to think that mainstream schools think SN kids are a drain?

[Planetarymagic1]

My understanding is that schools dont get aby additional funding for kids with Special Needs unless the needs are so exceptional that they can then apply for Exceptional Needs Funding, even if the child has an EHCP. Is that right?

(Before MN explodes, ive NC and have 2 SN kids at a Voluntary Aided mainstream primary, and am starting to feel like we are a bit of a drain and we should somehow be more grateful. Am i right about the funding? My kids are extra expensive?)

Well financially children with SEND need more resources that can't be denied.(so to go back to the OPs words not mine- they are a drain)-Even a fully funded EHCP doesn't cover the full costs IF 1 to 1 is needed full time. In small schools the budgets are smaller and the impact on the school budget is much greater. So 10 children needing additional support/resourcing in a school of 35 has a much greater impact that 10 in a school of 420.

But socially they are not a drain as we want our schools to represent the full cross section of society. Diversity includes SEND as much as it includes ethnicity or language.

EHCPs are detached from funding- some LAs have used this detached funding model for years but to others it has only been in place since the move from statement to EHCP and the transition has been more fragmented.

Lougle you are a . Thankyou.

Each local authority is different. This is a real issue as things are not consistent and it affects the advice given.

In our LA, we are expected to account for the first £6000 of support from our own budget. However, due to new arrivals and changing needs we consistently have more children requiring support than £6000s. Also worth pointing out that this £6K may not be spent directly on your child in particular - it may pay for a TA to do a group intervention, to work with a small group etc. It may not mean direct 1:1 support for say, half a day.

When we decide a child needs 1:1 support, we apply for high needs funding. We outline how we have already spent the £6000 and what we have put in place so far. We outline what we need from them to support the child and how we'd use the money. If it's given, we can get 1:1 support. If not we reapply or just have to manage without 1:1 as we can't afford it.

Occasionally we get a child who immediately needs 1:1 support. Our LA will only give top up funding after two terms of poor progress, so often we have to fund 1:1 for those two terms from the budget while we put together an application for high needs funding. This impacts on the £6000 that other children benefit from - absolutely not ideal but we can't invent money.

In our LA, we are told to only apply for an EHCP if a child is making absolutely no progress despite lots of intervention and support. If a child is making ANY academic progress, it is declined as it is seen that what the school is doing is working.

I am a SENCO at a school with a high proportion of sen.I absolutely support parents with ehcp applications etc but I am so limited by my LA. There are a limited number of specialist SEN places in our LA and they seem to think an EHCP is a passport to those places (even if no intention to move out of mainstream!!)

Schools are so short of money. We are struggling and we want to provide the best. planetary if your child is not receiving additional funding, and they don't have a TA to provide the intervention suggested I don't know what we as a school would do. I can't invent the money to pay for a TA even though I'd love to.

The school doesn't receive of have £6000 of funding for each child with SEN. The school receives a budget based on a number of factors such as deprivation, EYFS Profile attainment, EAL etc etc. If they have 75 pupils with SEN needing additional support or 3 a school of the same size with the same weighting factors would receive the same budget.

£6000 is probably more than the per head funding they will receive for that child (depends of LA and factors such as if child has EAL, is disadvantaged and their prior attainment).

Some LAs weight it again- so they expect you to fund £6000 for every 75 pupils for example. So a school with 150 would be expected to fund 2 lots of £6000 before any additional finance was available- but not all do it in the same way.

So there is no real £6000- it is notional.

I think that the staff just get frustrated that a disproportionate amount of their time is spent dealing with a small minority of children. This means less time for helping the other children. Add in the fact that many parents see "special needs" as an excuse for bad behaviour and get upset when staff have to take reasonable measures.

It is a difficult question. Parents usually want to send their "special needs" children to a "normal" school wherever possible. They don't want to see their children sent to a school solely occupied by other children with similar conditions. The want them to experience a "normal" school life. But this means that "normal" teachers (ie, without specialised training for dealing with "special needs" and the particular difficulties that can come along with them) have to handle these pupils in a classroom full of other children without these problems.

The teachers have to treat children fairly, and it undermines their authority when they are seen to let Child X get away with behaviour that would not be tolerated from the rest of the children.

The teachers have to do their best to ensure all children are educated to the best of their ability, and it is difficult to do this when certain children take up much more of the teachers' time than the other children.

I don't think their is an answer to the problem that will satisfy everyone. You could throw money at it, make more spaces available in "special" schools - but this would lead to children with "special needs" being isolated, kept separate from normal children. Equally, you could throw money at "normal" schools to provide specialist teacher - but again, you'd end up isolating them into specific classes. Even if you threw money at the teachers themselves, gave them more training in dealing with "special needs" and the behavioural problems they can bring, it would not solve the problem of disproportionate amounts of time being spent on certain children at the expense of the remaining ones.

There's no solution, so we just have to make the best of what we've got.

Ds2's ehcp has every minute of therapy, direct teaching, playground supervision arse wiping etc accounted for and costed and states that the first £6k comes out of school budget but the next £8.5k or whatever is funded by the la.

I would love to send my ds to a "special needs" school. I am sure he has dyslexia and dysgraphia but due to not having any interest him apart from collecting whatever extra funding he got because he needed to see the SENCO for 10 minutes per day and he was never diagnosed with anything as that would have meant they had to do something and there are no dyslexia schools he was in mainstream school till they made it impossible for him to attend.

Nothing would have been better for him to have not gone through the nasty bullying attitude of the teachers and children.

When you tell a teacher and then the head teacher that your son was beaten up because he can't read and write you don't expect the teacher and ht to turn round and say. "What am I meant to do?
He can't read and write"

Some schools are great but a lot talk the talk but don't walk the walk. This school in question apparently had an amazing SENCO dept. In actual fact what they meant was the SENCO had a fulltime teaching post so was unavailable so it was left up to the TA to do extra work for about 10mins per day and ds's TA shouted at him if he got anything wrong or was struggling with anything. She did more harm than good.

Schools, teachers, TAs, SENCOs etc. (you get the picture) would love to give SEND children (whichever way round you want to put it) all of the help, support and funding that they need.

Unfortunately the government doesn't exactly give a shit and funding is being cut, SEND definitions are being and have been re-written (sometimes just locally) and schools are struggling to fill the funding and support gap.

Part of the problem it's such a postcode lottery. Both as to how the LA treats SN and the individual school.

I thank my lucky stars that ds goes to a very supportive MS school. Even then though although they went above and beyond getting the EHCP and associated funding in place has made it much easier for them and ultimately ds because they can fund more of the extra support he needs

Our locality is like described by Pancakeflipper. Locality school SENCOs get together and have to make a bid for funding for specific children. We are an infants school so very few have a EHCP initially, or tbh even by the end of Y2, even for children who so clearly need it. So funding is limited.

It doesn't mean that schools and staff don't try their best to teach all children to reach their potential though.

'Special needs' is not seen as an excuse for bad behaviour by the majority of parents who have children with send (no such thing as 'special needs' children, bloody offensive term) but we are aware that say a child with asd being anxious and scream is not bad behaviour, for a child who doesn't have disability related anxiety and has no difficulty controlling their responses screaming would be putting it and therefore considered bad behaviour. Same as a child who has adhd interupting- when the part of the brain that deals with impulse control doesn't work properly it isn't bad behaviour, it's disability. Or a child who has dyspraxia spilling and breaking things. It's no different to someone who has sight or hearing impairments taking their assistance dog to a hotel as that's needed where as other patrons taking a dog to a no dogs allowed hotel would be taking the piss. Thankfully the school my kids will progress to eventually understands anxious behaviour is not bad behaviour and that reasonable adjustments are not special treatment they are an ability to try and provide equal access to education.

I'm not sold on the idea that kids getting differing amounts of time is a bad thing. It's pretty normal for some kids to learn more indepedantly than others. My kids school take the approach that it's important to teach children to be compassionate towards others disabilities and to understand that people have differing needs. Despite my disabilities I sailed through school, and I loved the opportunities to help other kids when I was finished my work, or to tutor kids who struggled, or help them access the libary because I already knew how to. This type of social learning is every bit as important imo as the academic side, and did more to shape my future career than my perfect grades did.

SN children are a drain on mainstream school. Schools do not get enough funding for resources or specialised teaching or 1:1 to enable these children to succeed and achieve.
Definitely not saying that schools do not try. they do with very little funding and support. Sometimes it gets too much and schools begin to suffer in terms of league tables and results when they have a high proportion.
It isn't very frustrating and unfair on everyone when children are not given the support they need and deserve. School staff KNOW what is needed but it falls on deaf ears.
A lot of the time unless you are a very vocal parent and not afraid to fight, you receive very little support and these children get lost in the system.
It is the system at fault NOT school staff.

Is frustrating not 'isn't frustrating'.

"SN children are a drain on mainstream school." I disagree. Insufficient funding is a problem for mainstream schools (and probably all schools). Schools need to meet the needs of all learners and you can't pinpoint one set of children and claim they are the "drain".

The problem with that is the league tables and not children's need for additional support, banging.

Ds2 isn't even going to be taking y6 sats in the Spring, but, thankfully, he's never been made to feel anything less than welcome because the HT values a lot more than just academics.

My son was very happy in his old special school and later a special unit attached to a mainstream school. Then Blunkett, with some personal vendetta, shut them down and shunted everyone into the maintsream with very little extra support or training for teachers, minimal TA support, no special resources (or none when I was a teacher) and so we now have kids in really unsuitable environments.

As a teacher, I worked in an LEA that was ahead of the game and already deciding to shut down its special schools (pure money saving - totally no educational rationale). As a teacher, I found myself with a class of 24 suddenly expanded to a class of 30 and that extra table of kids not only had profound and differing SNs but interestingly, their SNS often clashed so what optimised the learning environment for say, the hearing impaired child, was disastrousfor the visually impaired. I go zero extra resources and had to spend my time developing materials for my (lovely) SN kids because the government and LEA certainly weren't funding it. I taught at a time when we weren't allowed to ask TAs to do anything that might be seen as demeaning (ie: photocopying; blowing up worksheets to larger print, etc etc) so I ended up with no lunch times and no breaks, as I had to do all that myself.

I never resented my SN kids. In fact I longed to get extra training and would have given my eye teeth to work in a school with only SN kids. The original kids missed out as I had to spread myself very thin. The SN kids missed out because I had to learn as I went. But hey, who cares - the government saved money.

I take offence at the thought that my child is a drain on schools. Would you also consider people with disabilities a drain on society? What about other groups? Single mothers? People with health problems? The elderly?

I think the issue is there are too many rigid rules on how a child should be taught,

Ds's friend in school had English as a second language. He was taught one way. This way would have suited ds as it started at the basics and worked from there.
Ds having English as a first language was meant to muddle along with the rest of the class, even though he hadn't a clue what was being written on the board or was not able to read anything and was expected to do the homework even though to Ds it might as well have been a foreign language. But for 10minutes per day he had to go with the TA to practise his reading.

Apparently it is against the rules to teach English as a foreign language to English speaking children who struggle with reading and writing. I think if they did they might have a break through. Having over the years spoken to other parents in a similar position who all thought their child would have benefitted from joining that group.

I would much rather my son went to a special school/unit as I feel he would cope much better in an environment more suited to his needs. As it is his desk is tucked into a corner with a high wall of wooden planks bolted to it so that he isn't overstimulated by the stimulating environment of the classroom.

I definitely get what you are saying OP.

My DS is now in a special school purely because mainstream schools will differentiate to a point but won't go the extra mile some children need. I suspect this is down to funding and time.

So for example my son struggled with homework because he conpartmentalises different t things. School work is school time stuff and home is different. In addition he paces the house most evenings, talking too himself etc. He is not able to sit and do homework. Ideally they needed to drop homework for him completely or support him to get it done during the school day. They were prepared to do neither thing. In fact their suggestion was "more medication " so that DS could complete homework

In my opinion schools rarely practice inclusion..they practice integration and think it's the same thing or that it's an acceptable aleternatve. It isn't.

Best thing I ever did was pull my son out.

However I do worry about the children left behind who don't have someone to fight their corner. They are the children learning over and over again that they are actually bit that good at anything. And we all pay the price for that.

Much much more investment is needed to support children with additional needs in schools. Until we do that though then I suspect some schools will indeed see these children/OUR children as a drain.

blaeberry you are correct it is offensive, but as a teacher if pupil x causes you more work, more planning and more preparation you are drained.
The issue is funding and teacher time. Teachers want the time and the funding but society won't pay and then accuses teachers of complaining.
That is offensive.

I feel that my son's school feel the same about him. He's six and diagnosed ADHD and he goes to a voluntary aided school but is on the verge of permanent exclusion. They keep saying they can meet his needs but clearly they can't as they wouldn't keep excluding him. Four times last term!

To be fair, CeCe autism classrooms in many special schools have screened workstations, too.

snatchedpencil

There is so much wrong with your post. I don't know where to start.

However, one morsel (out of many) is this

They don't want to see their children sent to a school solely occupied by other children with similar conditions

1. many parents would love their children to attend special school, however since the mass closure of special schools mentioned by a pp, there ate limited places at special school and they are usually targeted St a specific disability or level of learning disability (is IQ level) - they are few and far between, our nearest is 45 mins by car and ds has too high an IQ. My friends dc attends, a 70 minute journey to school every day, there and back - they had to wait 9 months for a space.

2. many, many children with disabilities' could be educated perfectly well in mainstream schools - yes, with more funding, but also with better adaptation to individual needs.

3. when you talk about teaching children with disabilities - 'similar conditions' you do the disservice of lumping children with disabilities as one homogenous mass. This is short sighted and insulting. Children with the same condition, have as much variation in personality, intelligence, interests and learning styles as a child with no disabilities. Not to mention the fact that the additional needs that a child may have within that condition will vary wildly. Then there are the 10s of 1000s of children with no diagnosis - but needs that require extra support - learning disabilities, speech problems, behavioural needs, complex health issues.

My ds is practically non verbal (he uses a mixture of Makaton, limited speech and an electronic talker (an AAC device), he has physical disabilities, health issues and social communication issues - he has a higher than average non verbal IQ and has no problems with behaviour at school - he needs support, that is undeniable, nut with support he is able to access the full curriculum. He is as valuable a member of school society as any other child.

Children with additional needs should be included in mainstream education, as schools should reflect society, all of society, not just the easy unchallenging bits.

Schools are for all children. Education is for all children. If you don't have enough money to feed your family do you blame the eldest child, as the one who eats the most?
Snatched pencil your post was pretty depressing tbh.