used the tribunal system a couple of times. Without this both kids, but particularly one of them, would have been left in an absolutely horrendous state. My eldest's life would have been ruined and that is not an exaggeration.

Of course. I should've known.

High schools are going to be chaos with SEND children having support removed.

It doesn't sound to me as if that is the intention. Ime children's needs increase as they get older and they find secondary education more challenging, both from pov of coping with the new system and academically. There is certainly extra money being allocated to SEND.

It feels like a sticking plaster, rather than a truly holistic, multi-system approach. A holistic approach might look to include amendments to the curriculum and school environment, outdated behaviour management policies that are based on outward behaviour rather than underlying neurodivergence, greater investment in earlier neurodevelopmental diagnosis.

I applied for an ehcp when dd was 6, despite her not being diagnosed, because teachers are not medical professionals/ mental health experts. We knew she had unmet needs, but her presentation was masked at school. So we applied for an ehcp to get access to an Ed Psych who could advise school on what was likely happening to our dd. Without that, we'd have been none the wiser and school would have still been treating her as a neurotypical child who was choosing not to attend school, rather than unable to.

My biggest fear is that children like my daughter - the ones who cope until they break and their families reach crisis point - will be wrongly deemed to have less severe difficulties because they present as academically able, compliant and well behaved at school but fall apart at home. Then it becomes parents' words against school's because nobody is seeing the whole picture.

Dd is now 9 - four years later and just about to finally receive a diagnosis.

What I was reading yesterday of the leaks was about removing the rights of parents to appeal/go to tribunal and that would be down to the school going forwards!

"I would sooner the budget was given to schools, who can provide the right support, at the right time, regardless of needing an EHCP."

You couldn't put all children regardless of need in the nearest school and then give each school the same amount of money.

It isn't going to save any money though.

My son wouldn't be able to attend mainstream without his EHCP so if it is taken away because he is managing in mainstream without any consideration that the only way he's managing is due to the support he receives due to his EHCP then it will simply be my son not managing in high school without an EHCP and him likely getting a new one and special school if that's the only way he'd be able to get one in the future and I'd exhaust every appeal etc I possibly could and then him attending special school with a EHCP would cost more money too.

Or I would go to tribunal to fight for education other than school if mainstream or special school weren't possible which is also more expensive than a EHCP.

I would be far from the only parent willing to do that to fight for their child to access suitable education.

In Scotland they have started to create special schools as a bolt on to mainstream schools (they already had some that worked well and have now decided that all high schools must have 1). When done right it allows those who can't be mainstreamed to be in a sen environment full time and have access to the mainstream facilities and those who need a mix of both mainstream and sen environments to get them.
My ds is at 1 of the original ones and although there has been issues with some staff not being suitable for the job the system seems to be the best of all the options out their and I really don't understand why England doesn't do the same as it created 1000s of extra sen places for minimal extra cost