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

Thank you. That's it in a nutshell. It isn't about not spending money now. It's about whether they need to spend £500 per week, £1,000 per week, £2,000 per week or £4,000 per week. Because if she ends up in mental health hospital or a residential home, it will cost them dear. So they are trying their best to avoid it. Sad, isn't it?

Are you hopeful these suggested reforms will help this situation though as thats the crux?

I cant really work out if they are redirecting any savings from less ehcps and capping the cost of independent specialist schools to mainschool budgets to support the new tiers of support so a bigger range of children get support and get early help so it doesnt escalate - or if they are just reducing costs overall to spend more on defence and leaving mainstream schools to deliver this after a cpd session and one visit from a SaLt.

Yes, she was failed. She was put in a school that was unsuitable and then by the time they admitted it, she was too unwell to move. Then she was put in an unsuitable college, who I had warned of a particular characteristic she had, who assured me they could meet need, then excluded her for displaying that characteristic. Then she went to college 2 who knew about college 1 but did the same thing. Then she couldn't cope with college 3.

She has no provision. Not one minute of any day. We are going through reassessment to try and identify a provision that might work.

There is more to be considered than work and living independently or semi independently. To only look at those is shortsighted.

I hope @Lougle won’t mind, but the right support now could make the difference between her DD1:
Needing a hospital admission or not.
Being eligible for CHC funding or not.
Being able to be supported in the community or not, and if not, needing a secure residential placement or not.
Needing 2:1 (or higher ratio) and 1:1 being sufficient.

All of which will be far more costly than providing the support she requires now.

The support needed now is far more costly than what it would have costed to meet needs 5 years ago or even 2 years ago. The problem is the LA were shortsighted. Too focused on saving money in the short term despite that leading to higher costs long term.

Literally most NT mainstream kids without SEN have been given inadequate provision for bloody years!

You have completely missed my point. Regardless of whether they are provided or not, I was explaining the difference between catch up sessions for one off lessons/topics and catch up sessions/interventions that are SEP. Whether you recognise it or not, those needing reading interventions in your pp have SEN.

She’s been failed? How much is her placement and how long will she have been there by the time she leaves?

There are no catch up sessions for individual lessons/topics anymore because there is no-one to do them. This is the point. You get to a point where if a child/children do not understand the year 3 lesson on fractions, then the year 4 lesson will be beyond them. The teacher will differentiate of course but if they still don’t understand they go into year 5 even further behind. If the catch up sessions/extra support/interventions had happened in year 3 when issues were first identified then the likelihood is that most children would not need anything further. I was observed , by ofsted, during our last inspection, delivering a maths lesson to a small group of year 6 pupils. I had to scrap the planned lesson and go back to year 3 learning because it was obvious there were massive gaps in the learning from previous years, I then built on this over the course of a week to get them back to where we should have been. There was no SEN in my group just a group of totally confused children, who had not had the appropriate help at the right time because there was no one to do it. I am the only remaining class based TA we have in the school now, but even I don’t have the time to do these sort of sessions anymore so I leaving.

There was a time when she was identified as one of the pupils who would go on to an independence hub. Now she's really quite unwell. She will never live completely independently. She's been failed.

What do you hope he will do when he’s 18?

So despite all that input you doubt she will work and live independently or semi independently?

From what I can see that has been calculated the funding will be around £17000 a year extra each school will get.
Thats not even 1 extra TA!
Also the other funding which is side lined for salt,EPs,OTs will account for around 40 days a year maybe more for secondaries.

And by the way my child was in a room with a 1 to 1 on his own!
No friends (because they had to do work different to him) it was soul destroying to see him isolated just because he couldn't function in a class of 31 children.

And no he wasnt given horse riding or any thing deemed by some of you as special! Just an empty room!

"Time to take a practical look at the black hole of spending here and redirect it toward something more productive in the long run."

@Playingvideogames it is exactly this mentality that is costing my LA upwards of £140k for two of my children. Instead of meeting their fairly basic needs, they pushed them to the point that they became so ill that only an independent special school will do. It should never have been.

DD1....the LA saved possibly £5000 over the course of her schooling by sending her to the school that was ½ mile closer. Now, that is costing thousands in psychiatry, psychology, nursing time, social worker time, educational psychology time, speech and language therapy time, occupational therapy time...and do you know what? Each of those professionals will have no choice but to say that she has very high needs because she can't mask anymore and they can't say anything other than they can see. She didn't have those high, high needs in primary special school. They have arisen because of 8 years of education that didn't meet her needs. Now she is going to cost a lot of money, whether in education or in social care. Even the most basic social care package of a care worker taking her to a social care placement for 3 days per week will cost about £40,000 per year.

The only way to help society in the long run is to spend money on early intervention.

BTW @Playingvideogames, perhaps you can answer the question you previously ignored. Before posting the link that excluded education costs, did you actually read the link?

No child is receiving 100k placements for anxiety alone.

TA's are going to be even more busy with children in mainstream schools who clearly don't belong there when EHCP's are taken away from them. It's going to make that aspect worse, not better.

we want the TAs to actually TA and stop being 121s, and we want our children to stop being attacked, and we want them to sit and learn rather than being evacuated because of yet another chair thrower.

Why do you think shoehorning more DC with SEN into unsuitable MS placements is going to solve this? It won’t. See Scotland. See Wales.

Easy to say ‘expect better’ but you’re not saying that as a remedy to the SEN parents are you? Because it’s a meaningless mantra and we know ‘expecting better’ doesn’t mean it’s going to GET better.

It is actually said about and to parents with DC with SEN regularly.

some kind of fairly basic provision to be made with an online learning package. No more equine therapy for children whose only struggle is anxiety. Just a quiet small room where they can learn away from others if theyre motivated to do so, with no distraction and the autonomy they seem to need.

Once again showing your complete lack of understanding.

If you are genuinely telling me that someone has said to you “listen we know your child is behind on their reading, but there’s an autistic child over there we need to focus on” and your response to that is to complain about autistic kids and not about your child not getting the support they need from the school responsible for educating them - that’s up to you.

Surely nobody is accepting that as an answer. “Oh well, my kid will have to have inadequate education, off to MN to blame a SENd parent.”

The reason our kids have the support they do, or their EHCP, is because we’ve had to fight long and hard to get them it. Fill in endless forms, go to a million meetings, tell the right people the right words.

I did expect better, like many other SENd parents. I expected him to be moved from a mainstream setting that wasn’t serving anyone, including the other children around him. I expect him to have a school to go to that actually educates him and aids his development. He has better.

Do the same. Nobody is stopping you.

You want BOTH less violence in the classroom AND no more expensive specialist placements?
How are you going to manage that? Just send all the aggressive children straight to prison?
You do realise that the children excluded from school won't sit at home learning online - they will not learn, they will get sucked into crime (or they will become mentally ill) and either way they will cost more than the school placement.

Children with high needs will still be children with high needs, no matter what you call them or what you categorise them as. The support will have to be there because without it, outcomes for all children will worsen.

This.

And if you remove education support, other costs will rise.

If you cut DS1’s education package, his continuing care package would increase, he would have more hospital admissions, more outpatient appointments, more community appointments…

If you cut DS3’s education package, his social care package will increase and he will use more NHS resources.

But you weren’t talking about catch up on just one lesson/topic like fractions. Your post was about more involved catch up. That is the difference.

Just add my examples to pp's then. All that stuff doesn't get done any more. It's a shitshow in schools atm.

DD2 got great provision in year 4/5/6 without an EHCP. Her needs were recognised and met. Then she went to mainstream secondary school and they did the very least they could get away with. In fact, when I did a SAR, amongst the papers was an email that said 'can I take this list of kids off the SEN register? They're keeping their heads down and trying.' and the reply was 'you need to keep x (DD2) and y on there.' In fact, DD2 was drowning.

Later, I had a report giving DD2 a grade 1 in English. No commentary on the report. Just a grade. I emailed the teacher to say "Ooh, tricky.... What are we doing about this?" She replied, "If DD2 does what I tell her to do, she'll be ok....", and I replied "If DD2 could do that, she would...."

Nobody accepts it but what can we do? Were told just to feel lucky our children aren’t SEN, and to stop picking on those who do 🤷‍♀️ because we want the TAs to actually TA and stop being 121s, and we want our children to stop being attacked, and we want them to sit and learn rather than being evacuated because of yet another chair thrower.

Easy to say ‘expect better’ but you’re not saying that as a remedy to the SEN parents are you? Because it’s a meaningless mantra and we know ‘expecting better’ doesn’t mean it’s going to GET better.

It’s time for £100k placements to stop and some kind of fairly basic provision to be made with an online learning package. No more equine therapy for children whose only struggle is anxiety. Just a quiet small room where they can learn away from others if theyre motivated to do so, with no distraction and the autonomy they seem to need.

If the public are substandardly educated then the pool of taxpayers expected to prop up these expensive placements will dwindle even further than it already has.

Time to take a practical look at the black hole of spending here and redirect it toward something more productive in the long run.

Interventions, catch up sessions amounts to the same thing in my school.

It is not semantics. There is a difference between the pp posts and your example.