I've just created a thread in Site Stuff, but I wanted to repost here to gain a larger audience.
You may or may not be aware, but MN has several topics covering SEN support. It's my understanding (I've been here a while, but this was before my time) that they were originally created in order to provide some privacy for posters who preferred to discuss SEN related issues with other parents who had been there and avoid upsetting replies from posters who had not registered the mention of SEN in the thread.
The way that this privacy was originally provided was to offer an "opt-in" system - by default, all current (at the time) and new users of MN would not see threads from the SEN topics in their Active Conversations feed. However, there was a section of the forum settings where users could choose to enable viewing of these hidden threads in their own Active Convos. They remained hidden to anybody who did not actively choose to turn this option on.
At some point this functionality got broken or changed, I don't know whether it was accidental or intentional, but I believe it was tied to one of the bigger site redesigns, most likely some time in 2014. The hidden sections can still be "unhidden" in Talk Settings, but this doesn't do anything any more. They are hidden from everyone, whether you've opted in or not. In order to see if anyone has posted there you have to visit the section directly or add it to your subscriptions, and even if you're fully subscribed with notifications on, threads from that topic will never appear in Active.
Since this change, there has been a marked reduction in posts in those sections, to the point that they are much less known about and used. I felt like that was the case, anyway, but I was curious if it was visible as a trend so I used Advanced Search to search for all posts in SN Children during the whole of 2008 - it returned 2,500 results, which is the max number of search results. I reduced the time period to smaller ones until it was reporting well under 2,500 and the time period I found was a week. So I changed the week to be 1st-7th March (inclusive) each year, from 2008 to 2021, and this is what the number of posts (comments) looks like for that random week in each of those years:
2008 - 966 posts a week
2009 - 1541 posts a week
2010 - 1079 posts a week
2011 - 1349 posts a week
2012 - 1533 posts a week
2013 - 2500+ posts a week
2014 - 1530 posts a week
2015 - 466 posts a week
2016 - 262 posts a week
2017 - 296 posts a week
2018 - 113 posts a week
2019 - 151 posts a week
2020 - 118 posts a week
2021 - 129 posts a week
The number of weekly posts has literally been decimated and that doesn't make sense when the number of site visitors has grown and the number of SEN diagnoses and the amount of discussion is also increasing. With a lot of anti-SEN feeling on the site sometimes I feel like the safe spaces are more crucial than ever, and I really want to open a discussion about whether the old functionality can be restored to allow posters who want to use the SEN sections to use them as easily as the rest of the site.