Millions of pounds is wasted every year by local authorities fighting parents for support their children desperately need, and in most cases are awarded at tribunal - about 96% on average are awarded at tribunal. This money is a complete and total waste. If you're losing 96% of cases at tribunal, at some point it would click that maybe you shouldn't take those cases to tribunal and you should use the money to support the children instead. And yet still they carry on, because those families who haven't got the resources or are too burnt out by the process to actually take it to tribunal will quietly go away and struggle along on their own.
It doesn't mean that those cases that don't reach tribunal weren't necessary and that child didn't need support. It means that they were squeezed out by a system which is designed to break families so that the LA don't have to provide support. Good for them, not good for vulnerable children. Until I'd been through it I hadn't really appreciated just how little support there is. The answer is, none, unless you have the money to pay for a solicitor.
Unfortunately Those billions of pounds you mention won't get anywhere near children. Local authorities could already choose to spend the money involved in the process on children's outcomes and they choose not to. All these changes will do is cause more children to hit crisis point without any support to save them when they're suicidal as a result. CAMHS is a joke. There's no support now so these bills won't actually improve things for the most vulnerable children - that is to say, any with additional needs.
There's already no effective way for parents to get support for their child if schools say no, so they go for EHCPs - if the LA say no, which they do in almost every case as a matter of course, regardless of the child's needs, then that's how you end up at tribunal. Parents have to fight for every tiny crumb and those crumbs are nowhere near what their child is legally entitled to. But they break a child enough, break the parents, then eventually the parent deregisters and the school gets to tick a little box saying "parents choose to home educate".
That's what needs fixing, not taking parents rights away and handing them over to schools. It's incredibly naive for anyone to think that school staff always have children's best interests at heart. If your child had been bullied out of school by the staff the way my autistic child was, you would be terrified about these bills coming in. It will lead to situations where parents could be compelled to send their child to a setting which is actively harmful to them with staff that couldn't give a shit about them and are actively blocking an EHCP such as happened to my child. Before that happened, I would never have believed that school staff could behave in such a manner towards a vulnerable child, but they can and do with impunity.
The reason more children are being diagnosed and have sen needs is because they school system is set up to suit practically nobody and children with SEN are the least able to cope with a bloated overwhelming curriculum, huge classes, teachers with an hour of SEN training, no TAs and overpaid ignorant SLTS and MATs. Children with SEN are being forced out of education by schools and LAs in a pincer movement because they don't want to meet needs, and at the same time the government wants to remove rights from parents and hand them over to local authorities.
My child was suicidal in the education system after being bullied by the teachers. We've been forced into home education. The government now want to make that choice harder because they want to compel children back into mainstream , yet have absolutely no ideas for how to support those children. It's inhumane, and it's absolutely not what labour were voted in for, this has come out of nowhere. I'm in a reform led LA and they're obviously no better. In fact both labour and reform's approach to disabled children seems to be incredibly similar. And all the while, nobody's talking about taxing the super rich because we are all focused on attacking disabled children.
Changes are necessary yes. Parents need to be able to access support, schools need to provide it, there needs to be real consequences for schools and LAs who wrongfully deny support, we need TAs back into classrooms and get rid of MATs because they're all about profit and not children.