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.

My daughter is autistic and non verbal I can tell u why she is the way she is, its Hereditary , I have been diagnosed in last few months as having adhd , which is under Neurodiverse umbrella, it's not some big conspiracy! Parents pass on autism and adhd , my younger daughter is going through process of adhd and autism but to a lesser severity

Agree with you hercules. When they say just keep the children at home, that also means a parent has to be on benefits too and out of the workplace, so yet more loss to the country and more cost. I work full time and we need my income. DLA does not cover my salary. So you are almost condemning the diasbled person to a life of poverty too as well as living with disabilities if they should just be kept at home because they will never be a computer programmer or a nurse.

I have worked in MH before and there were so many undiagnosed people who were ND. They were usually the most complex patients that needed the most care. They often got labelled as attention seeking and unstable. I cant help but think if things may have been different for them if they had just got the right support and education. They were high functioning compared to a lot of people with ND, not like the case discussed in this article. They were in inpatient beds for months. You can imagine what the cost would have been to support them there and the rest of their life. A proper educational placement may have changed that.

Wow where do u expect these children go then? Rubbish heap! Or just stay at home all day! All children deserve an education and specialist schools provide an education! It's about independent skills and supporting them with communication and other skills they need to live full lives! Their education may look different to mainstream! but it shouldn't just not happen! My daughter has really progressed in last year in her special school I very much doubt she would have without it! It feels very much like ur assuming everyone feels disabled children and adults are less than and that's so awful!

Wouldn't be so bad if the private special schools provided the right level of care, my son was at a £65k a year school and they were unable to manage him so LA ruled he would be safer at home but wasn't entitled to a Tutor as the LA had no authority to force the school to deregister him so they continued to be paid and therefore no funding available for a tutor.

He left school with no qualifications and with a lot of imput from myself he was accepted into a main stream college and in his first year got functional skills in Maths and English and distinction in L2 BTECH.

Needs to be much more government provision for SEN.

@ComtesseDeSpair "very expensive holding pen"?!
Are you actually likening children with SEN and/or complex needs to animals in a pen?!

@Dizzy82 i have experience of a poor independent special school too. I wanted to sue them for fraud! They pocketed money for a 1:1 that they didnt recruit due to covid.

I also have experience of much better independent schools. They really need to be held accountable somehow.

There’s clearly a hereditary link but it doesn’t explain (to me) the sudden severity of these children’s conditions if that makes sense. I never said there was as a conspiracy, I said I think we need to investigate why there has been such an enormous rise in children with complex learning needs.

That is high op, tbf I would have had no idea on how much it could be except for your thread

Omg I am going to ask for my posts to be removed. I misread that post and thought they said holding a pen.
now re reading I am disgusted by that post.

The council I live in's plan is to halve the amount of children going to private sen places by 2028 and then another 100 the year after. They just won't offer them. The option instead is to make mainstreams cater. It will save them a fortune admittedly but at what cost?

I teach in a mainstream primary school and the number of children with severe additional needs that we take has been rapidly increasing year by year. The support and funding that goes with supporting these children has gone down year by year. We have zero training, no specialist teacher support, decreased funding for support staff. Everyone tries their best but some of the students are little more than babysat as we do not have the knowledge or resources to provide them with an effective education. In a special school with well-trained staff they would be learning communication skills and have access to sensory areas etc.

Through no fault of their own, they are also very disruptive to the rest of the stude ts as the school is too small to have anything like a nurture room they could go to. Our meagre support staff budget goes entirely on 1:1 support staff.

I have been teaching for 20 years and SEND students have borne the brunt of the shocking budget cuts. It also has a knock-on effect on recruitment as the job of teachers and TAs is so much more challenging with sp much less support than there used to be.

Some commentators on here who are worried about being judged if they said what they were really thinking, NEED to be judged.

Op, you're 100% right. Too many people questioning the cost of even adequate care for those of us with children who need this care and not enough questioning the cost in the long run of not equipping them with any skills they could really benefit from, or the financial toll that LAs cause by forcing parents down the tribunal routes or the financial toll of parents/carers having to give p work or the then mental health toll on those carers, putting more strain on the NHS etc.

Not to mention, god knows how much money our LA has saved by not finding a school for my child for over a year. I bet that saved them a pretty penny and I'd want that in any cost benefit analysis in addition to the others.

At the end of the day, the government needs to increase funding to LAs for this isse. Or pay me a LOT more to stay at home, with breaks to get respite.

And yes, Mumsnet needs to do something about posters who are comfortable enough to liken disabled children to animals.

My son’s education is costing the LA £1m over the next ten years, not taking inflation into account. I’d much rather that the £50m invested in the 50 children at that school was invested into the local SEN provisions run by the council, but that isn’t going to happen. It’s disgraceful but the reason he goes to that school is because there are no other in a 30 mile radius that can meet his needs.

Pretty disgusted by some of these hateful posts (and mnhq to let them stand).

All children need educating, even those with severe sen, if were going to disregard Sen children then that’s disgusting, Sen schools also offer more than just educational classes, they do therapy, life skill classes and more.

one of the biggest shames are the shut down of SEN schools and the loss of provisions meaning those who need it are now shoved into wholey inappropriate mainstream schools

I think it’s fair to ask what society should pay for and what should be up to families or communities

So families should be financially penalised because they happened to give birth to disabled children? Mothers (which is of course who the burden would fall on) unable to work? DLA and carers allowance are pitiful.

I have an idea over 10 years of cuts to the therapies that support these children! When my daughter went to her speech and language therapy, the therapist said as it was around the general election, before Conservatives came in while under Labour, all children including pre school children were seen and therapy put in place. Now she said and this was 2019 they are unable to see pre school at all and are bearly seeing or giving therapy to children needing ehcp , and I'm sure that has now made even worse since lockdown! Goverment cutting the funds for SEN are going to have a knock effect on the children who need to be seen, if they are not getting into specialist provision and bearly getting through at mainstream is it any wonder that their ability levels are so low!

They said they were happy for them to stand because “they’d been robustly challenged so they are minded to let them stand, when I reported some of the horrendous ones, which I find awful tbh

@Naptrappedmummy because we have great medical care to avoid miscarriages and help premature babies survive. Infant mortality too is drastically improving all the time. Babies born before the 24 week abortion limit can survive. Most of these children will develop mild to moderate to severe sen needs.

That will account for some of it, but I’m sure if every excess case had been premature they would have made that link by now?

Genuinely wonder if Mumsnet would act if there was group action taken against them for it.

I'm not advocating for that or saying I want it, but I do want to shake acquaintances who never seem to be able to see the problem even when its blatant.

Genetic sequencing is also picking up a lot these days.

For example, my daughter was not premature but by 24 months, we were fairly certain of neurodivergency as she had lost any words she had acquired by that point.

They did a microarray and discovered she has Tanc2 Syndrome, which explained literally everything. Turns out so do I.

The diagnoses are a result of multiple factors. Its rarely as simple as ''bad parenting''.

I wanted to add my daughter had a Educational psychologist ,speech and language therapist and occupation therapist input into her EHCP the document that shows Legally what the school needs to provide , we had all three input and report made, which inputted the ehcp. Talking to 2 school mum friends who children are at mainstream now and both have ehcps , they didn't have any of the 3 professionals involved or reports. So the ehcp doesn't even contain the correct support in mainstream! Schools are not trained particularly well in speical needs. So they are muddling along trying to support the children who usually should really be in special provision anyway it's horrendous what is happening to SEND but I guess if people genuinely think disabled children are less then then there isn't much outrage!

Well it most certainly is not bad parenting. Because to put it crudely bad parenting has been around forever, and this is a recent rise. Interesting, perhaps there’s something increasing the frequency of genetic variations.

@SpudleyLass mine wasn't meant in a negative way. More a 'once I start I won't be able to stop'. I have children who attended private special need schools.

God where to start!!!

Not least with the pathetic government creating legislation that it cannot even financially support to deliver on its duties!

Or the fact that various governments have shut down many LA specialist care homes so they have to pay £££££ more to private providers!

And yes those children who need such specialised provision their parents will have had to jump through many, many hoops just to get what they are entitled to

The whole country needs a good shake up as the infrastructure of LAs and their services are not fit for purpose!