To be so angry that people like this are in charge of SEND budgets

[Dalmatron]

Has anyone seen the thread on twitter/X about the Warwickshire Councillors at the scrutiny panel for SEND spending?

I am so angry!

Some quotes:
(Talking about institutions) "They had better ways of dealing with them at that time. Let's go back to those ways"
"I don't know what the fix is, I just look back at years gone by those people by whatever means, it was right at the time".
"Is it something in the water?"
"Families are swapping tips to get diagnosed"
"Why are there so many people jumping out with these needs? Where were they when I was at school?"
"Why do so many people have this badge of SEND and special needs?"
"To stop this spend fix the problem at source"
"the plea of a Mother saying Little Willy has ADHD when Little Willy is just really badly behaved & needs some form of strict correction"

How can people like this be in these positions? Why has nothing been done to remove them or apologise? I felt sick watching these clips.

Warwickshire Council thread

NRTFT but ASD in girls has only recently been recognised with distinct diagnostic differences. Going back to the ‘old ways’ (in the words of councillor Brian Hammersley) for many girls who went undiagnosed, those old ways would include forced electric shock treatment, being hit or physically threatened by adults to comply, or if deemed bad enough (or families could afford it), being sent to a secure public or private institution. The royal family pretended their institutionalized disabled girls were dead and removed them from record. Look up the Bowes Lyon cousins. Perhaps the eminent Cllr would prefer that for our children.

If anyone would like to send Cllr Brian Hammersley a polite reminder that we’ve moved on nowadays he can be contacted at his office here.

[email protected]

These people have jobs as public servants and are required to abide by statutory laws regarding education provision. Whatever their (revolting) personal opinions might be.

I did not know that @Phineyj and that is horrendous.

The schools that we keep being referred to all have 0% of their children getting GCSEs above old-money grade C. These are specialist schools but SEMH/ASD not learning disability. Some of this is due to missing schooling for years and some due to attention difficulties and other cognitive difficulties but a lot is due to low expectations on the part of the school (and parents etc.).

I was more going with maybe upto 15 different levels of school maybe even more.

Rather than insisting that all children can simply learn this way at this rate.

You might have 10 year olds still learning with more free play as such rather than just expecting to sit at a desk, while you might have another group at the age of 10 actually building and making the things normally just taught via a book so history really is live in your face rather than a text book or a video.

Having it at different levels of say smartness in primary means you’ve not got 2 children sat in year 3 still barely reading while 10 peers are free readers and others are in the middle. The schools for those further behind or slower however you wish to word it would have more support for catching them up and teaching to their level rather than square peg in a round hole trying to manage 30 children all learning at such fast different rates and different ways. Those ahead could be taught higher levels rather than getting left to drifts. A true education that fits every child.

Not a baby sitting, plebs and posh. That’s partly the current system for lots of people and it doesn’t work.

That councillor was talking rubbish. The latest government statistics from 22/23 show 4.1% of pupils in Warwickshire have EHCPs.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-68212512.amp

On the BBC now.

Is he supposed to be apologising for the clumsy and archaic wording or for querying the rise of special needs in children? Is anybody actually looking into it, in any official capacity?

I can't quote the post, but re: Sen percentages. The 17.4% mentioned may well refer to the averages for all SEN in schools and maintained settings, which was 17.3% across England as of last year. @SearchingForSolitude is quite right in that the average for EHCP's is currently around 4% and you would expect to see this reflected in individual localities.

There's a summary of the data here: nasen.org.uk/news/2022-23-sen-data-released

It doesn't include pvi nursery numbers which I always think is a shame as this data would be useful and also interesting to track from the perspective of my job role.

@erniesmilkcart you can see the EHCP data for non-maintained early years settings here. You can edit the parameters to look at only non-maintained early years establishments and specific LAs.

I would think he should apologise for being rude and poorly informed, whatever the subject matter.

I can't imagine anyone in government is looking into SEN, because there is such an obvious link with the cutbacks to every form of early intervention and support, along with the increased levels of stress and poverty and the state of school funding and buildings.

And no government would want to admit they've turned a blind eye to large scale law breaking by the LAs they fund with taxpayers' money.

Maybe some thinktanks are investigating though.

Actually the best bet for serious investigating would probably be the OECD or Unicef etc. More neutral. Useful to know if this is a general developed country trend too.

I don't believe it is more diagnosis. As a teacherbfor over 10 years the volume of very high needs is massively increasing in the early years. Schools in my area that might have had one child needing very bespoke support and an ehcp are no seeing 5 or more per class. Nurture units left right and centre as these are children who can not cope in a mainstream classroom. They need highly qualified practitioners and proper resources but it is really variable as schools can't get staff or pay for the ratios needed. The councillors are awful but the rise in SEND can't be ignored and it is more than a now and next board and an understanding teacher.

Sorry the article says 1 in 9 with a disability, thats according to official figures so I assume government stats.

There was a report on school readiness

https://kindredsquared.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Kindred-Squared-School-Readiness-Report-2022.pdf

on page 17 there are percentages presented for what parents think they are wholly responsible for.

Only 60% of parents thought it was wholly their responsibility to toilet train their kids
Only 40% thought it was wholly their responsibility to make sure their kids could eat independently
Only 26% thought basic language skills was wholly their responsibility

and so on

I mean it’s not surprising that children appear to be delayed when they start school if so many parents don’t think that the very basics of parenting are their responsibility. There are going to be some kids who with minimal effort from their own parents would have never had any issues starting reception. Sorry to be blunt but it’s shit for kids who should have been taken care of properly and it’s shit for kids with ND who need the resources available.

Just done a very rough calculation based on last years figures and in my LA I make the % EHCPs as just under 8% of school population so 4% ish in Warwickshire is waaaay less than lots of LAs!

You know what I’ve just watched it. Totally disgusting, they should lose their jobs. The utter ignorance and pure nastiness.

Does anybody have the link to the petition?

It’s interesting that so many teachers/EPs are saying this is definitely the case and can’t be put down to more recognition of SEN. So many of my teaching friends say the same too. Do you have ideas as to why it might be? And if it’s at such levels in a relatively short space of time it’s really quite scandalous not to look into it.

Its a councillor isn’t it? Elected by public vote, he’s not a salaried employee.

What I’ve noticed is that an awful lot of early years parenting is ‘child led’ now. Parents seem to have a view that things will happen organically when the child is ready, rather than actively teaching them things. I saw a post not too long ago where the mum of a 3 year old was pondering delaying school because her child is still in nappies and has a dummy. So rather than work on ditching the dummy and toilet training, her answer was simply to delay school for another year.

I toured a nursery yesterday for DS and they said they bring in outside agencies to work on school readiness as so many of the children reach 4 without being able to put on their own shoes or use the toilet.

Unless you are working from more up to date statistics that have been released at a local level your LA won’t have 8% of DC with EHCPs. The most recent gov data is from 22/23 and, according to that, the LA with the highest % of EHCPs is Torbay at 6.2%.

It's not something that needs investigating because the cause is known.

In the 1960s, average life expectancy with down syndrome was 10. Now it's 47. That's a lot more support needed.

Similar is true of many other conditions and syndromes. Many children with high needs have complex medicine conditions and would not have survived infancy if they had been born in the 80s.

Seriously though.. 1 in 9 kids classed as disabled?! The councillor who asked if there was something in the water might actually have a point albeit it was a clumsy way of putting it. If we really have 1 in 9 kids disabled then something is very, very wrong. Is it our diet? The environment? Or and I know I am going to get shouted down for this - is there a financial incentive, are some kids just badly parented in SOME cases. . I don’t believe we have that many disabled children. We can’t carry on like this and not ask questions. I also don’t want to go back to institutions and kids being punished because they don’t ’fit In’ but something is not right.

How so? Please enlighten us.

The figure was 5545 at November 23 which was released at some sort of tribunal where LA were taken to task. School age children approx 78,000 of which approx 70,000 are in state run or funded schools. So somewhere between 7-8% is that right ? Does seem high but then they are saying they’ve had a massive increase in a short space of time.

Obviously SAHM Mums carried the load instead of asking for outside help.

Trying to find out the cause of something is a different matter to meeting the needs of children who are already here.

That's the distasteful part.

I mean imagine we found out today that playing Roblox caused SEN (to give a ridiculous example).

Would that solve school funding falling in real terms, lack of teachers, lack of support staff, huge waiting lists for a variety of relevant services (diagnostic, therapeutic), poverty, austerity, councils spending millions on lawyers so as not to have to meet their legal obligations, etcetera?

Look at the potholes in the roads.

We have got similar potholes in the health and education system.

It's easy (and cheap) to blame parents, but this is systemic.