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

In the past there were more unskilled labouring jobs - paid enough to live on. If you were hard working you could do physical jobs without much schooling.
Nowadays you have to understand health and safety regs to be an employed cleaner.

I read somewhere that giving children wiht ADHD extra exam time was the worst thing for them as they have difficulty maintaining attention for a long time and lose interest when bored.
It made me wonder what we have learned, what is best for children. There seems to be no properly researched methods for helping these children. I know they are all different but each family seems to need to fight the same fight.

'More chemicals in things'

The entire world is made of chemicals. Comments like this don't help find a solution because they're meaningless.

Wow so children with disabilities such as autism don’t get help to overcome their disability and achieve what they’re capable of. Does that go for all disabilities? Many children with SEN are capable of level 3 education and even uni. The curriculum and school is very much aimed at everybody else reaching their full academic potential- why not those with SEN?

Where has the "ADHD is 1 in 9" figure come from? (I've been a teacher for 13 years and have a DD with ADHD and ASD). I've seen credible estimates of 1 in 20, which seems more plausible with what I observe in my classes and among adults.

Girls and women are clearly underdiagnosed through with both ADHD and ASD because there's more social pressure on them to behave and their presentation is more internal.

So maybe the rate is higher than 1/20.

No-one would ever have picked up DD's differences from observing her at school (although when she eventually saw an Educational Psychologist, he could see it).

Looking at DH, my dad, my sister, the mum of one of DD's friends, a schooI friend of mine... I strongly suspect that when your needs are mostly met, you can hide in plain sight for most of your life. Only one of them is diagnosed.

But there’s chemicals and chemicals aren’t there? You would (not personally!) probably drink a can of Relentless which is full of shit and chemicals. You would not however drink a bottle of toilet cleaner which is full of shit and chemicals. You would take aspirin in pregnancy, but not thalidomide. And so on.

@Phineyj

Exactly my dd story too.

Many woman and indeed men undiagnosed that can function in society by masking (hiding in plain sight) suffer from anxiety. Ocd addiction And other MH issues If they had a diagnosis they could
Understand themselves better and live better. This has to be a good thing.

But if the money isn’t there, what can actually happen? It’s like you having empty pockets and me asking you for £10 and you saying you don’t have it. So I list all the good reasons I need it, ‘so what do you want me to do, go without it?’. If it isn’t there… what then?

Literally every service in the country needs investment and one-off enormous spends. The NHS, education, social housing, infrastructure… SEN is one in a long list due to general economic decline, mismanagement, covid debts and a public who live longer and are less likely to work than generations that came before.

I don’t disagree with a lot of what you write but it’s all entirely moot until something happens to free up a load of cash.

Petitions, marches, appealing to the council, going to the media, it’s all utterly redundant because they couldn’t do something even if they wanted to.

Our only option as I see it is to solve the financial problem first, and everything else can flow from that but it’ll take years. Do you have any other ideas?

17% of the school population do not need EHCPs. Why do they have them?

They dont. 4.3% have an ehcp.

I'm in bits after watching this video. They have not idea what it's like to parent SEN child and I thank my lucky stars every day my little one wasn't born back in the days of straight jackets and the cane. I don't sleep last night because of these people's attitudes. I sincerely hope one day they understand.

Perhaps we shouldn't educate mainstream children beyond 14.

Employers could pick up the cost of training and education via appretiships.

That isnt a serious suggestion btw. But i find people very quick to decide we cant afford disabled and non disabled people an education so decide we will just have to pick the non disabled.

Not all SEN adjustments cost money though. Sometimes it's just about having a quiet space to go to and being allowed to eat what they want for lunch. Kids who were undiagnosed a generation or more ago sometimes only need understanding, not a 6 figure school place. It's certainly cheaper than all the mental health care I ended up needing.

Edit: typo

I think Labour almost had the right balance in 2010 funding wise, however under the conservatives social care and SEN funding has been abysmal. Parents now often have no choice but to use legal representation to get their kids EHCP accurate then met.

Diagnosis has improved drastically but there is still room for improvement. If the government updated and developed its education provisions a lot of unmet needs would be naturally met … I’m thinking of the thousands of young people home educating (not out of choice) and not fitting into the sausage machine of mainstream school

Social Care regulations are the best they have ever been. Thank goodness! Abusive institutions should be left in the 1950’s where they belong.

I don't think it's quite the same as an individual asking for £10 because individual budgets and cash are not the same thing as public policy spending. Sometimes for example it makes sense to go into debt for a while in order to make an investment which will pay off later. Currently it seems that we are paying the bare minimum (or less than, frequently) on so many things and this is now catching up and all the dominoes are falling. It will cost much more to sort out this way.

Yes the finances need sorting out first. I think everything is in a big mess because of austerity and many parts of public services being underfunded or restricted for decades, unfortunately. As well as lack of provision being made for issues that are not a surprise to anybody - like the elderly care funding problem which has knock on effects on the NHS, which fed into a lot of the COVID issues, which again wasn't a surprise - epidemics have always happened, and epidemic turning pandemic was well known long before that happened. The NHS was being run right at capacity with no breathing room so when the pandemic hit there was no expansion space, which caused a lot of problems.

It seems like there needs to be someone who goes around working out what various pots of government spending are being spent on and what is working and what is not. In fact I'm sure there are plenty of reports already which explain these things perfectly well. It is then frustrating when you can have someone who is actually responsible for funding decisions read said report and then feel free to dismiss half of it based on their own uninformed opinions. I don't think that should be allowed. I think if there are reports which have been done well to a high standard which explain where funding ought to be allocated, these should be followed as far as possible, not decisions made by a council.

I think we have some major circling issues in the UK which all feed into each other and so it might just be a case of pick one of these to do the absolute gold standard practice on, and wait for it to help alleviate the load on the others, but none of this is a quick fix and that seems to be the issue with getting it into policy.

(The issues being elderly/social care for disabled adults underfunding, leading to bed blocking in the NHS which leads to strain on various NHS services including SEN diagnosis and support, mental health support, which leads to unemployment, struggling parents and more social problems, which leads to parental strain leading to abuse or neglect or breakdown of family relationships, which can lead to more SEN or developmental problems, children struggling to integrate into schools, and/or generational cycles, and increased strain on emergency services, as well as social services/social care, elderly or disabled people with no family support and we're back at the beginning of the circle.)

Actually I do wonder if a lot of the issues in general are this same thing - report gets done which is well researched and looks into every aspect of some issue, and then some individual further down the chain reads the report, says very nice, well done, but then completely dismisses half of what it says and makes a different decision. It makes you wonder what is the point of commissioning these (probably very expensive!) reports.

This is exactly the point I was going to make.

If correct measures are put in place they are often inexpensive or cost neutral.

It is the lack of these measures that cause many children, like my eldest, to break down due to autistic burnout and to need more expensive provisions.

There seems to be no properly researched methods for helping these children.

There are LOTS but they don't seem to be applied universally in schools meaning you get useless things like extra time for ADHD children! A better accommodation for an ADHD child might be a separate room so that they aren't distracted by others and/or so that they can freely fidget or move around or vocalise etc without distracting others.

You can also just ask someone what it is they find hard about exams and if it's not something which affects the content of the exam, then offer it as a reasonable accommodation. Like, bringing in all your notes might not be a reasonable accommodation, but a dyslexic child having a scribe or being allowed to type rather than write might be fine.

The genetic component of autism doesn't always xmean what people think it does i have a severely autistic teen ,non verbal.in a special school etc
Neither myself or his Dad are autistic However my son has a rare chromosome disorder ( he has a micro deletion) on his 16 th chromosome Which is thought to be the underlying cause of his disabilities so therefore genetic ,rare chromosome disorder, s can be inherited from a patent but in his case its De novo,do its occurred randomly
Many people with rare chromosome disorder, s are diagnosed with autism and or other disabilities and the severity can vary massively.

I think it’s no coincidence that the rise in childhood increase in SEN presentations and MH problems has increased dramatically since the government decimated early years help/sure start. And then again since covid where lots of children fell thought the net. As a pp said early access to things like speech therapy could make all the difference to many children.

I’m sure I’ll be flamed but I honestly believe a proportion of children (not all by any means) who later go on to be diagnosed with some sort of SEN have simply suffered mild neglect and early life trauma which leads to (to name a few) poor speech and communication, poor impulse control and behaviour, poor attendance and being behind academically, poor MH. They have missed out on early intervention that previous generations got because of things like sure start. If I think of the diagnosed Sen kids in dcs class at least half of them fall into this category. I’m not saying they don’t have those SE needs though, so it still doesn’t solve the problem. But increasing early years funding to what it used to be might help in the solution. Unfortunately once these things are lost it’s almost impossible to get them back, much like missed early childhood experiences and development. It was criminal what the Tory’s have done.

Sometimes for example it makes sense to go into debt for a while in order to make an investment which will pay off later

Thats fine but if we do that then inflation will further increase. Hence depending COL crisis, deepening child poverty, and the cycle continues.

If we’re really serious about long term change then we need to accept we’re not paying enough tax and everyone who can work should work, no claiming UC ‘because I prefer to be around for the school run’ etc.

But, this will not happen. People simply cannot fathom that they need to make a contribution to society so they can continue to take the things they want.

There’s no way out of this mess because the only solutions would be wildly unpopular with a large group of people.

I agree 100%.

I highly doubt that a large proportion of children that suffered in the pandemic have received diagnoses yet. They'll be in the queue.

12 years ago there were nearly 40 educational psychologists serving the schools in my area. Now there are less than 20.

Of course there are different classes of chemicals, but the pp referred simply to 'chemicals' in things, which is over-simplification. I do think it would be interesting to further look at maternal (and even paternal) consumption of certain compounds, in either higher than normal or lower than normal quantities, just in case there are some links we are missing. Of course not to ascribe 'blame' but to give advice going forward. Regarding thalidomide, that's a very interesting topic - it was seen as a wonder drug initially, but clearly soon became evidently not a wonder at all. Thalidomide is still used today in some circumstances, and research also showed the chemical to be very interesting in that it exists molecularly in two mirror forms (as chemicals can do) - both forms being responsible for different effects. (Link if anyone interested; https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/t/thalidomide.html#:~:text=The%20thalidomide%20disaster%20caused%20many,S)%2Disomer%20is%20teratogenic.)

Well going on figures announced by my LA, as I said upthread, since covid EHCP have tripled. Obviously lots of other costs too. Care costs etc. The LA is on the verge of bankruptcy and now making the most awful, ridiculous cuts. I just don’t know what the solution is other than more money ! It’s no wonder that councils can’t keep up with that increase in need.

Of course it’s over simplification as we are having a general discussion, and he/she was putting it forward as an idea, not writing a paper. My gut feeling is there’s no one reason, but instead a few things which are then exacerbated by a reliance on screens and sensory items which prevent babies and small children from interacting properly with the world and their caregivers. Plus the reduction of early years services to pick them up.