I couldn’t agree more and your post should be pinned at the top of every thread on here about education or SEND, EHCPs, etc.
I am in the process now of taking our Local Authority, such as it purports to be, to tribunal for the third time.
I don’t know how these people sleep at night and they should all be removed from post. I don’t see anything changing in education until a competent regulator is put in place which will prosecute schools and Local Authorities for every single legal breach reported (rather than expect parents to do it individually) and levy fines of sufficient magnitude to remove the peverse financial incentives that motivate this behaviour and removes from post all Local Authority staff involved. The TRA also needs replacing with a competent professional body that will suspend teachers pending investigation and strip them of professional qualifications when they are found to have broken the law, like in every other sector.
Meanwhile, the total education budget is only 7.4% of national spending. That needs to change, drastically, with the entire system overhauled.
The current system serves very few children well. The problem is clearly trying to force everyone into mainstream schools which work for a vanishingly small proportion of children.
Some children will never cope with the curriculum and need to be in specialist schools because they have learning difficulties or other physical disabilities.
Some children can’t cope with the environment and large class sizes due to autism for example, but are very academically bright and need small specialist schools with strong pastoral care, small class sizes, but that are very academic (these do not exist at all).
Other academic children would be ok with large classes but need less disruption so need to be in schools tailored to academic ability (e.g. the old grammar school model).
Some children have talents in music, sport, art or practical skills and the current curriculum almost entirely excludes these and doesn’t allow them to develop their talents and skills. Therefore, they become disruptive and stop others learning and leave school thinking they are stupid having not been given a chance to develop their strengths.
Some children have severe behavioural problems and should be in specialist provision for that so that they don’t prevent others from learning.
The very few children in the middle of the range with average intelligence, for whom the curriculum and environment is designed, could benefit from mainstream school as it stands if all the others weren’t forced to attend.
The solution is far more choice of schools catering for different children’s needs and talents, rather than this insistence that everyone is the same and this factory farming approach will work. It has been proved that it does not.
However, the Government’s most recent proposals by the clueless Education Minister are to move in precisely the opposite direction, doubling down on the ideology that we can pretend children are identical clones and that their needs can be met in mainstream school, meaning that very few children can thrive at all. She is actually proposing to try to restrict access to specialist provision even further and pile even more children into mainstream schools, making it even more impossible for teachers to cater for the hugely disparate needs of the children in their classes (which are double the size they should be).
Unless this country starts to invest properly in appropriate education for all of its children, with a much wider choice of schools that are appropriate for each child without parents having to fight protracted legal battles to secure it then the future of this country looks very bleak. This should be the first priority for public spending and yet we have an Education Minister proposing measures that will make the situation even worse and gaslighting parents releasing statements saying that she “wants to restore their trust”. She needs to start listening.
This country’s financial problems are due to decades of economic mismanagement. They are not the fault of children with SEND, or disabled people. They are the fault of incompetent politicians and an economically illiterate electorate who continue to vote for their ridiculous policies and give them a mandate for further stupidity.