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

@earlyfeb24.. Same. My dc needed very small adjustments which is what has made this so shocking for me and the impact those little changes made.

But we had to fight for them and rely on the kindness of some very special teachers.

Ive seen a theory regarding the rise of severe ASD: something along the lines that ASD runs in families but can also intensify as it travels down the generations.
Also that now with more people meeting their partners at university or online there are more neurodiverse pairings (I guess in the past some neuro diverse people wood struggle to find a like minded person in the local area so wouldn’t be having children) leading to a greater chance of inherited ASD etc.
Ive worded that clumsily but I hope you get the gist.
There is also an increase in severe disabilities due to survival of very premature babies. These children need an incredible amount of care which is extremely expensive.

I think the knowledge is there now and the ASD / ADHD kids that would have slipped through the net and been seen as anxious, depressed, odd etc are getting diagnosed.

We have information at our fingertips that just wasn't available then. We can Google and it's all there and we can push or pay for an assessment to get an answer. Parenting wasn't like that years ago.

When I was a kid, if I'd wrecked my room when I was overwhelemed and had toddler style tantrums I'd have got bounced off every wall in the house and i knew it. When DD started doing that, I didn't rattle her arse or shout, I found out why, made adjustments, helped and advocated for her.

Parenting has changed and the world has changed. These MP's need to bloody change too.

I don't think anyone knows for sure. My husband is a total extrovert. You couldn't meet someone further away from having socail struggles. I think I could be diagnosed. We certainly don't make great genetic soup either way.

This a really interesting thread and I will be bearing it in mind at election time. There loads of waste in the system by its failing at early intervention and with LAs spending so much time and professional energy fighting off parents who are just looking for help for their kids. It’s in the interests of everyone at MS schools not to leave these kids so unsupported. It’s really depressing as a parent just coming into this.

But we have to keep SEN to a proportion that it is supportable by the rest of the population.

If 3% have SEN (for example) that’s manageable. If 20% do, not so much.

It feels grubby saying it but money makes the world go round. Councils are facing bankruptcy because of the spiralling costs of SEN. That will have knock on effects on entire cities.

I wish we could just implement a system purely according to need, but life just isn’t like that.

I think this is what I don't quite understand - we must be talking past each other. How are you proposing that this is done?

Do you mean that you would advocate only to offer support to the 3% with the most severe needs? What are the 17% in the middle supposed to do? Just struggle/fail - and then what?

Do you mean that we should change our schools so that 97% of children (rather than 80%) can access them, and the only children who need support are 3% (which are surely the most severely disabled)? (I think this is a wonderful idea BTW but I'd argue it's what SEN provision ought to be in the first place.)

I don't really understand what you mean by "we need to keep SEN to a certain level" - someone either needs extra support or they don't, it's not something that policy makers can just decide.

Has anybody pondered the rise of ASD in the young alongside the rise of conditions the other end of the spectrum such as Alzheimer’s in the elderly?

Whoever said those things at Warwickshire Council are as thick as mince and a bit of a twat.

It was badly worded I guess a more accurate phrase would be ‘we can only fully support it at a certain level’.

I honestly don’t think many posters on here have a grasp of the numbers when it comes to issues like this. I don’t think they realise how dire the financial situation is and how the money just isn’t there to give everyone everything.

My son has severe ASD. I have a cousin on both sides of my family diagnosed and OH a niece with it. I was only aware of one cousin having it when I had my son. Now I see definite traits in my mum and BIL too, so I didn't quite realise the risks before having him. It's one of those things where people tell you or you notice it once it's happened to you or your child. I think as the ASD population increases there might well be more of it in people's genetic make up maybe.

It wouldn't be so bad having a child with ASD if the government did their fucking jobs. I say government and not LA'S, as they are the root cause of the issue, but LAs are embarrassingly underhand and crap at their jobs too. There is a real culture in LAs of assuming that parents of SEN just collect benefits and moan a lot. They seemed shocked that I still work FT, but can't understand that it's them that prevent parents from doing so by making them fight for help and giving them endless admin (and pointless meetings where they offer no help whatsoever) and running holiday clubs to enable working in school holidays. It's impossible to have anything close to a normal life because they are so crap.

I do think we need to have a mature, adult discussion about the rise in SEND and the differences within this, and what educational needs are really the most appropriate.

DS is severe SEN and there are almost no places in specialist schools near me. I find myself battling and it seems those who can afford lawyers get the best placements.

But do I think councillors should be just bandying around these lines? No I don’t.

OK so then I would say same question.

If for example the decision was made tomorrow to only support the 3% with the highest needs - what happens to the other 14% - remember 14% of ALL school pupils. 1 in 8.

Do they stay in mainstream school but now they are unsupported so they are causing (even more) disruption to the 83% without (diagnosed) SEN?

Do you send them all home? No more school place for you. What do you do then that maybe 5-10% of the nation's parents are suddenly unable to work? That sounds like a disaster.

Do you pile them into a special school? How much does that cost?

I don't think that there is a magic money tree, but these needs exist and they will not vanish into thin air if they are not supported. They will continue to cost money whether you fund it out of a SEN budget or whether it comes from somewhere else. Yes I do think managing this budget somewhere more central might make sense, rather than leaving it up to LAs. But honestly it probably doesn't matter where the decision is being made.

As long as people have this view of children with SEN as hopeless wastes of oxygen, why is anyone bothering to educate them at all, you'll have people who see SEN funding as a waste of money.

And as long as people see SEN funding as a waste of money there will be this circular argument of "Too many people are claiming SEN status, these people didn't exist in my day, they must have coped then they can cope now".

It's like saying "Too expensive to heat the school! In Victorian times they had a single fireplace and crammed 100 pupils into one classroom. They coped then, they can cope now!" We don't expect pupils to do this, because we have moved on. Even though energy prices are incredibly expensive - it's just seen as an essential cost and the heating is kept on.

Horrific! After getting to know my local councillors, I've come to realise that anybody can be a councillor. Some of them are pretty thick! They get voted in because they are in a ward that is a firm red or blue seat, so they don't even have to prove themselves, it's a given they will be elected.
It's so frustrating that people with these outdated and disgraceful views can be in charge of anything to do with SEN. It needs reporting on in the local press. People with loved ones with SEN need to unite and be up in arms! Have you got local SEN groups you could share it with? They need to mobilise.

BTW I don't think a petition is very helpful. I don't particularly want the councillor to step down. If I had the right contacts in Warwickshire (which is my old county so maybe I do, I should ask.) I would look to invite him as a visitor to any SEN support hub so that he can meet the families that he thinks did not exist 40 years ago. I think we do better when we understand each other and I think it is a useful question to understand where the rises in things are coming from (what we know and what we don't know and what the current theories are) and what this money actually pays for.

Yes, it's fair to say oh look there is a huge overspending - are we actually spending this money wisely. I just think the automatic idea that we need to stop so many people getting SEN support is not the right answer. But I think you can't have a conversation about what should be, or how we should get there, unless everybody is on the same page of understanding about what is, now, the actual situation.

Because currently there are policymakers who assume SEN = will always be dependent on others, so educating them is a very nice/worthy thing to do but not very useful to anybody else (when the reality is that SEN covers all intellectual capabilities from low to average to high) and simultaneously seem to think that if you have any potential of independence at all, then you don't have SEN so you don't need any funding and you just have to try harder, and anyone claiming SEN when they have potential is automatically a scrounger.

Whereas the vast majority of SEN parents are saying hang on, my child could access school but they need some help/support to do that. They cannot currently access school and they are rapidly losing any potential they had because of that. And then what happens - all the expensive things I explained before.

It doesn't actually matter what your personal views are on whether or not it is valid or correct or whose responsibility it is to educate somebody who is struggling to access the education system on their own. Even if you ONLY look at the question of "what are the costs of not educating them?" you will find that it makes more sense to invest early. Or maybe our education system needs to change if only 80% can access it without support.

But I do think you have to see that "middle section" of people for whom support is more like stabilisers - a temporary measure to enable them to catch up.

But there you go again - we're not dealing with 'wants' but 'needs'! And not meeting the needs will not make them go away! What do you want us to do...shove a certain proportion into storage?!

This is a really good post. I also think "what are the costs of not doing x' is lacking in many areas of funding and/or policy. It's all about the short term and kicking things into the long grass.

https://www.ipsea.org.uk/blog/when-childrens-rights-become-demands-and-parents-get-the-blame

An important thing to remember also is that a lot of changes can happen in schools that are free! There is such a lack of understanding of SEN. I find it quite bewildering. I work in different schools and I am constantly horrified by this”we must treat everyone the same”, “how will they cope in the real wotld”. People seem to forget that the Equality Act will protect disabled people throughout their lifetime! You go to your local shopping centre and they have a “quiet hour’ to shop. My dc old primary school would pump loud music out in the playground in the morning - it was an autism resource provision! How many kids started the day off disgusted due to overwhelm. In the playground? My dc had to enter school via the office, that’s when she went to school. She was teased for being different. None of this cost money, it was just born from ignorance!

I think we agree, but I'm a bit confused by your post, is there a sentence missing in the middle?

I was reading an article about the increase in ADHD diagnosis.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/one-in-nine-children-has-a-disability-after-post-pandemic-surge-sw86m2tcw

I mean if 1 in 9 children are now experiencing a disability it does need to be looked at carefully.

It's disgusting.My eldest is disabled and I have two dcs with autism. I am sick to the stomach hearing these comments from the councillors.

Growing up my dsis had a dreadful time at school. We are mixed race and endured a lot of bullying and then she was later diagnosed with ADHD (in her thirties). Years ago people ignored the needs of children, seen but not heard. Corporal punishment- awful.

The school curriculum today probably has exposed a lot of children to anxiety. Poorly resourced, lacking in teachers and TAs. An overcrowded over ambitious curriculum is hard for many children and those with SEND are struggling the most.

We had lots of problems in my inner city school growing up but the curriculum fave up more chance to breathe. Maths, English, some Science and PE. It feels like primary schools are mini secondary schools now and it doesn't work.