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

No the system needs to change. Money shouldn’t be wasted and diverted from state provision like it is. Those who shout the loudest shouldn’t get better outcomes. Many parents of kids with SEN and those working in the sector feel this too. It’s not just the government.

And the way the system is set up. It needs to change and will be as it can’t continue in this way.

I’d love(not) to have seen what would have happened if the child I used to help look after were involved in ‘group sessions’ by a ‘trained TA’

Well in mainstream she requires a sole 1-1 of 32.5 hours in the schooo she is going to she won’t plus all therapies are includes
SLT / OT / free lunches so won’t be getting those from free school meals etc
and it’s around 50k a year independent Sen school in west London

Money shouldn’t be wasted and diverted from state provision

Do you also feel the same way about the despicable amount of money LAs waste on representation to defend indefensible cases against unrepresented parents?

This is the issue.
The mainstream schools have become increasingly hostile places for SEND learners (academisation has been a major factor).
Therefore the number of children struggling has risen exponentially.
The focus post COVID was all wrong, emphasis on academic catch up and not on supporting children to make that transition back to school. Many ASD and ADHD learners never managed it.
Then under the Tory government all forms of discrimination became more acceptable and mainstreams began to openly view SEND kids as a blot on the nice corporate image of their academy.

The answer isn't to keep throwing money at expensive specials school placements- that's a sticky plaster. The fundamental issues need to be addressed so that mainstream schools successfully serve the vast majority of children, not just high fliers, and those without SEND.

In any other type of legal battle you'd be a fool to not represent your case, but SEN children and their parents should just shut up and put up?

Apparently so.

It’s not that simple OP, these local authorities waste a lot of money by the way they conduct things. Where I live the only way to get into a send school is through a tribunal. A complete waste of money for the LA. I tried to fight for my DC to go to the local send school but instead the LA refused and offered an independent school, 30 min drive away costing £90k per year. The local school was a lot cheaper and we wouldn’t have needed transport. I could have fought but I didn’t have the energy. The system is broken.

If we're looking at children with severe or profound disabilities then firstly a lot of what people are calling education is actually medical care - physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, epilepsy care.

Secondly, it's very unlikely that their health condition will resolve in adulthood - and unfortunately adult services are being cut due to limited local & central funding. Spending more on children's education will mean less money for services for the same child once they become an adult.

I'm very pro spending more on children on moral grounds & to improve adult outcomes, but realistically there is probably more potential for impact by spending more on social care and safeguarding. There's no point in providing specialist education whilst failing to prevent and detect abuse and neglect.

The reason why SEN funding is so insufficient for all is because successive governments haven't treated it as a priority. Or to quite an extent because they have cut funding for local authorities overall: they can then say that they haven't cut funding for health, education, etc., when they haven't done so directly, but have cut the local authorities' ability to spend.

No doubt it's unfair that those who can complain most effectively are the most likely to get (some of) what they need; but the real unfairness is that SEN provision is generally underfunded and not treated as a priority; and that more generally people with disabilities and their families and carers are often treated as a convenient whipping boy. And I don't think you can really blame recent increases in defence spending for this- it's been going on for far longer.

I helped a parent with an appeal. She'd been misled by the LA so badly, and it was quite obvious they were taking advantage of her situation. She'd been on 4 parenting classes, her child was part time in a mainstream school that said at every review they couldn't meet needs, and was regularly contacting them for help. Her child watched cartoons on an iPad whilst in school and basically barely contained.

The LAs own panel said SLD was suitable but the caseworker felt it wasn't, and kept telling her he'd find a better school, knowing full well there weren't any. It was bullshit. The LA conceded 3 days before the hearing.

Her child has struggled with the transition to the SLD school. Years of bad experience in mainstream can't have helped that.

@TopographicalTime the law means health care provision which educates or trains is deemed to be special educational provision. This includes things like physio and hydrotherapy.

More money on safeguarding?

We have unprecedented levels of s47 enquiries going on in this country and it has done very very little to change outcomes and caused a lot of trauma to families who shouldn’t have been subjected to it
and I can promise you the cost of those increased enquiries goes far beyond yse of resources to conduct them

https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2023/10/30/child-protection-enquiry-total-hits-new-annual-high-but-proportion-finding-abuse-continues-to-shrink/

My child is potentially about to end up at a 100k a year school.

None of the 30k a year state specialists can meet her needs, not even close. Currently she is receiving no education and hasn't for the vast majority of this academic year.

I'd love for her to not need an expensive education but it is what it is.

What do you think we are doing by fighting for suitable placements other than safeguarding?

Neglect is abuse.
Neglecting a child's basic and legal needs is abuse.
Neglecting to keep a child safe is abuse.
Fighting for a suitable specialist placement where a child can have their medical, health, social and emotional needs met is safeguarding the child and preventing abuse. That's before we even begin to think about education!

Do people really want to return to a system where children are deemed to be uneducatable? That was abolished in 1970

In addition, I ask you to consider what the acronym EHCP stands for before claiming it doesn’t include social care.

This is definitely true, and not just with SEN schools. I fought and fought to get it daughter up a surgery wait list, kept being told it was at least 9 months. I sent the secretary an email from my nhs email address and suddenly there was a date available within 2 weeks.
Same when my other child needed speech therapy, huge wait lists, and when I mentioned I worked for childrens therapies in an adjacent borough, they couldn't do enough for us, she got weekly for a year at the age of 3, which is very rare. I'm grateful for this, but under no illusion that she would have got that if I wasn't in the job role I am.
We even have this, we are are so worn down by the pressure and the complaints that sometimes we say yes to a parent to something which isnt an essential for their child, because it's more cost effective that having daily phone calls from them, and because we get flack when people make complaints even when they are not upheld. Which is definitely wrong, bit it's extremely naive to pretend that the parent with connections or the parent who doesn't put hige pressure on gets more. And I'm not saying they are wrong to do this, I had no qualms in using my nhs role to get my children up the list. But it is not equitable.

Exactly.
It's possible to entirely sympathise with why parents do this while agreeing that any system that delivers those outcomes needs reforming.

And that decisions about funding for SEN dont exist in a bubble and do have consequences for how much funding we have to meet other needs

Criticizing other people isn’t going to help though. Everyone posting wants good outcomes for the children and their parents. The debate is how best to achieve it.

Exactly this . A how to achieve it while balancing the needs of the rest of society

So that’s what this is all about for you? Your child’s EHCP is lacking but YOU didn’t sort it and are spitting jealous tacks??

I don't see envy here. I see economic pragmatism.

I do think there is a bit of a problem with independent special schools though. It is NOT the fault of parents fighting for independent specialist; the schools have clearly sprung up to address the gap in provision (particularly because the vast majority of mainstream schools are so shit for children) but they are (usually) private businesses and therefore children basically represent a profit margin.

All the local independent specialists here have recently upped their fees from around the £60/£65k mark to at least £80k. At the same time most of them have increased their maximum class sizes. People are making extraordinary amounts of money off vulnerable children and the provision isn't getting any better. It's a terrible situation though because the mainstream schools (and occasionally the state special schools) fail so many children so badly that there is often no other humane choice but to place children in these specialist independent schools. The answer is not to remove rights from disabled children and their families or push the narrative of sharp-elbowed parents.

Edit: argh my SPAG is awful! Edited a few times to correct!