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.

I would imagine that the largest cost of educating / caring for children with the highest needs is staffing.

Providing constant 2-1 or 3-1 care is very expensive. You probably need 9-10 staff to cover 2-1 24/7, perhaps even more to cover sickness etc. Of course many children will spend a lot of time at home but there are small numbers where that really isn't possible / desirable.

Many of those staff won't be well paid as it is. At least some need to have some level of teaching experience / specialist skills in order to actually provide an education.

If you try to cut your staffing bill an obvious way is to reduce the ratio. That probably puts your staff and / or the child in question at risk and may mean that you simply can't recruit for the roles. I don't think 2-1 / 3-1 rations are generally provided unless that is really required in order to keep everyone safe and it is extremely rare for 24/7 care to be provided at school.

Of course staffing isn't an absolute cost to the government. It creates jobs and staff pay taxes, which feed back into the system.

A second cost for some children will be specialist equipment and / or adaptions to buildings so that they can access it. The issue with this is that much of the technology / adaptions will be bespoke, which makes it expensive. If everyone needed a specialist wheelchair they would be relatively cheap but anything you are making for a small market is expensive. I think the cost of some assistive technologies is falling as they are used in the mainstream in smart phones etc. e.g. eye tracking technology.

There may be some discretionary spending e.g. do you provide a swimming pool which all children at a special school can access. You can provide an education without it. But the swimming pool only really provides for disabled children what other children would get anyway and may be of higher benefit to the disabled children e.g. because of the health benefits or because they cannot access other local pools. The special schools near me rent out their facilities as much as they can for classes and so on.

I'm sure there are inefficiencies and maybe it would be preferable for local councils or the government to provide more special school places than to rely on the private sector (though using the private sector sometimes seems to be more cost effective overall for the government even where individual cases look to be very expensive). Maybe placements for very high needs children should be centrally funded, so you don't get a situation where some the budgets Local Authorities are really affected by having to fund them, which incentivises litigation to try to reduce the cost.

But overall I doubt that special schools are spending most of their money on nice to have extras without which they could still provide a reasonable education. In my experience, a lot of the "extras" e.g. trips to local attractions or special technology is funded by charities or donors or local businesses etc.

So you'd be happy to refuse a double amputee a wheelchair because crutches are cheaper? Would you also be happy to refuse treatment to a stage 3/4 cancer patient because its too expensive and might not be life saving anyway? Because that's exactly what you are saying for disabled children.

I think education needs more money and funding. How do we get this? Well the UK has low productivity and skill shortages and I think that starts from school. We should invest in bright students far more, get more people working in high paying jobs or creating businesses and thus we have more tax money to spend on SEN. Of course this is a very slow solution (and just one part of the solution), not an instant fix.

Hopefully they’ve also run stories on the counties number oh parents who struggle to get the most basic adjustments for their children with SEN, ending up with many mental health issues, etc 🙄

Would you also be happy to refuse treatment to a stage 3/4 cancer patient because its too expensive and might not be life saving anyway?

That happens already, doesn’t it? NICE make a call on whether a particular drug is cost-effective.

I think the costs of providing SEN provision does need to be looked at - not to take any education away from those who need it, but whether there is a more cost-effective way of meeting needs than LEAs outsourcing to the private sector. I don’t think private firms should be making a profit from vulnerable children.

The casual eugenics in this thread is sickening.

You'd think so - but that is true for a lot of what they do. The plan seems to be to funnel as much money to their rich mates as possible and who cares about having a functioning society.

Councils are going bankrupt, thresholds for care and support are constantly being raised, social care and NHS are on their knees - and they're not even keeping the police on side (which Thatcher at least had the sense to do), it's a complete shit show, and I'm not even convinced they're going to lose the next election, or that if they do it will make much difference.

@EilonwyWithRedGoldHair theres no doubt they’re wasting money and funnelling it off in the way you describe but how much is actually being lost to this? A fair amount of course, but enough to run the country the way some of the posters here describe? It isn’t a cut and dried situation, if they stopped siphoning money off we would have more. But not I suspect enough for 5* public services and social housing across the board. Even countries with much lower rates of corruption, high tax and a small population can’t really manage it.

This is such poor economic planning. Giving the right support means, for a lot of children with SEN, the difference between being self-sufficient and a net contributor to the economy in adulthood, and being fully dependent on benefits. On that basis, providing an adequate education with the right support is an incredibly good investment. Down the line, those children left unsupported in unsuitable schools will cost much, much more than the council is currently saving.

The Senior Education Officer you quote is an idiot. Parents are not asking for Rolls Royces. They are simply asking for what their children need in order to achieve their potential, which in turn is in the interests of society as a whole.

No, it isn't fair that ask children with SEN don't receive optimum support and education. It is however highly unlikely that they have "exactly the same EHCPs". The reality is that councils short-change children by writing poor quality, vague EHCPs that guarantee nothing and therefore mean that virtually any school, no matter how poor, can claim to be able to deliver on their requirements. Pupils in good quality provision tend to have much better-written EHCPs that specify precisely what they need, which in turn means that LAs can't just shunt them into any school but have to find one that is able to deliver on that.

Yes, more knowledgeable parents manage to achieve that by securing good quality evidence and, when necessary, going to the Tribunal. It shouldn't be necessary to do that. However, don't blame parents for using the resources available. Instead, you need to put the blame where it should lie, at the doors of LAs that try to save money by throwing disabled and vulnerable children under the bus; and at the doors of this government, for failing to fund LAs adequately.

@LolaSmiles that doesn’t really answer what I said though. Do you believe there should be a cap, or theoretically should we just spend whatever is needed? If so which other budgets should be reduced to meet this need? Knowing there is a finite amount of money and that all spending must have limits isn’t the same as thinking people are undeserving

I think we should spend what is required to ensure that children get the education they are legally entitled to because the alternative is that we adopt the position that some on this thread have alluded to where as a society we decide it's acceptable to write off children for having special needs and disabilities. After all, there's only so much money so it's not that big a deal for some children with SEND to not be suitably educated.

When we start adopting the position that some children are less deserving of their right to a suitable education that's a terrifying road to go down.

My point is that if lower tier services were available and children/families could get the support they need early on, and there was proper investment

I don't buy the idea that the choices are a spiralling bill on private providers or capping education and ensuring some children don't get educated in the name of finances.

Does everyone on this thread realise it's trending on Twitter??

@Anisette I am not blaming parents.... I am that parent.

Surgery/chemo might be refused. Just like mainstream school might be refused for a child with severe SEN.

But treatment is not refused. And it is appropriate to the needs of the patient e.g. pain medication, hospice or home care, community nursing, anti-sickness medication...
Healthcare is accessible to everyone.
Education must be accessible to everyone too.

Mainstream refused to child with sen???? I would argue that special needs school is majority refused for children that desperately need them! LAs will rather have SN children in mainstream it's cheaper than special school

Illegal expulsion of children with SEN? (Usually because mainstream was always detrimental to the child in the first place directly causing escalation of behaviour)

Or parents forced to give up work and home school because of unsuitable provision?

Or councils failing to provide a specialist place for a child leaving them in limbo for months/years on end until a place becomes available.

But yes, there is a massive problem with specialist provision being refused too.

@Mumsnet WHY is this thread not being managed? This is utterly appalling.

Mainstream refused to have my child. In fact he went for a year with no education at all whilst he waited for a suitable placement. There are lots of children recieving no education at all - stats vary but it is normally around 1 to 2k at any point.
Its amazing how many people felt that was ok when it happened to us.

But the comparison was that refusing mainstream school would be the right action for the child in the article, just life refusing surgery may be the right action for a terminal patient. The patient still has a treatment plan though, appropriate to their needs. Just like every child with a EHC plan requires health care and education appropriate to their needs.

Over the last 13 years the Tories have cut funding to pretty much everything, arguing that we can't afford it and need to make tough choices.

As a result we are (as a country) sicker, poorer and less able to work.

Our productivity growth has tanked and the economy has flatlined.

That money 'saved' hasn't been saved at all - it's just prevented us from making money.

It's like forcing a cleaner to save money by selling her vacuum - sure she might get a couple of hundred quid cash now, but she's going to find it much harder to make money from then on.

That's the real, infuriating tragedy of austerity. All those libraries and children's centres closed, all those cuts to SEN funding and adult social care, all those road and rail projects stalled, all those houses not built and buses cancelled and playgrounds run down and LAs starved of money. All that suffering and wasted potential.

It was all for nothing. All a complete fucking waste of time.

YANBU OP

DoubleShotEspresso
They took it out of Active and Trending I think but said that the debate was being managed and challenged by users.

This has happened to us. When my DD finally gets to attend her new special school full time in January, it will have been over a year since she has been out of school.

No mainstream will touch her because of her needs.

So she went without and I stayed at home. My mental health is so far down the drain, I'm basically just trying to get through each day without hurting myself or lashing out at others.