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?

Let's rewind to when I was in school in the 80's. Cane behind the board to basically ensure you sat still and listened, big walk of over 1 mile each way to school and back each day with all of your friends, so plenty of exercise and lots of time to destress , longer playtimes, more playtimes (break morning and afternoon), proper dinner hour, lots of art, lots of music, lots of sports. Actually FUN LEARNING IN SCHOOL - project work, preparing for school plays, learning the recorder.

I think the point many are trying to make is that the needs of a big cohort of children appear to have significantly increased. I can assure you that my DC (and most of her classmates from her special school) wouldn't have coped any better or flown under the radar in the scenario you describe simply because the needs are far too obvious and severe. Even school admits that the cohort changes in the last 10 years completely as there wasn't such a big number of children with complex needs 15 years ago.

My Df is clearly dyslexic but left school before his exams with low literacy. He was labelled as naughty and spent a lot of time being caned. More severe needs were met at special schools. Also we didn't have the Internet, projectors so lessons didn't inovle 24 pages of powerpoint instructions (which is overwhelming), teachers weren't requried to ensure their lesson covered learning obejctives, do nows, interleaving, blended learning, independent tasks, their two vocab, challenge for the more able and talented, deep questioning, formative assessment, plenery's and much more..... it's too much. Kids go from one all singing all dancing lesson to the next and they are exhausted. Also video games, 24hr streaming of anything you want to watch, the whole internet, their own mobile devices. Kids are overestimated and unimpressed by education. I remember it being very exciting when they wheeled the TV out at school or the textbook had a colour photo. Nowadays, many kids aren't interested in anything unless it's inane rubbish on tik tok and they don't have the attention span to focus. They just sit there like zombies saying 'what do I write'.

Apologies - since this thread has gone the way of many others (ie with a few posters focusing on non-speaking autistics), I was talking about those in terms of the numbers. Should've made that clear.

I thought evidence from countries where prenatal genetic screening is commonplace for e.g. Down’s syndrome reveal that actually fewer children are being born with severe genetic abnormalities, as women choose to abort?

I don’t buy that there are more children with difficulties in the public view because previously they were hidden away. I don’t think anyone has given any data to support that, and we aren’t talking about the 1950s, we’re talking about the 1990s.

I do think we should be looking closely at the quality of parenting. You can’t deny that screen time for babies and young children has massively increased over the past 20 years, and we need to either rule that out or understand the effects properly.

I also think we are seeing the results of genetic damage from lifestyle factors from the 1940s-1960s, where smoking and exposure to other chemicals were much more common. Don’t forget that your eggs were made whilst your mum was pregnant with you, as women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have. Which means the eggs that made my children were made when my grandmother was pregnant with my mum.

I do think that more is diagnosed, rather than more existing now. Even back in the 90s, Autism "didn't exist" for girls. Dyslexia wasn't believed to exist by many teachers and those who were were very advanced with their studies, but had no social skills were just Nerds rather than people with autistic traits.

But this doesn’t explain the huge number of preverbal kids starting school currently. We didn’t miss those kids.

I feel like I sound like I’m some kind of conspiracy theorist saying it but I agree there’s no clear data to back up what we’re all saying at the moment which is weird. I’ll admit it’s mainly anecdotal but when every single person who works in schools and healthcare is reporting the same we’ve got to start listening. Part of my work includes visiting schools and nurseries and part of my work includes supporting the ASD diagnostic service and every one of my colleagues is seeing this increase and talking about it. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this is the year the nhs/ government start to notice this and start to act on it at a higher level.

Ah sorry @ntmdino
I’m guessing that will be hard to study as an ASD diagnosis code in records won’t indicate non-verbal children.

@Sometimesnot and @BillStickersIsInnocent - I don't really have the resources (or even the first idea of how to look!), but it strikes me that the only source of such numbers will be the money...which is to say, looking at a combination of disability benefits now (and possibly back then), and funding for long-term residential/mental hospital care back in the day.

If anybody has the enthusiasm to go looking, I'm guessing that'll be the only way it can be quantified.

The major problem, though, will be the gargantuan scale of misdiagnosis when you go back more than 10-15 years (which will only increase the further back you go). There would have to be a lot of guesswork and supposition involved, with an appropriate margin of error applied.

And even if it did it wouldn’t be particularly meaningful as these days children who might have been diagnosed with ‘severe learning difficulties’ 20 years ago are now also diagnosed with autism. So if you could evidence it the data would be skewed.

Is the increase in numbers unique to the UK, or is it global? Confined to Europe, or western countries?

I have ADHD and ASD. The former diagnosed aged 3... But in the 80s you either had to be on high medication or muddle through. If you were academically able you just ended up as the odd (and often bullied) kid. We now have a wider range of support available and better diagnostics.

My little boy almost certainly has ADHD and ASD. At the moment this is not a real issue for him. But with the increasing focus on going back to very strict ways in secondary school, I worry about how he will cope in a few years time. He is bright, loves learning but would struggle with overly rigid 'pointless' rules and punishments. Being put in isolation would cause him problems, especially if it were a punishment for something minor like not taking his coat off before he got in the building, or wearing comfortable black trainers instead of black leather shoes -- these examples commonly coming up on threads about secondary schools.

I seem to recall reading an article a while back which suggested that the diagnosed population in the UK was higher than in other countries, and that difference was statistically significant. I don't remember the actual numbers, but it was on the order of double (think 3-4%, as opposed to 1-2%).

Genetic screening isn't available for many chromosomal abnormalities or. Rather it is but it isn't generally offered to pregnant women
My sons rare chromosome disorder was picked up.on a micro array blood test when he was four
And even if it had Been discovered prenatally there.is no.way of knowing how much this going to.impact someone until .they start developing.

Exactly. Its the same at my sons special school.,these are children who are. mainly non verbal or very little functional language. and have a diagnosis of severe or profound learning disabilities as well as often autism.

They do still.have. special school, s my son goes to one ,obviously the. terminology has changed but it is far from.barbaric
What would be barbaric would be placing my son in a mainstream school.

I know of one special school who had to make changes to their sixth form common room as those attending the school now were far more profoundly disabled than than in the past. Partly it's because the more able are now being forced into main stream schools (not necessarily best for them) and that those who were more profoundly disabled are surviving longer due to advances in medical care.

Until fairly recently my area experienced a small baby boom. There were lots of bulge classes, schools increasing PAN etc. At the same time, SEN school places were reduced. No bulge classes or increase in PAN. So even if the prevelence of non verbal remained the same at, say, 1%. 1% of a bulge cohort is more children. They would head to mainstream as there were no other places. At a reception level the boom has ended now, but I think we are still getting more non verbal children in mainstream - but i am not sure.

As an aside there was a period when the 2 year health check was scrapped. This check was essential at picking up language difficulties and getting SaLT in at a key devdlopment stage. I dont know if they brought it back in.

Several factors in play here.
When I left teacher training college, (when dinosaurs roamed the earth.....) one of my friends (still in touch), a very talented teacher, landed what was in effect a deputy headship, unheard of so early in anyone's career! The reason was that she went to work in special education, in an institution that, until a recent change in legislation, had not been classified as a school.
Some very outdated terminology here, certainly hasn't been used for years, but below a certain ability level, children could be regarded as under the health system rather than the education system.
The staff who took care of them were nurses rather than teachers, and their remit was to care for their physical needs and keep them happy and occupied, which they did admirably; learning expectations barely came into the equation.
My friend's brief was to encourage a set-up which was more like a school, and to raise expectations of what should be expected of the children.
Another factor is the survival of vulnerable children who would, sadly, not have reached school age in earlier times. I read the autobiography of a lady, now in her nineties, who was born and raised in the East End of London. She recalled the birth of a younger brother who was "poorly"; her mother was told to treat him kindly, as he would not thrive, and he lived for about a year before this sad prediction came true. Nowadays, there would doubtless be medical interventions to keep him alive, but he would have lived with lifelong additional needs.
As for autism; I really not that old (!), but I can remember this being mentioned as a condition which was just beginning to be recognised when I was in my teens; certainly not a factor to be considered during my teacher training, It certainly existed, and in retrospect, I can think , made sense of some situations.
A saying penned by Victoria Wood and spoken by Thora Hird in one of her dramas:
"We didn't have special needs in my day, you sat at the back and did raffia work!"

There are so many reasons. I think part of it is that more people with SEN are meeting each other and having children when before they weren't. More children are surviving. Not just premature babies and "failure to thrive" babies but I'm sure my ds3 who has adhd wouldn't have made it in the days when children weren't supervised like they are now. Also (and this is of course a good thing) there isn't the shame in having SEN that there used to be. My in-laws are proud that dh made it to adulthood with no diagnosis but now parents are desperate to get a diagnosis for their child. I'm not sure about the increase in children with more severe learning disabilities. Maybe that's mainly due to babies surviving when they wouldn't have before.

Ninety years ago we did not have antibiotics in the UK. Nobody is talking about that long ago. But about an increase in complex disabilities in the last 10 to 20 years.

"At school entry, approximately two children in every class of 30 pupils will experience language disorder severe enough to hinder academic progress."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082564/

"It is currently estimated that about 30% of children with autism spectrum disorder remain minimally verbal, even after receiving years of interventions and a range of educational opportunities. "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3869868/

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?

I certainly have access to that sort of evidence for my LA, Of course, I would not be able to share it on here, but my point is, the data is there and would be very easy to draw down if the Government wanted to (and I presume in other LAs and I presume on Health systems too). The fact of the matter is it isn't in any Government or LA's interest to collate and share it as it will highlight how many dc are being let down.
Bit like the fact that waiting for 4 - 18 hours in an ambulance outside A&E to even get in to the hospital (despite the highly skilled paramedic having decided that's where you need to be) is an anecdote lots of people can share. The fact it hasn't been collated Nationally, peer reviewed, and published somewhere the public can access it, doesn't mean it isn't happening day after day, week after week at hospitals around the Country. We've gone from being able to expect an ambulance within 8 minutes in my HA, to 'you'll be lucky to get one within 4 hours'.
None of the dc I was teaching in Special school 20 - 25 years ago would even get an assessment for an EHCP in my authority at the moment, let alone specialist provision.

@UsingChangeofName - that's quite interesting. I kind of assumed that might be the case, hence thinking of ways to infer it (like following the money, which should be available).

The obvious thing to do would be to try to figure out the right questions to ask, and submit a Freedom of Information request to force it out of them on aggregate.