Let’s talk about how we can make changes in schools to improve them for everyone involved.

[SchoolsMustChange]

Having binge-read the WFH/attendance thread, I feel it important to have a positive discussion about changes schools can make that will improve things for everyone.

As a mother of autistic children, a couple of whom have school refused to the point of us being threatened with court and fines, and feeling totally unsupported by school, and ending up home educating because there felt like no other options, which also meant claiming more benefits to be able to do that.

I feel there are alternative options that would help schools become less chaotic, ease the stress on SN families (much of which comes from gaslighting and lack of support from within school) and improve outcomes for most children involved.

Lack of special school spaces is obviously an issue that must be addressed at some point, but for this thread let’s focus on mainstream schools, which seem to be really struggling right now.

At my youngest child’s school there was a high % of ND children, mainly because the local choice of schools is a draconian academy which manages out children with support needs, and this school, which is now riddled with attendance and behavioural issues. When I deregistered my son he was the 11th child in his year group to be removed, in a small school with under 60 per year group. My son’s attendance was nearing 50%.

What would have worked for him? Streaming lessons. Using technology already set up in the school during Covid lockdown. Allowing my son and others like him to login and register his attendance, and attend school and in a way that he could cope with. If he felt he genuinely had a choice to access education in this way he would have thrived. In days where stress levels were lower he could attend school and register as normal. If the day got too much he could come home and log in for afternoon lessons without it affecting his attendance and worrying schools, OFSTED and government. With this arrangement I know that his attendance, and that of loads like him, would be 100%. He wants to learn, but he can’t always do it in school.
Edited to add: this would also work for children who are ill who should be at home instead of spreading their germs to everyone!

I also think this plan could go further in dealing with increasing behavioural issues in the classroom, by being clear to parents that any issues (a lot which will be caused by unsupported SN) and their child will do lessons in a quiet room, streamed to a device with headphones (isolation room was often full of children who couldn’t cope in a loud classroom and who calmed down once there), and if the behaviour persists they can go home to learn there - if school is then not accessed they can be chased for their attendance, because a workable option is available.

Schools can then have a clearer line of acceptable behaviour with a real solution that’s not up for debate. At the moment lines are blurred and behaviour remains a big problem.

So rather than talking about the problem, can we have a discussion about potential solutions?

It’s depressing reading the frequent threads fighting teachers and/or children and/or parents.
Teachers are understandably not coping and are often blaming pupils and parents, children are not coping - as seen with rising rates of mental illness and poor attendance, parents are not coping because, especially those of us with SN children, we can see that they are not supported and we take the brunt of that once home. The system isn’t working for anyone.

So what can be done, because unless someone addresses the issues, instead of constantly pointing fingers at any other problem, this is only going to get worse for teachers, parents and pupils alike.

Any thoughts?

The high needs SEN budget (£1bn) is projected to be 1.56% of the core schools budget (£63.9bn) for 2025-6 so I'm not sure where the £10bn figure is coming from?

ifs.org.uk/education-spending/schools#:~:text=In%20the%20Autumn%20Budget%202024,very%20tight%20in%202025%E2%80%9326.

Not the schools fault no. The government for cutting the numbers of staff available in schools and classrooms.

I'll tell you whose fault it definitely isn't - my young child.

This is unfair to assume this.

I know what my family have been through, I know what other families have been through.

It’s too convenient to lay the blame at the parents desperately trying to pick up the pieces.

I have never felt guilt or shame in this way. I have faced challenges as a parent that most parents don’t, and for that dubious pleasure I have been blamed and gaslit and left unsupported. The fact that my son is now a productive adult is 100% down to his family, who went through an awful lot to get him there, no thanks to the numerous organisations we thought might help us in our darkest hours.

If you have not experienced this you simply cannot understand what parents are going through every day.

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/spending-special-educational-needs-england-something-has-change

Making schools better includes the option for a hybrid virtual school option.

What an ignorant comment, I suggest you join the Facebook group not fine in school ( but please do not post) and you will see exactly why children are being removed to be home educated.

Do you mean a hybrid virtual school option which requires teachers in schools to create separate virtual lessons?

I was just coming to put this in context.

I haven't checked the origin of the 10bn, do think if we are going to focus on 10n it's fair to highlight the total education spend is 116bn but that includes student loans and further education and early years.

It is a lot of money but I think people hear it and thing it dwarves the rest of the education budget..

But when so many report issues with individual teachers, and other organisations report the same issues, we’re in a situation where those paid to advise the teachers are often being ignored, to the detriment of a large number of children.

What’s the point in having these expert advisors at all if they’re going to be ignored?

Any good teacher will make adjustments, of course, but bad teachers don’t. Every school (and college) that my dc have been in have been populated by a mix of teachers, some excellent, some poor, most somewhere in between. They should all be following expert advice though, not unilaterally ignoring it, which even if that happens with only one or two teachers per school is still too much and is affecting too many pupils.

This is not the point of the thread though.
The point is, in the absence of the money to fix things, SN children still need to access education.

I mean a state version of this model of schooling in every local
authority. dukeseducation.com/hybrid-schools/

I have lots of experience of EBSA. You'll know that EBSA Plans will only work with joint working between family and school.

It needs (and can only work) with a recognition that families/parents have to work on pull factors while school works on push factors. Accepting two-directional responsibility is essential (infact three-directional, if we include the child). An EBSA Plan that starts from the premise that all responsibility sits with school isn't EBSA.

I don't place all the blame on parents.

I equally know, without any doubt, that all thr blame also does not lie with school.

That's what I was challenging the OP on. I will continually challenge the suggestion that parents are not a factor in non-attendance. They always will be. School always will be too. Suggesting one (or the other) doesn't is ignorance. Anyone suggesting that is just biased and is not going to be a reliable judge of truth.

But if the ‘expert advice’ is wildly unpractical (multiple adjustments for multiple children that conflict with each other) - what then?

This is money from the core education budget.

It doesn’t include the further money spent on things like SEN taxis by councils, which in themselves now cost £1 billion a year.

Council tax is essentially now a social care tax.

OP, Academy21 seems to provide the kind of online provision you say your son would benefit from. Have a look?

Sadly I don't have time to do the number crunching this evening (too much teaching work to do!) but I think it is better to look at percentages (which are indeed going up) as when people bandy about very large figures in billions they often forget that the schools' budget is many billions. Anyway both figures are from IFS reports so must be for different aspects of the spending assuming the IFS is consistent with itself...

On the ground it is certainly difficult to see what the additional funds are being spent on. Although no doubt a chunk is on lawyers. My own LA spent two whole years denying my child's SEN therefore forcing us to do two tribunals, both of which they lost (they lose around 96% in total).

Oh and it was me that got a half day on SEN in my ITT 15 years ago. I bet I wasn't the only one.

*Its a common theme (that schools are to blame) in non-attenders because the alternate is facing thr fact that the parent holds the responsibility/blame.

This cohort of oarents clearly don't want to hear or consider the alternative. So they will all, almost universally, blame something else.

The voice of these parents is not reliable to be truth or fact. They will be significantly and inheritance biased to avoid their own shame, guilt and feelings of blame.*

It's just that this sounds a lot like you placing the blame on the parents.

Because much expert advice is poor quality, contradictory and unworkable in the real world.

I remember one child who had been through the NHS diagnostic pathway and had letters from NHS services saying that the child had no diagnosis and any issues were behavioural, followed some months later by a private diagnosis swearing blind the child had autism. And that’s before you get to any advice about how to actually manage the child.

Repeat this by the number of children going through the system and there’s little wonder why schools are utterly ground down and very skeptical.

I'm not going to do that. I'm an Attendance Lead. I've issued over 70 attendance fines since September. I suspect I'll disagree with the core values of said Facebook group. 😁

Absolutely agree. If the adjustment is, say, using a pencil instead of a pen, no problem. But if four children have an adjustment that says they need a supervised quiet 10 minutes out of the classroom to decompress (a real example in a class I worked in) and you have one TA, who’s assigned to another child, what then?

academy21.co.uk/

Disclaimer: I haven't used them and don't work for them. There's no need to reinvent the wheel though. There are quite a few online providers.

Of course the $64m question is who pays.

I'm not suggesting it isn't a lot of money or nothing needs to be done.

But how many people know what the core school budget is. Maybe they think it's 12bn and sen is nearly the whole lot.

You have to say it's 10bn of core school budget out of 60 odd bn to give it context.

Practicals aside, I don't know why hybrid couldn't work for secondary. Only caveat would be that student should expect there may be tech issues from time to time.
Alternative is the AV1 robots from the Scandinavian company No Isolation.
They cost £3500 each with an annual fee for maintenance or £150/month to rent but if the government funded them for students who would attend if they could attend, it would save in the long term (outside tutors/special school placement/benefit bill if no qualifications earned).
The issue would be keeping it safe but it was used in the UK in the NE by a student with EDS.

I know that though, and I understand.

It just always feels hollow that that threads about SN children in schools always come down to blaming parents somehow and repeating that it just can’t be done.

SN children are the canaries in the coal mines. They are going down like flies. Whatever is being done isn’t working, despite the funds chucked at it, but no one will stop and look at what’s going wrong, no one’s interested in asking the children themselves or their parents, it’s assumed they are part of the problem.

There will come a time (and I’d argue that with the current MH crisis we’re already past that point) where it’s not just SN kids falling. I just wish there was a way of salvaging something so that in the meantime children currently falling behind have some sort of access to education.

To set the SEN taxis in context - how many special schools could you build, staff and equip for £1bn?

Typical government - spend out of revenue to avoid spending out of capital.

Those are private schools though. Upwards of £9000 per term in fees.

Parents do hold blame. Any suggestion that parents have no influence on a child's attendance is false.

School systems also hold blame. The two are not mutually exclusive. There's always going to be a combination of responsibility, and support needed from BOTH home and school for this to be successful. Not just school. Not just home.

I will wholly disagree with any premise that parents hold no responsibility at all. If I've got a parent who wont accept they have any away or influence whatsoever on the childs attendance, that's a parent in denial.