Are you aware of the amount of SEN/additional needs pupils in class?

[yetiflowerpumpkin]

I’ve put this in chat rather than anywhere else because I just want to highlight the scale of SEN/additional needs in schools. In my experience, and reading on MN, some parents aren’t aware of the issues school staff face in supporting these students.

I am an experienced cover teacher in a medium sized primary school. In the classes I cover there are 25-30 children.

As an example, in two of the classes 75% of the pupils have additional educational needs. Some are diagnosed, others are on the (years long) waiting list. Some have multiple needs (Autism, ADHD, AuDHD, SEMH, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, physical/visual impairment and other medical needs, some life threatening). I don’t think in any class I cover there is less than 40%.

I think some parents think their child is the only child with needs in class and cannot understand why those needs are sometimes not met. In the ideal world all those needs would be met, but there isn’t a possibility in mainstream with lack of support staff, lack of space and lack of funding.

I try and do my best (my own family are neurodivergent) but I know my best isn’t good enough for some parents.

Does it surprise you the amount of additional needs there are in class?

I'm a governor at an infant school. According to the report our HT delivered at our last meeting, 30% of our students are on the SEND register - so no, i,'m not surprised sadly 😏

I do think there needs to be more discussion and research into genetic vs environmental factors but that never goes down well. Several of the children I know who are ND have experienced trauma in their life so could there be a link there? Obviously there needs to be more funding to help these children get the education they deserve, that’s without question but I do think funding needs to be spent towards understand why so many children are ND in today’s age. It cannot just be that we are more aware and so there are more diagnoses. If there is a link with trauma for example, the funding would be better going towards counselling, alongside support in the classroom.

As I understand it, heritability for ASD or ADHD is around 80%, with environment contributing to the other 20% risk.

However, imo, it’s not just about trauma, it’s also about antenatal care. DD2 is pregnant. She had hyperemesis gravidarum from 5 - 22 weeks. She had a real battle to be prescribed effective antiemetics as per RCOG guidelines. She expressed her concerns about the effects on the baby of not being able to eat for weeks, to be told by doctors, it doesn’t matter. Apparently, HG guidelines say women should be referred to a dietitian for advice. Nobody offered DD a referral. Hyperemesis is suspected of increasing the risk of autism and ADHD.

DD had a blood test for gestational diabetes at 8 weeks. She was supposed to get another between 16 and 24 weeks. She only got a blood test at 29 weeks, because she’d been prescribed a drug, known to cause gestational diabetes. She’s got it. She reckoned, she’d had the diabetes for weeks, but assumed the symptoms were a normal part of pregnancy. Gestational diabetes is associated with increased risk of autism and ADHD.

Many countries offer pregnant women a third trimester anomaly scan to pick up problems, only seen later with the baby. The NHS doesn’t.

It seems as though the NHS is more concerned with reducing short term costs on antenatal care for women, oblivious to the lifetime costs for society from children with autism and/or ADHD?

But I think saying use of full time childcare causes attachment issues is a kick in the teeth to those of us working

It’s no good pretending that using full time child care is always just fine when it can have a detrimental effect on children .

It's genetic in my family MIL, Mum and Dad family it's there - but everyone works pays taxes is fully funcational memor of society- in Dad family it's often in higher wages professional jobs. There's 4 countires it's across - Mum and Dad's family so can't even say there something about the UK.

In past partiucuar individuals with a lot of quirks got local family support to help - family got more scattered with work and house prices with time. We're nowhere near family but have still had some finacial and emotional support. There a lot more family quriks I found when my kids finally got near assesments - our normal isn't apparently societies normal.

When I was young I got a mix of support from school and home but more importantly time to develop skills that came but slower than peers - so by secondary was flying. My kids it's pretty much been pushed onto us the parents - though school often delayed that realisation with gaslighting.

Even with nuclear family mostly - DH and I - we had time and resources to help the kids I could and was at home in primary years - that hidden expense on us. My single parent sister hasn't got that - she hasn't even got a school willing to have her youngest in all school day so every day nephew falls further behind and she more stretched and stressed.

I think there may be some increase in various disablites/ND/SEN but a lot is less reasources from wider societey, busy stressed parents and schools and more demands on kids. I was in class primary room in 80s and secondary 90 and I'm one of a about 6 in class of 28 I know of later diagonsed with something but missing from school stats and likely as quite behaving not on anyone but families radar - in the just about coping pot that's increasingly struggling in schools.

Lots of reasons I think; loss of specialist schools, often SEN issues are genetic and I read a paper on SEN people marrying and having a relationship with each other resulting in more SEN children. I think that’s really interesting tbh and I definitely see examples around me. I have adhd and possibly high functioning autism as does my husband and our daughter has been diagnosed with both. Also add in super anxiety everywhere following Covid, more awareness and understanding of neurodivergence, potentially more medicalised interventions, different discipline practices in parenting so perhaps less masking going on as children feel more secure?
my friend thinks adhd is the new trans; lots of students identified as trans at the peak and now we’re seeing a drive in adhd students. I disagree obv with my own experiences but she is convinced!

Not jumping on the beat working mothers bandwagon but my own v limited anecdotal evidence is that my autistic adhd daughter was in childcare whereas my nt son was with me until school 🤷‍♀️
there could be issues around attachment, bonds, dysregulation, abandonment etc that I think are interesting to explore HOWEVER the government never will because they want people (mothers) working

Absolutely this. My dc inherited their autism but in them there is a definite link between how severe their autism is verses how traumatic their birth was. I also noticed that my dc who is the most sensitive to noise used to move around a lot more than usual when I was on the ctg monitor. I was sure it was hurting him and I said so to the dr but the dr dismissed my concerns. My youngest was born by emcs after failed induction and then spent a few days in nicu. His autism is much more severe than my eldest who had a very calm homebirth with no ctg at all, just monitoring every so often with the doppler.

I really wasn’t trying to ‘beat’ or guilt trip anyone.
I am a working mother myself!
But this is the crux of why it’s so hard to discuss.
It’s an emotive subject. We feel judged and take comments personally.

As you say, it won’t be explored - but I think it should be.

Also, to the previous poster mentioning trauma. Similarly hard to discuss for obvious reasons- but also much more of an issue than I think we all realise and often leading to misdiagnosis.

My ND kids were with me - partly life throwng curved balls - let go in pg could only get temp work rest of pg then got a clingy baby who we thought would never cope with childcare so we made luxury for many choice of one parent staying home have kids close together expecting to get back when they started school - which they then also struggled with let along time in before and after school care.

I've had posters insist the kids would have coped - they have had to when there was no choice.

However Dsis and newphew were in had to camp of having to use childcare and the wheels are slowly coming off in early school years having been fine with childcare in early years- he not in full days and school making little effort to change that. We came very close to school refusal and if one had realised they could stay home we'd have never got them in again - we'll never know but I do wonder if we'd pushed ahead using childcare if we'd be in a worse position or better.

I think poltically it would be near impossible to look at childcare potentailly adversly affecting children as governments need women including one with young kids working and paying as much tax as possible. Same with parental age - particularly fathers - being older as that's being driven by social and economic winds and people react badly and emotionally to existsing data that it increases risks to kids though by small amounts.

As a neurodivergent person myself,

• We're overdiagnosing. So many parents are seeking disgnosis for something that, years ago, would just have fallen under quirky. Many of the SEND children with a mild case would cope perfectly well without any adjustments.
• We're over-adjusting and putting the needs of individuals over that of society. When it gets to a point that a teacher is required to adjust lessons to 400 out of the 1000 children they teach, and know the needs of every one of those 400 individually and cater for them, the system is setting the teacher up to fail, and the children up to fail in later life. No one will get their bills sent to them in their preferred colour, no one will tolerate excessive swearing and aggression regardless of past trauma, no one will get 10min timeout every 60min of their working time for anxiety or to calm down. Schools, however, are required to cater for all of that, and much more, and needs often clash in a classroom where so many students are diagnosed.
• Neither the money nor the technology is there in schools to support the students, be it with smaller class sizes, 1:1 support or with tech that actually works, but teachers are still expected to make all of this possible in the name of inclusion, because in theory, they should.
• Cost-cutting means ever fewer special schools, so what is severe need is being redefined all the time, and thresholds for this are getting higher and higher, so more students are pushed into mainstream, which is unsuitable to them.
• A huge breakdown in societal norms and support systems (such as police presence, early intervention, mental health support etc.) means that more and more students develop skewed interpretations of what is normal and acceptable, often carrying the label SEMH. Social media adds to this.
• Then you have the effect of medical advancements, meaning children born earlier and earlier survive, but often at a huge cost in terms of later issues, such as lung conditions, visual impairment or brain development.
• Some parents project their own over-protectiveness and anxieties onto their children, demanding adjustments when none are, realistically, needed. Those children grow up needlessly more afraid of challenges than they should be, because they've never had to be uncomfortable.
• Education, as it stands, is not fit for purpose. It tries to shoehorn too many children into an academic path they're not suited to, and that makes the clashes between children and the system much louder than they need to be. Instead of forcing Shakespeare onto non-academic children, they should be encouraged to learn a trade they enjoy and qualify in this by the time they leave school. As it is, SEND needs become more severe as children age and the work becomes impossible for them to keep up with. We see this in grade boundaries, where 50% of the paper is all that is needed to get a grade 4 pass.

All of this is a time bomb waiting to go off at any time. We're already seeing the beginnings of this with huge numbers of school leavers being classed as NEET as they cannot make the jump into employment, because they are used to being seen and catered to as an individual and suddenly find out that the real world doesn't work like that.

I am glad no one knew I am autistic when I was at school, because despite some struggles I was just expected to get on with it. It helped me develop coping strategies and grit, which is now, sadly, lacking in so many young people.

Why do you think we're over diagnosing? I understand there's under diagnosis

DC don’t need a diagnosis in order to have SEN.

DC wouldn’t meet the legal definition of having SEN if they didn’t need any adjustments/support.

Early, intensive childcare can contribute to these issues. Things will only get worse with the childcare funding and the government pushing for babies to be away from their parents from 9 months old.

We are pathologising things that are pretty normal. Things that can be managed without a label requiring formal adjustments which, when taken for granted in school, will make normal working life (or any life, really) much harder in the long run.

Anxiety is one of them. More and more young people are diagnosed with anxiety as a condition requiring adjustments. They are catered for in a way that allows them to opt out of uncomfortable situations. Students are allowed to opt out of lessons in which they have to experience being uncomfortable for various reasons, such as struggling to understand something first time, having to speak out loud in front of a class or being asked to sit next to someone who is not their friend. This is true for many students who show normal signs of occasional anxiety, which almost always become worse and more regular after formal diagnosis and adjustments have been put in place.

Mild autism. My condition means I struggle to remember names, faces, expressions of emotion and to express empathy. I hyperfixate, have issues with texture, can have heightened anxiety, am uncomfortable when my daily routine changes unexpectedly, struggle with noise and I am lacking true inventiveness. These days, this would have meant access to ear defenders, adjustments to uniform granted, exam conditions like rest breaks and a separate room and access to a quiet space and pastoral care whenever I felt I needed it. Given the option, I would have taken it. I didn't have the option then and learned to mask, cope and adjust - something which still helps me in the workplace and in life situations now. One of my children has inherited my condition in very similar ways, so I know exactly how much schools adjust even when they coped fine in lessons beforehand. My child got asked about their preferences, and every one of them was granted without question. While autism is a spectrum, with even the milder sides getting formally diagnosed now, this becomes an issue.

Mild ADHD. See above - where the line is drawn often differs from practitioner to practitioner and it is not uncommon for parents to seek out multiple professionals before a diagnosis is granted. The issue then again becomes not the diagnosis in itself, but what is expected as a result, and what becones the new norm for the child.

I suppose, that is the point. Often the adjustments that are required following diagnosis, however mild, are what exascerbates the condition. And when we include more and more people who show some signs, however mild, of neurodivergence, then what is the norm becomes ever narrower, and the ways in which society has to change around the needs of the individual becomes ever larger. And that causes issues. So, having 40% SEND students in a class is not the issue. Having to cater to everyone's individual strengths, weaknesses and preferences while being expected to make accelerated progress with all students is.

Support, including adjustments, in schools aren’t based on diagnosis. They are based on needs.

I think one of the reasons for this change is greater awareness among the public, which I put down mainly to social media. It never crossed my mind that I might be autistic until I cane across a screener on social media. I filled it out and got a surprise.

And actually also greater understanding among healthcare professionals.

This may be true in (some?) primary schools but it's certainly not true of the mainstream comprehensive where I teach. There is very little flex in the curriculum these days and no spare staff or resources.

I think you make some very valid points

I have had the opportunity to work with a number of secondary schools across several regions in England.

In many mild cases, the needs are determined by asking the kids what they want to happen. In my child's case, quite literally. They were presented with a list, and got to choose what they wanted. I've witnessed this kind of thing a few times.

Children are not necessarily the best people to choose what works best, but what is easiest or what they prefer without much basis. So, many dyslexic girls will choose pink or purple paper to read from, whilst I haven't ever come across a boy whose needs showed that pink is best over, say, blue or green. It's a silly example, but one of many where extra work is added.

And if a child has the option of opting out of things they find hard, it will be taken.

I have a SEN child (adult now) so I do have some understanding (interestingly he was a prem baby) and I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to ‘not see’ if almost half the class was invisible SEN.

the needs are determined by asking the kids what they want to happen.

Needs and provision are not the same thing. Needs are identified before deciding the provision that is required to meet those needs. Any school who only looks at the child’s voice when looking at needs and SEP is incredibly poor.

@Jasnah I think some of your points are fair but I would refute some of them.

>> So many parents are seeking disgnosis for something that, years ago, would just have fallen under quirky. Many of the SEND children with a mild case would cope perfectly well without any adjustments.

IME the waiting lists are so long and/or private assessments so expensive and it's still a fight to get needs registered at schools etc - I don't know of anybody doing this whose DC is not massively struggling. Perhaps some people do it just out of curiosity but it seems like a minority. And even in my own case where in hindsight, DS1 didn't need a diagnosis at the time I sought one for him and he seemed to cope well for years without having any specific support, it has turned out to be the right thing when he hit 16/17 and the house of cards which were all his ADHD coping strategies collapsed all at once, which tends to happen with ADHD, we have realised - the coping strategies tend to all hold each other up, so once one goes it tends to completely destabilise all the others.

He went from being one of the top students to just suddenly seeming to not bother out of nowhere. It was so fast he almost failed the year before his tutor was even able to call me in for a meeting. He had 3x the amount of absences over the threshold for it to affect his permanent record. Luckily for him he already had the ADHD diagnosis so all we had to do was call the doctor and organise a new medication prescription, as well as putting other strategies in place, because we could see immediately what had happened, rather than start the arduous process of working out what was behind this sudden and out of character seeming crash and if ADHD wasn't something that came up early on in the process then you have to deal with waiting lists and medication titration as well, who knows how long it would have taken.

>> The system is setting the teacher up to fail, and the children up to fail in later life.

Completely agree.

>> No one will get their bills sent to them in their preferred colour, no one will get 10min timeout every 60min of their working time for anxiety or to calm down

Actually I think these are examples of the kinds things which adults organise all the time for themselves, which children don't have the luxury of being able to do. Lots of people use Pomodoro timers at work, or when WFH, or even the good old fashioned smoke/vape break is an extremely common practice. Adults can choose all kinds of formats to receive bills including through an app which can often be put into dark mode, opt to fill their home printer with whatever colour of paper they like or simply automate payment so you don't need to read it at all. And they are also examples of accommodations which children tend to need less of as they get older, more confident, or more used to the situation/task. When we put a bib on a baby or toddler, we don't worry that they will never learn to be careful of getting food on their clothes. They automatically develop this awareness along with the better motor control that allows them to eat more carefully. We usually stop using bibs after they are mostly staying clean, and it doesn't prevent children from developing better motor control. Children with SEN might develop skills later or more slowly than their peers but they are still developing and growing, they don't stay the same forever.

>> No one will tolerate excessive swearing and aggression regardless of past trauma

Schools should absolutely not be tolerating this either? I can't see why a school would have a policy accepting this, unless you're referring to deescalation tactics as being acceptance or tolerance, which is not the same thing.

>> A huge breakdown in societal norms and support systems (such as police presence, early intervention, mental health support etc.) means that more and more students develop skewed interpretations of what is normal and acceptable, often carrying the label SEMH. Social media adds to this.

I'm very curious as to how these things have got mashed together because I don't see how police presence and early intervention are linked, unless you mean social services? It's true these services are chronically underfunded and likely failing in many areas, and this can create sort of "pockets" of communities where children are growing up in environments where they are being exposed to all sorts of troubling ideas. But I am sceptical of the idea that "societal norms are breaking down" because I don't think that the existence of these families is especially new or surprising, they are mainly more visible now whereas in the past it was more hidden. I also can't think of a time when the UK has ever had adequate mental health care and services. They've always been completely shit and not even started to meet the level of need, even if you look at the very brief window in the late 00s/early 10s when it seemed like things were going in a more positive direction. But also, some societal norms needed to be abandoned - a lot of older norms were just stigma against people unnecessarily and I don't think that helps at all.

>> Some parents project their own over-protectiveness and anxieties onto their children, demanding adjustments when none are, realistically, needed. Those children grow up needlessly more afraid of challenges than they should be, because they've never had to be uncomfortable.

This is interesting and I think could be worth looking into.

I also think that the SEN crisis might be actually a symptom of an improvement in society - a general recognition that 'the system' has a responsibility to all children and basically giving up on a chunk of them at the start of secondary school isn't good enough.

I can easily believe 40%+ "SEN" thinking back to my school in the 1990s if you are now counting everyone in the bottom set, everyone who was in the higher sets but disruptive plus a good chunk of top set as "SEN", plus the inevitable handful of children with serious ongoing medical issues or traumas.

I'm sure this has been said already but there's a significant overlap between SEND and children in the "pupil premium" category so rising rates of poverty coupled with falls in real terms per child funding have made challenges much more obvious.

Of course pupil premium funding helps the school's budget but it doesn't get spent on SEND support.