SEND - children’s needs to be reassessed from year 6 2029?

[missbish]

Are they taking the piss? After the struggles parents have trying to secure support for their child, they’re then going to threaten to take it away once they’re due to go to secondary? Ds goes to secondary this year so I don’t think it will effect him but I am so angry for those it does effect.

Yes.

How much do you think these children will cost across their lives without adequate early intervention?

How would that help ‘wheels coming off’ type 12/13 year olds?

I'm curious to know how they will determine "the most severe needs". My dd's needs are complex. But when she's well supported she appears 'fine at school' (mainstream). Contrast that with how she falls apart, and takes weeks and weeks to recover, when she is not well supported - or that hard-won support and understanding falls away.

I suspect that it will largely be high masking, compliant, bright autistic/ audhd girls (this presentation is most common among girls) that pay the price. Precisely because their needs are complex, but not seen as severe until they reach mental health crisis. As it stands, they're already diagnosed much later than boys, as well as misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed.

For some children it will meet social needs, occupational therapy needs and physio needs. It's therefore cheaper to provide one therapy than 3 separate different interventions. Would you rather they had three different interventions that cost more overall because you personally don't like the idea of equine therapy?

Do you have the same objections to swimming/OT/physio?

Swimming is already required by the national curriculum

physio can be provided by the health service.

I can see how OT may be required to ensure access to education for example supportive seating and adapted equipment (one of my own children had special pens).

There are a myriad of things currently being provided at vast expense via EOTAS that are not educational needs.

We must spend less
We cannot not.

Now imagine you’re the parent of a child who is likely to lose their legally mandated provision.

I’ll be honest, I don’t believe I have skin in this particular game. My son is “complex,” and I’d be very surprised if any reassessment didn’t say the same thing. He falls into the group who likely won’t lose their provision, it’ll just be recategorised and get a different label.

But - the only way you can comfortably say “oh well some children will have to lose out,” is if you’re so lacking in empathy that you can’t see the real impact of that, or consider how you’d feel if it was your child potentially losing their legal rights.

1:1 swimming isn't required by the national curriculum. My son does 1:1 hydrotherapy, is that really much different to equine therapy other than water vs horse?

The NHS typically does not provide enough. If you are lucky to qualify for speech and language, it may be 8 sessions in total type thinking. When in other European countries it would be weekly sessions with practice, some even provided in schools intensively until the kids catch up.
Same with physio, what is provided is often just not enough to make a difference.
Same with the few sessions of swimming in state primary schools. It sounds like it is being provided, but the intensity and frequency is not enough.

Nobody is saying ‘oh well’.

We’re saying there’s no other option, children that don’t have the highest level of disability will have to cobble along with some fairly rudimentary state school assistance.

That’s all there is to it now. Many services have been cut or restricted.

Swimming is only for one term in the curriculum, children with EHCPs might have it weekly for years. Is that acceptable? If so how is it any different to any other physical therapy to help them like equine therapy?

You do know it's education, HEALTH and care plan right? What's physio being on the nhs to do with anything? Your tax still pays for it.

If she can ‘appear fine’ in any context then I doubt she’ll be considered severe.

For some children it will meet social needs, occupational therapy needs and physio needs. It's therefore cheaper to provide one therapy than 3 separate different interventions. Would you rather they had three different interventions that cost more overall because you personally don't like the idea of equine therapy?

No. I think less should be provided. Parents should work on social needs. There are far far more cost effective ways to provide OT. How does equine therapy provide for OT that enables a child to access education? There's no horseriding in the national curriculum, because its very expensive and unnecessary. If its not considered necessary to provide it to all children as part of their education or as direct tool to access the same education others receive, it shouldn't be funded as education.

Physio can be and is provided by the health service.

Any way its pointless arguing this as we fundamentally don't agree. Costs must be cut and will be, who are you goimg to vote for instead, reform? The conservatives? Both known for their stellar willingness to fund these things. Good luck. You know when labour are desperately cutting government spending its because there really is nowhere else to go.

Physio often isn’t provided by the health service. Certainly not at the level required. It is also a special educational provision and not health care provision.

There are a myriad of things currently being provided at vast expense via EOTAS that are not educational needs.

Thankfully, the courts disagree with your incorrect assertion.

Early intervention can prevent DC reaching the point where the wheels fall off.

Thankfully the law will be changed.... the government and I agree. I'll take that.

Its not a need. Its a provision.

The provision outlines the recommended strategy to support a need to achieve an outcome.

Theres more than one way to meet needs and achieve outcomes. The need might be motor skills. They could pick OT and physio instead and peoole get less pissed off eith that even if it costs more.

Equine therapy tends to be very cheap because a lot of charities offer it and it tends to be effective. Theres some peer reviewed studies on it for cerebral palsy showing its very good.

NHS SALT is a joke. We’ve been under them for two years but have been seen all of four times. Twice was by a fantastic SALT who then left and the other two times were different people. My DS is incredibly intelligent and doesn’t accept being patronised in any way. He knows he isn’t a baby and doesn’t expect to be treated like one just because he’s selective with language. The last woman we saw was trying to get him to engage with baby toys when he’d just turned 5 so obviously had no interest.

We paid private for a while but that was equally shit. The woman kept trying to play a game with a box with him where she wouldn’t let him see inside the box unless he asked and then it would be one toy at a time. He just got fucked off and wanted to see inside the box so lost interest… It all seemed to centre around toys regardless and he was hugely disengaged.

You clearly have no idea of the meaning of being fine at school that us sen parents do

Was it a mr potato head by any chance ?
My ds had exactly the same thing with the baby toys

There's a key bit of timing here - children who already have an EHCP will be reassessed as they move up into the next school from 2029.

Quite aside from the fact that a complete change of environment is exactly the thing that causes autistic and ADHD kids the most trauma...this government already know they're going to lose the next election. The chaos this will cause in the education system is going to be somebody else's problem.

The sensible thing to do would've been to adopt the "reasonable accommodations" approach that disabled adults have to deal with in work - at the very least, it would smooth out the cliff-edge problem that this new binary policy causes.

Haha she did try with mr potato head! It was also a unicorn thing where she’d press it and a ball would fly across the room. I think he was supposed to go fetch the ball like a dog…

You don’t actually know what the law will be. The White Paper is just that. It doesn’t mean that it will definitely become law. Many ideas in White Papers don’t actually make it to legislation. Neither do you know what will or won’t be subsequently be part of packages.

Hence my fear. She's currently not attending school at all due to burnout - since just before the Christmas break. She's barely leaving the house any more as her nervous system has completely collapsed. For several weeks she barely ate or slept, wore the same clothes (PJs) 24/7 and told us repeatedly that she wanted to die as a result of sensory overwhelm and dysregulatation. She's 9. Does that sound 'mild' or 'fine'?

Absolutely right.

"We are spending £200,000,000 to make sure that every teacher has the training to meet the needs of children with SEN".

Impressive.

The reality, given that there are 513,000 teachers:

"We are spending £390 per teacher, which will include their day's pay, to make sure every teacher has had an online PowerPoint delivered by a bored instructor training to meet the needs of children with SEN."

The provision sounds great, doesn't it? Children will have provision mapped, and only those with 'specialist support provision' will get EHCPs and the legal right to challenge them.

Well, if there's no legal right to challenge, and it is the school that decides what provision is needed, how does a parent make sure their child gets what they need?

DD2 is in specialist school via an EHCP. Her school SENCO wouldn't even agree to help me apply for an EHCP when her line manager instructed her to do so. I had to do it myself. After my application, the LA commissioned assessments and immediately decided that she needed a special school. Yet the SENCO had tried to block that step. The Government of today is trying to remove that protection.

DD3 is in special school. She's there partly because the school's idea of 'provision' was tob allow another child to verbally abuse her so often that she had a breakdown. I had to remove her from school (at their suggestion), apply for an EHCP, then the LA commissioned assessments and immediately decided that a special school was necessary. It took a whole academic year for the new school to get her to the point where she could step inside the building because she was so traumatised. Staff sat on the drive way in the rain, playing Scrabble and banagrams, proving that they were able to do what they said they would do, building her trust.

Anybody who looks at these reforms and thinks things will be better for the next generation of children is hopelessly naive.