SEN funding isn't a bottomless money pit

[Sogfree]

I'll preface this by saying I really enjoy my job working in a SEN school. I care deeply for the children and families I work with.

I've had 4 different conversations this week with parents where they expect an excessive amount of additional resource to be allocated to their child. They expect this as, in their opinion, it's needed. I disagree with 3 of the 4 parents that this is needed.

All 4 of the parents are going to fight the decisions county have made. Their decision to fight will mean county spend more money arguing the challenge.

Services are already broken with the increase in need. Recruitment fails, as there aren't enough speech therapists/OTs/CAMHS practitioners etc to employ.

One parent demanding extra from one of these services means another child gets less.

One parent demanding a child goes to school X at £100k per year when a place at school Y at £30k is going to meet their needs means the child who needs the place at school X doesn't get it, and extra £70k per year is wasted. And the parent keeps their child out of school for 12-18 months whilst they fight for the place at school X.

That's the reality.

Every parent wants the world for their child. I understand that. But taxpayers can't afford to give every child the world.

AIBU - parents know their child best and we should fund what the parents say the child needs

YANBU - there's only so much money to go around and parents need to accept hard decisions have to be made without challenging them

Agreed! But nobody says it out loud. It’s like misogyny, everyone knows they can’t say it out loud so they dress it up in a load of faux concerned bullshit instead (absolutely not directing this at OP just to be clear! Just an observation).

the things I’ve seen people think are ok for the kids I work with would make peoples toes curl (or maybe it wouldn’t. Who knows anymore?) but it comes down to these kids will never be economically active so screw them.

This is surely discrimination - I don’t think it’s legal. They are actively putting obstacles in the way of your child being able to access school
and they refuse to make reasonable adjustments for her.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdS9eurH/

Like others have said - parents are always going to fight for their children. A lot of time and money is wasted on even basic support being refused and having to go through appeals process. My child with the mental capacity of a 1 year old was initially denied all support and to go into a mainstream school. If you know your child is not even going to be safe let alone learning anything then of course you’ll look for solutions. With a lot of parents of disabled children also having to give up their careers to support their child they also don’t have the money to privately access any support for their children.

Exactly!
Lots see care for the elderly more important, which it isn’t, both equally important, without investment in children, and education, neither can happen!
Simply not enough investment.

If their parents aren't contributing more than £100k a year in tax, perhaps the best thing they could be doing is caring for their child?

It's not unreasonable to do a cost benefit analysis. This is one of many areas where the 1% most difficult cases are more difficult (and expensive) to address than the other 99% combined. See also: criminality rates, medical treatments, etc - how far do you go to try to prevent EVERY single crime, cure EVERY single person's cancer, etc? It's not just about spending a bit more, it's orders of magnitude more.

Britain is addicted to defined benefits ("every single person has a right to X at any cost and can sue the government if they don't get it") and wonders why the country is crumbling.

Parents absolutely want the best for their child—but there’s a difference between want and need, and the system simply can’t give everyone everything
That’s the difficult part. SN or not, there is not enough money to give all children what they need to reach their full potential. I say this as a parent of two DC with SN.

Its not the fault of service users that the system is overstretched. I also work in an underfunded overstretched sector and face similar difficult conversations with people who naturally want their needs met by those whose job it is to meet them, and are understandably frustrated when this doesn't happen. It's a challenging part of the role, to be constantly disappointing people and dealing with their responses.
But I feel strongly that the way to do that is not to encourage them to acceptance by pitting them against each other. If securing a service you're entitled to comes at the expense of someone not receiving it, that's a failure in the system, not something to lay on the shoulders of the recipient.
If services are inadequate, people should never stop fighting. Those of us providing them should lend our support, not try to hush them up because we find their complaints difficult.

I work in this sector and have 3 autistic children, 2 went through mainstream and one at a special school.
I also work for an LA in a role close to the SEND team.

The answer can't be to build more special schools. The whole concept of a special school is that they should provide something vastly different to a mainstream.

However the issue is that mainstream schools are often (mostly sadly) very hostile places for children with SEND, much more so than they used to be.

The answer is to look at the fundamentals of what a mainstream state school is. There are some any things that are done because they are just seen socially as part of school, a few examples:

Uncomfortable uniform
Formal classroom/curriculum from year 1
Sedentary learning from year 1 (seated etc)
Loud bells
Having to be outdoors at break/lunch
Academic curriculum only
Communal changing areas for PE
No choice over what sports are done at PE and the sensory implications (e.g. basketball indoors is a sensory nightmare)
Increasingly huge secondary schools
Immediate detention if you forget homework/equipment (so disproportionately affecting those with poor executive functioning skills)
Social communication based on tradition e.g. calling teachers miss/sir

Souch of this could be fixed without spending a penny of facilities and resources.

Then targeted spending on speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, emotional literacy specialists, TAs trained in social communication skills etc.

Offering vocational curriculum options from a much younger age and not presenting it as a back up option for those 'not good enough'.

We need to overhaul what the experience of a mainstream school is to make it an enabling environment for children with, for e.g. autism, ADHD, communication difficulties, anxiety and poor mental health (endemic since COVID).

However as a country we are so wedded to the social indicators of a quality school being traditional uniform, sitting quietly in rows and following an outdated and rigid curriculum it is a major barrier and this is leading to huge numbers of kids having to go to special school because it is a manageable environment not because they require specialised approaches and specialist equipment.

My son is one of those kids. He now goes to special school 11 miles away which means he has no school friends nearby, relies on LA transport etc. I know the fees for his school are 40k. With the right approach the local high school would have been suitable, he would have a shorter day, local fri mfs etc but they have no interest in doing this.

I know this is a bit of a rant. I think EHCPs are going to have to go.
They are unsustainable.

They were designed in a time were most people accepted that public funds would provide 'just enough' for a child. And many parents still realise this. But a culture of expecting utter perfection in terms of high levels of personalised provision for children with moderate needs, combined with increasingly adversarial approaches on all sides has created an unsustainable situation and someone does need to make some brave decisions that will be unpopular.

20% of the school population have SEN. This has been a fairly consistent figure for decades. We cannot move towards a position where 20% of the school population are in specialist schools. We need to rethink the mainstream sector so it is enabling for all but those with the most complex SEN needs.

If a Tribunal has Ordered a school be named despite the LA claiming the school is full, the LA has not be able to prove placing DC there is incompatible with the efficient education of others or efficient use of resources. The problem is that is a higher bar than many LAs and some schools care to admit. It has to be something specific, not the vague woolly rubbish LAs often come out with, and it is more than an “adverse effect”, “impact on” or “prejudicial to”.

EHCPs don’t entitled DC to the best or perfect education.

I think where you are wrong op is that the tax payer can afford it. It’s actually a political choice not to allocate the public funds to this area of society and instead choose another that is considered ‘more worthy’. The underfunding of the public sector as a whole is absolutely a choice made by the government and partly the public. There is money in the public purse- don’t believe the austerity lies - we would give money to bail out banks and private business, but not our public sector. You are working in the midst of this gap and amid chronic underfunding. Another reason to never vote Tory!

I discreetly videod DD2's reaction to being asked to practice a song she was performing at school. The school hadn't supplied the lyrics and the lyrics I found had a slight variation in the verse. She was in complete meltdown. The teacher actually gasped when she saw the video because DD2 was completely different at school.

How can mainstream schools meet the needs of these children, when often it's the very structure of the school that is the problem? The only mainstream in our area has 1300 students. DD2 was asked to annotate a map of the school with colours to indicate how she felt in each area. The whole school got red dots. The road outside the school got a green dot with the comment 'I can go home'. The entire school was 'unsafe'.

We're about to have our first AR for the EHCP. Should I tell them their model student regularly hits us, and sometimes threatens her own life when particularly disregulated? Not sure they'll want to hear that.

1300 is quite small these days too.

Nice of you to suggest getting rid of EHCPs, sounds very much a case of pulling the ladder up after your child.

From the position of a parent with special needs, please try not to see those parents as being difficult or pushy. I have a constant track of low-grade fear and guilt that has been running in my head for nearly a decade, I'm sure they do too and that it's fairly standard.
We've kept our child with an EHCP in mainstream into secondary, purely because they themselves are enjoying it and learning things. (And the school have recently said they weren't sure in the first term if the placement would work out, but for now they pleased to be seeing good progress).
Would my child do better in a special school? How the heck would I know, overall? I've just read the post of someone above who's son is doing fantastic after attending a specialist setting (wonderful, good for him!) and now I'm having a tiny wobble about our situation, but because you hear a million different experiences and opinions, and there are so many different variables with each setting, and there are so many variables to your child that how can you tell a good fit for your child based on what you hear about other, different children's needs and support at various local schools? And it's not like the local authorities are rolling out the red carpet for you to have taster sessions at these specialist schools.
People will trot out, 'well your the expert on your own child,' but I'm certainly not an expert on child development and education and schools within a forty-mile radius, but I do feel at times that I've been expected to behave like one.

You’re wrong. It’s an attitude I see a lot from the people involved with my child (at SEN placement), and it is not a fully informed attitude.

My eldest is currently at a SN college. It’s ok, not the best, not the worst. Previous placement was an independent SN school (not £100k, but far more expensive than a state SN placement). On move to current college, the immediate assumption was that my child’s ’dependence on 1:1 must be broken’. No assessment of whether that 1:1 is still needed, or why it was awarded, or how it could be used. Nothing, just ‘must be broken’.

they are wrong, and the anxiety it is causing in my child is huge. No account taken of how far my child has come (for them to even be thinking of being able to reduce the 1:1) over their lifetime, or what my child could go on to achieve, if they are properly supported in a a way that actually takes account of their needs. Just blind assumption that they (the placement) know best, and won’t hear any different. Any query I bring up is met with ‘well, you could always go to a different placement’ (knowing full well that no alternative placement exists).

I don’t want more for my child because more is available, and so why shouldn’t my child have more - I want more because the current support is not actually meeting her needs, it is merely doing enough to make it look like it is meeting her needs. The outcome is very different - she will not have made as much progress over the last couple of years as she could have, and given she is now supposed to be looking at moving into work placements etc, this is crucial. She will not (probably) now go on and be a productive member of society, because her confidence has taken a real hit due to lack of support. She isn’t now able to do several things she was able to do when she left school, because her skills have not been maintained. She will not qualify for work experience (when she successfully held 2 separate positions during her sixth form years), as the lack of support has meant she cannot progress in the ways necessary.

the short sighted views from the college have massively damaged her life chances, and all because they want her to fit into their narrow views of how things should be done, rather than actually giving the individualised approach to her needs that they claim they offer.

Oh, interesting, just had a Google and it's not. Average is under 1000. But my borough has at least two of 2000+ so 1300 seems small compared to them.

YABU. The problem is it’s underfunded. And before everyone cries out about not being able to pay more tax, there really is no need. If tax was used smartly, then it should be funded properly. Same as mental health services. The problem is a lot of your tax $$ are pissed up against a wall essentially. So, probably best focusing on this and addressing it, rather than posting on Mumsnet berating parents of SN kids🤔.

Sorry I mean it needs to be replaced with something more fit for purpose.
Like when EHCPs replaced statements. They were designed in a very different time and situation.

This is what I mean about adversarial approaches, it's not doing anyone any good.

Apologies that I didn't explain my comment fully. I am used to working in the sector and should have explained more thoroughly on a general forum.

I disagree with this. I think it’s hard to understand the figures being thrown around without understanding the costs breakdown. £100k sounds like and is an enormous amount for one child’s schooling provision vs £6k in mainstream for a NT child. So it’s not resentment as such but a shock and lack of understanding as to how those figures are reached.

Exactly. The middle ground desperately needs developing as does the state sector. These huge figures are always for independent and usually run at profit.

Partly this is a consequence of grouping everyone under the "SEN" banner - half the people in this thread are talking about severely intellectually/physically disabled children who will never have a "normal" life (even if they are very much loved regardless!) and the other half are talking about kids who just aren't suited to classes of 30 kids sitting rigidly and would benefit from a basically normal school with a slightly different ethos and structure to the day.

I think the rigid rights and assessment culture has made it more difficult for schools that want to innovate a bit or provide a slightly different offering that would be more suited to that category of kid. The gulf-like separation of private schools which are able to do that at massive cost and state schools which are not even allowed to accept £40 of private funding to buy a book or chair or whatever is also ridiculous.

The Warnock Report of 1978 (which started off the inclusion approach) suggested 20% of children had SEN. So that hasn't changed. We've just become totally unrealistic with the syllabus.

Definitely. The SEND system needs to be able to recognise this.