When were Special Schools closed?

[IdaBWells]

I have lived outside the UK for 25 years. My mother was at a teacher at an inner-city primary in the 1970s/80s. Lots of her friends were teachers and her best friend’s DH was an art teacher at a special school in the borough. I am clearly very out of touch but when were all the special schools closed and by who? What were the reasons? Did anything replace them? What happened to the staff and students at the schools?

I'm one of those sn teaching assistants who has had pretty much no training so far. Sometimes I feel very out of my depth dealing with the behaviours but I am training to get more knowledge. I do sometimes question if the minimum wage is worth being attacked on a daily basis but I do love the job and its very rewarding as well as hard.

OP has not come back

For our school, an EHCP can be quite meaningless. What are we supposed to do, if the EHCP states 1 to 1 support and we can’t fill the post? Or worse still, have a revolving door of staff who don’t stick around because they can’t cope (often the case with violent children) or get a better offer? I can’t remember if an EHCP will award agency staff costs. For many small schools, they don’t have TAs available all the time, so can’t just sub one in from another class. And for many schools, meeting the additional costs can easily tip them into running a deficit budget.

As a governor, you can also be faced with Hobson’s choice - pay for support out of the school’s normal budget for the support a child needs, but the next year another child starts with even more severe needs. Do you cut the first child’s support to pay for the second child’s support? Or not pay for it in the first place on the basis that you know you could never afford to pay for it for every child, therefore it wouldn’t be fair? Or not pay for it, in the knowledge that those funds could support several other children with milder needs? Or give a pay award to another teacher who’s done wonders for an entire class and that the school wants to keep?

Even if you succeed in obtaining an EHCP, it takes years to get one here, and that’s if parents are on board. We can’t even get the LA Ed psych to return emails.

If you watch the recent BBC 2 programmes “School” managing pupils with SN with not enough resources was their main issue imo. My DSis worked in a specialist assessment autism unit and was made redundant earlier this year. She suspects it was because they recommended most of their pupils needed lots of additional support in mainstream or expensive specialist schools some of which costing up to £40,000 pa