Sensationalist reporting - whipping up resentment towards education bills for complex SEN placements

[SoFuckingTired]

AIBU to say that the purpose of articles such as this is to foster resentment towards disabled children/young people? Clearly I'm naive but I'm surprised and disappointed that the BBC would report in this way. Yes £2.5m is a lot, but when you actually read further this is a placement for very complex SEN/behaviour spanning several years

Council billed £2.5m for pupil with special needs.

Schools Week have a long article about private equity firms and SEND provision today.

@a

@Anisette sorry about that....
Things will be done In house' . A bit like mainstream schools opening a unit rather than paying to send children to a PRU.
Councils will push schools to do it 'in house'. Sen provision will get a lot tougher. I am starting to see it already. Cost cutting exercises.

But I'm assuming that you don't need 24/7 care? If you truly do, then you should indeed have it. But most disabilities don't require this.

There's a lot of things most of us can't ever do, especially as we get older. But that's different from someone who can't do almost anything without help.

Isn't it? The response I received from my reporting of this thread was wholly inadequate and to be rank, completely tone deaf to the gravity of offence caused by much contained in this thread. Agree that without the Twitter fuss @MNHQ would have done nothing.
Shameful for a parenting site.

100% this. It would be great if there were a blank chequebook for every deserving case (in healthcare, education, social care, social housing, high pay for those doing socially useful jobs etc) without any kind of balancing act but that is just wishful thinking.

It’s refusing to pay for higher needs that has actually caused the huge bills, usually in the form of paying companies.
If there were more specialist state funded spaces, earlier in a child’s life, then almost no children would require £2.5 million of expenditure. It’s precisely cost ‘savings’ that have caused this. Which then, conveniently, the government can say costs too much!
Same for the NHS! The government intentionally underfunds it, then says it’s no good and we should move to a privatised system.
Who benefits? Companies owned by mates of Tory MPs.
Immigration then- underfund public services, don’t build social housing, sell it off in large amounts and then blame the very low paid immigrants who are propping up social care and the NHS.

The sad and infuriating thing is that working class people are being sold this lie that is totally against their best interests and for 10 years seemingly haven’t noticed.

I’m working class and cannot imagine what would possess you to vote Tory unless you have at least £2-3million in assets. Even then, just look to the US to see how all that could be wiped out if your child needed cancer treated.

This country needs to wake up.

I wonder what will happen if Labour gets in. Will they be able to sort out this mess (caused partly by them in the first place and partly by the Tories) or is it just too late?

Personally, I think the biggest waste of government funds is the servicing of the national debt (which I think is nearly 10% of GDP). They should never have taken on any debt in the first place, let alone let it spiral out of control over decades.

@SENparenting that's a fantastic post and spot on.

.

I think it will be a very sad day if and when we accept as a society that some people’s needs are so great that we cannot help them. The mark of any society is how they treat the sick, the elderly and the vulnerable. The UK’s track record isn’t great now, but at least we don’t just give up on people.

I couldn’t agree more, so funny how people like that accuse others of being uneducated 🤣

Our SENCO definitely does not push back enough.

The sad and infuriating thing is that working class people are being sold this lie that is totally against their best interests and for 10 years seemingly haven’t noticed.
This!
I think someone mentioned it up thread, but it reminds me of the cartoon where there's a fat cat banker, an average Joe and an immigrant, and the fat cat with a mountain of cookies looks at Average Joe's 2 cookies and says "better watch that immigrant. He wants your cookie".

Just replace immigrant with:
Adults with long term health conditions
Disabled people
Children with SEN
Parents of children with SEN
People on low incomes

And you realise that 90% of Tory propaganda is convincing middle and working class people to fight between themselves.

Even labour are starting to do it by trying to get working class voters annoyed at the bog standard middle class people.

It all conveniently keeps the attention away from the big problems such as untaxed or minimally taxed wealth and taxpayers' money being channelled into the pockets of companies who have the right political connections.

What you’re describing is divide and rule. The Tories have always been masterful at it, and now Labour are following suit. You only have to look at the way disabled benefit claimants have been vilified as cheats and scroungers in the gutter press and on TV.

Public sentiment is whipped up - if you need proof, look at some of the vile ableist comments on threads like this, and those discussing benefits, to see how people are sucked in. Then lo and behold, the real reason is revealed. At the autumn statement the lovely Mr Hunt reveals government proposals to cut disability and sickness benefits even further in an attempt to get more claimants back into work.

This time they’re aiming for the very most sick and disabled - those who are presently considered too sick to work. It doesn’t mean that these people are any less sick or disabled, it just means the government are moving the eligibility goalposts so that more and more don’t meet the thresholds to claim. It’s compulsion dressed up as support. But it doesn’t meet with much opposition from Joe Public because they’ve read about benefit scroungers in the rags that pass for newspapers, so it must be true. This article comes under that description as far as I’m concerned.

LionKing above put it perfectly:

The sad and infuriating thing is that working class people are being sold this lie that is totally against their best interests and for 10 years seemingly haven’t noticed.

I’m working class and cannot imagine what would possess you to vote Tory unless you have at least £2-3million in assets. Even then, just look to the US to see how all that could be wiped out if your child needed cancer treated.
^^
This country needs to wake up.

What I find frightening is where else can families turn for help if governments and political parties let them down at scale? Nowhere. So it’s imperative that we need to vote carefully and also at election timeS (which we’re already in because of the general election next year) the only power we have is our votes.
We have to tell politicians that the quality of their policies to support disabled children and adults and their families is going to decide. us on voting for them or voting for someone else.

Email your MP today or better still ask to meet with them, ask to meet with the prospective parliamentary candidates for all the major parties in you area, if you get doorstep election canvassers to your home say the same thing to them. say how disgusting it is to scaremonger about disabled children. Ask what more support they would give in power.

Also ask the national disability charities to write to their members and remind them about this. This shouldn’t be the burden only of individuals and families with disabled members - we need widespread understanding of the need to support people with disabilities. The moral social and economic arguments for that support are all here on this thread.

@NalafromtheLionKing there is nothing funny about this thread-absolutely nothing.
What posts like yours continue though to make crystal clear is how out of touch with the realities for so many, which comfortably suits the methods of this government. The majority of decent folks with even the most basic of education levels are able to see this and demonstrate some empathy.
There are many messages coming from your posts and others like them, the lack of awareness and education may be one of them, but this ought to be the least of your worries.

Its ideology based on 'inclusion'.

Its convenient financially.

See also 'care in the community' if any of you are old enough to remember who and why that came into being

The idea is (again ideology) that mainstream schools will have a range of additional services to support children with SEN to the degree that they don have at the moment

Where this might come from, I couldnt say.

There are big differences across the country of the number of children within each LA who go to specialist schools and those who go to mainstream, the differences in decision making are being scrutinised at the moment

I dont think anyone has mentioned on this thread, with all the arguing about money and why money shouldnt be discussed etc etc, that a very very large number of councils are Tory and those councils are very likely to be commissioning LAs, this means that they CANNOT provide their own services, they all have to be commissioned by tendering.

People who live in those LAs who vote at local council elections have voted for that, its what they have wanted.

Exactly none of this is inevitable. It’s political.

Our HT pushed back against the LA. Did everything he could but the school was unable to fulfil the provision in the EHCP (mainly inability to recruit staff). Parents took school to tribunal, and the LA then hounded the HT out of a job.

Schools often can’t push back without severe consequences. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Don't know if anyone saw this today... apologies if it has replicated.

apple.news/AefufDQBzQHuMa-NIkVamCw

@stomachameleon I did read this, but thanks for sharing, there are a good few posters here who could really benefit from reading this.