More SEN, better diagnosis, lack of funding or a combination?

[genuinequestion235]

Genuine question:

I read a lot of threads on here relating to poor provisions and support for children with SEN. When I was a child I don't remember many children with SEN (3 spring to mind in my school of 200!)

So do people think more children have SEN needs? Or are we simply better at diagnosing?

When I think back to my last year of primary school, we had one kid in the whole school diagnosed with dyslexia, plus one with complex delays.

In hindsight, in my class of 30 there were at least three classic ASD including me, possibly two more, one unbelievably obvious ADHD, and probably a global developmental delay.

I know that teacher was given the tough kids at both ends of the spectrum, but there were only seven classes in the whole junior school so that's a pretty high proportion.

(And yes, I am an expert, but it is a guess based on memory).

I've been a SENCo for nearly 20 years. We are absolutely better at identifying young people with needs, my own ADHD was missed when I was younger and I have been diagnosis as an adult- so much of my childhood makes much more sense now looking back.

However it's undeniable that the number of pupils with complex needs has increased exponentially. I teach in a 2-form entry school, 5 years ago we had about 2% of our pupils with EHCPs, now it's over 6%. We had 7 pre-verbal children start our nursery this year, I have a further 9 pre-verbal children in reception and a few more in KS1. All would have been in specialist provision 5 years ago, now there are no spaces so they have to stay in mainstream. In the past our pre-verbal children would have moved over to specialist provision as soon as their EHCPs came in.

Societal change and better diagnosis and recognition. Life is very fast and over stimulating. Sensory and information overload. It’s difficult to find peace and space to just be This is so true.
These kids weren't just the quite kid in the back, they were also the disruptive kid and and the one that couldn't learn and the class clown and the kid that went home and melted down because they masked in public.

I cant speak for other SEN, but with NDs like ADHD and Autism a lot of it is better diagnoses. Women especially due to masking flew under the radar and still do, but to a lesser extent.

I know a lot of people whose kids are ND, mostly Autistic, some with ADHD and some with both. Most of these kids have at least one parent who is ND, the vast majority of these parents don't have and can't afford to get an official diagnosis. My DC are all Autistic. In the previous generation XH and I both have siblings that were Autistic and undiagnosed. I probably have ADHD. So that makes 3 in the last generation who are ND and 3 in the current generation. Officially we have no ND people in my generation and 3 in my DCs generation.

My DC would have all flown under the radar. They're all very smart, do well at school, mask well, not disruptive, not obviously Autistic. Infact my DC are all less noticeably ND then my undiagnosed brother.

Um excuse me, I do NOT want to say that because it is NOT what I think. Why are you assuming I do?

Who knows what the cause is - environmental, perinatal, de novo mutations which are suddenly much more common. But what I do know is that this specific profile is much much much more common than it used to be, and therefore there must be something behind it. And I’ve never once said it is due to parenting (because there have always been crap parents, so that disproves that one).

The right to an education if you had learning difficulties only came about in the 1970’s. Before this you could be deemed ‘ineducable’ and therefore denied a place at school. It was only in the early 1980’s that children with SEN had the right to a mainstream education. When I started teaching I taught adults with learning disabilities who had been released from the long stay institutions. Many had been placed at 5 and were now in their 40’s or older. Some of the staff from the institutions had been transferred to the day centre where I was teaching. They recalled that the children would be placed in a room with no toys or any activities, apart from a TV in a box, high on the wall. They would be left there all day. Those who we would say had profound and multiple disabilities were called ‘the babies’. They were wheeled out to a covered balcony and left there most of the day. If you can bear it there is a documentary on YouTube, made by ITV called ‘the silent minority’ I think it was made in 1981. It’s a very hard watch but it tells you where the children we now see in school were. One of my students who was kept at home by their parents rather than placed, remembered being called out by the headteacher in primary school, and being told he could not come to school anymore, he was in his 50’s when he told me, and still very upset by the memory. This was because he had a learning disability. I think it’s really important to remember what we (who may be lucky enough not to have cognitive difficulties) did to those who did, and why we did not see them when we were at school.

Then you're ignoring the obvious.

Children like my daughter are not "exponentially more common" - it's just that we're in now a country which is slashing all specialist provision so more are seen in mainstream.

Oh and people love to blame the parents.

Less support is given so needs increase and for longer.

Its not a conspiracy. Social media exposure, no support, better diagnostics, more ND coupling all have their parts to play.
ThThese children have always existed. It's absurd to think otherwise.

I can’t take this further as you’re now arguing against a narrative that isn’t even real.

Half a century ago children with SEN were put into different schools called ESN schools (Educationally Sub Normal). Seems barbaric.

They were not hidden at home, they were often 'put out of their misery' at birth which just would not happen now, or institutionalised and the family did not talk about it. Ever, especially to siblings. A parent might visit or not.

Very very different to the other extreme we have now of many telling siblings of stillbirths or even late miscarriages and remembering yearly as part of the family.

They were, but that doesn’t explain the increase from the 90s/ 00s and even early 2010s to now. Growing up in the 90s I knew 1 severely autistic kid who was sent out of county. But now at work I meet multiple kids like him in mainstream every week. Sometimes several I’m one mainstream reception class. There’s absolutely no way there was the number we see now but kept out of public sight.

Meanwhile the complex needs schools near me are having to constantly expand their preverbal autism classes to not even close to meet demand.

The last long stay institution for those with learning disabilities closed in 2009. It was called Orchard Hill. Watch ‘The Silent Minority’ ITV documentary from 1981 on YouTube. Yes the children were absolutely being hidden in the 1980’s.

And the autism scandal is still happening in care homes now, by another name. For those with profound needs.

This is it. Of course there were institutions, but nothing like the number needed to hide the number of disabled children we see now. There are more special schools now than ever before as @x2boys said and yet the overspill into mainstream is huge.

Every teacher and early years professional I have spoken to about this says the number of children with non verbal ASD is skyrocketing. I don’t know why it is seen as unpalatable to state the truth. Only by acknowledging the issue and getting to grips with the scale of it can force the government to do something in terms of provision and finding out why this is happening.

Exactly. It’s such a clear and undeniable increase yet people are still denying it. Denying it isn’t going to help support get put in place. We need better diagnostic pathways, more specialist schools, more training and time for staff supporting these kids in mainstream and to start looking into why this is happening so we can help prevent this crisis worsening.

I wonder if it’s unpalatable for some posters because of Andrew Wakefield etc and it therefore (rightfully) now seeming controversial to say something is increasing the prevalence of autism. While we now know it’s not vaccines there are definitely other factors causing this increase.

This is what I see.

Every teacher and early years professional I have spoken to about this says the number of children with non verbal ASD is skyrocketing. I don’t know why it is seen as unpalatable to state the truth. Only by acknowledging the issue and getting to grips with the scale of it can force the government to do something in terms of provision and finding out why this is happening.

and I agree completely with this.

Environment
Dna changes
Smoking.
Overweight parents
Inherited

Smoking grandmothers can increase asd in gc.
But logically they are also more likelt to have adhd too

Both sides have a very heavy smoker in. .

The last generation a lot more have gone to uni dividing into grads and non grads.

Possbly pairing up adhd/adhd people and others into asd/asdcouples

Actually bil is very hyper too and his dad smoked a lot!

If it is obesity causing some of the increase and parental age thats going to be very bad news...

I guess there's no selection anymore as we have become so technologically advanced.
What about egg donor children, do we yet know any effects of being in the womb of a different mother / people with 3 parents genetically?

It seems as well autism is an umbrella term, as is adhd, for probably many many different genetic variations.

Def the Internet plus changing social attitudes mean more babies of nd couples so much protection of recessive genes likely gone increasing severity.

Age of parents causing new, maybe as yet unknown, conditions due to egg deterioration or low quality sperm replication.

As well as chemicals in upf food and the water, plus sweeteners, we have no idea of the long term effects we haven't been using them long enough.

The smoking argument doesn’t even make sense. Surely less people smoke in every successive generation, so ASD would have peaked in about the 1930s?

With adhd some kids can sit still in a quiet calm environment where they are working by themself. So more old fashioned classrooms
Put the same child next to a friend where friend and other kids messing about and -- mayhem.

Expectations to work through pages of math quickly for eg.

When i was at school 80-90 there was obviously tv but
Only certain times of day was kids prog. I didnt have own tv. My dad had tv from maybe 6:30 on. And from sat afternoon.

And yes obviously no out of school activities. I didnt even go out with mates as school far away.

Better awareness and diagnosis is certainly a huge factor - I’ve no doubt that there are many adults who should have been identified as ND when they were younger but were probably just labelled quiet, naughty, awkward, difficult, whatever. However, I work in early years and there is no doubt that over the last 15 years my colleagues and myself have witnessed a rapid rise in children with additional needs. It’s definitely occurring more and I’ve spoken to medical professionals who say the same. I’m really not sure what could be causing it. We have certainly reached the stage in our setting where ND outnumbers NT.

That is interesting about the increase in non verbal children with ASD. I am aware personally of three friends with young children with this.
Is there any decent research that says why this might be?

I do remember watching a programme years ago about medical advances happening that meant that babies born under 28 weeks could now survive. Whereas before babies under 28 weeks surviving were miracle babies as it was so rare. The programme said that many, although not all of these babies would be left with some kind of SN as a result of being born so early.

As a child I knew every single family in our street and most of the families in the few streets nearby. By knew I mean I knew the name of everyone who lived there and often a bit about them. There was not one single child hidden at home.
As a teenager I worked with children with complex needs. All were in special schools, none were hidden at home, even those who were non verbal as teenagers.
There was a ward in the local mental hospital where a lot of these children went for respite and a tiny number of children lived there full time. But the vast majority were at home and attending special schools. This was in the late eighties.
Eighties and nineties saw the closure of the old institutions and children were moved out of them. My DP worked as a support worker in the 90s within a house where adults who had lived in institutions now lived. These were people who could never manage to live independently. The houses where in ordinary streets, they were not hidden away by the early nineties.

OK, cards on the table: a big part of the reason I'm sceptical is that nobody in the thread (thus far) has actually shown trustworthy numbers detailing the scale of this "increase". It's just a hand-wavey "I've seen..." and that's it - it's all anecdotal.

I couldn't find anything useful on Google, either.

Does anybody have anything concrete?

This review suggests an increase in prevalence but attributes it to changes in diagnostic criteria and methodology of the studies it reviewed.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=increase+in+autism+prevalence&oq=increase+in+autis#d=gs_qabs&t=1704696606389&u=%23p%3DmJKrzguLtpkJ