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.

Having had an ASD child who has been through the system .. I honestly think that (at least at high school) EHCPs are a bit of a waste of time. It all takes too long, and is too prescriptive, and often just makes for a load of conflict. I would sooner the budget was given to schools, who can provide the right support, at the right time, regardless of needing an EHCP.

Teenagers are complicated, and can cycle in and out of the support they need, and schools need to be more responsive.

Our High School doesn’t even really use the phrase “SEND” anymore (though they have to do legally of course), that have invested school budget in creating a Hub, in school based Alternative Provision, in supporting alternative timescales, in providing in-class (and out of class) assistance, therapy, trauma based training for staff etc. All of which can be accessed without the need for an EHCP.

PEXs are down to virtually zero since this approach was adopted 3 years ago.

The amount of better work they will be able to do with the new funding, and the new facilities they will be able to provide will be amazing.

Various reasons.

My son wouldn't have survived in the 70's, as an example. Advances in medicine means that more children are surviving that wouldn't have otherwise in the 70's.

Some of them were undiagnosed.
Some of children just didn’t survive at birth if there were complications.
Some conditions are hereditary. More ND people are married nowadays and have children and their children have higher chances of ND / additional needs.
Some believe that older age of parents is contributing.

I personally think that awareness is the main one. I’m sure that at least 3 people in my form at secondary were autistic and it’s just my form , there were 5 others. And I haven’t started thinking about possible ADHD yet.

Sounds like they want to phase out EHCPs except for the highest level of need and it is politically easier to do this gradually as kids transition to secondary school. I get why. The current system is crazy expensive. But they will probably just stick all the responsibility onto schools and not resource them properly.

"I would sooner the budget was given to schools, who can provide the right support, at the right time"

@ExtraOnions having personal and professional experience of lots of schools, I think leaving it up to schools would be a disastrous idea.

Agreed

There is a phase transfer annual review when doing from primary to secondary and again at post 16.
There are annual reviews every year (or should be).

I think this is proposing doing a full needs asssesment again, as is done when you iniatially apply for an EHCP.
IF done well, this should involve multi disciplinary team assessment such as education psychologist, speach and language therapist, occupational therapist, teachers, health professionels, social workers etc. In reality it ususally doesnt and needs are not fully assessed and support required remains unidentified.
The statutaory time frame for a needs assessment is currently 20 weeks. This is very very rarely met by local authorities due to to shortage of EPs,SLTs,OTs , caseworkers , financial constraints and level of demand.
When my own DD went through her needs assessment in year 8, it took 39 weeks, at the end of the process she had no named school.
The needs assessment was inadequate and did not include SLT and OT assessments so her needs were not fully indentified.
Her mainstream school could not meet her need and the LA could not find a specialist school . She had no education for 2 years whilst went to tribunal for Education Other Than at School. Which she got.
My experience and that of many other parents is that needs go UP and not DOWN when a child transitions from primary school to secondary school.
The secondary school environment, frequent transitions, large number of people, noise, the large school building plus puberty and communication and relationships with peers becoming more complex.
DD is academically bright, she initially went to main stream grammar school. They had THREE part time teaching assistants for 1200 pupils.
Ther TAs didnt have the training or the to implement the recommended programs such as ELSA . The senco didnt have the time.
There was kindness but no support.
Mainstream schools have a 2 week rolling timetable. So if you see a therapist every monday morning , for example, you will get behind in 2 subjects.
Availabilty of support and professionals means you cant pick the time and avoid important lessons neither can you change your appointment time or day every week.
If the child goes to the learning support centre there is no teacher available to teach them and often there is also no TA so they are left to read a book or attempt a worksheet for which they havent had the accompanying teaching - because theyve missed the lesson.
SEN isnt just learning delay many SEN pupils are academically able and deserve the same level of teaching as their peers in mainstream school.
SEN pupils have diverse needs but often they are put together in the same specialist school and entry criteria ie behaviour needs or global development delay is ignored due to there not being enough SEN school places so the Special education NEED that the school is meant to fulfill and focus on is diluted and provision streched and therefore their pupils needs are not fully met.

The current law is excellent.
Its the implementation of it that is failing.
Weakening the law will let our children down and just push the cost to society further along the track to adulthood, they are far less likely to lead productive lives as an adult if their needs as children and young people are not met.

If they phase out EHCPS at a higher level it will create such a mess with the slightly less struggling kids that they'll all end up needing more support.

Secondary schools are so much more pressured than they were 20-30 years ago. Uniforms are stricter, lessons and grades are more pressured, lunch breaks are shorter and kids can't just bunk off without attendance penalties and potentially social services getting involved.

@Dutchhouse14 your analysis of the system is spot on.
i would love to send you to DoE as an SEN advisor.

In Scotland they have started to create special schools as a bolt on to mainstream schools (they already had some that worked well and have now decided that all high schools must have 1). When done right it allows those who can't be mainstreamed to be in a sen environment full time and have access to the mainstream facilities and those who need a mix of both mainstream and sen environments to get them.
My ds is at 1 of the original ones and although there has been issues with some staff not being suitable for the job the system seems to be the best of all the options out their and I really don't understand why England doesn't do the same as it created 1000s of extra sen places for minimal extra cost

It isn't going to save any money though.

My son wouldn't be able to attend mainstream without his EHCP so if it is taken away because he is managing in mainstream without any consideration that the only way he's managing is due to the support he receives due to his EHCP then it will simply be my son not managing in high school without an EHCP and him likely getting a new one and special school if that's the only way he'd be able to get one in the future and I'd exhaust every appeal etc I possibly could and then him attending special school with a EHCP would cost more money too.

Or I would go to tribunal to fight for education other than school if mainstream or special school weren't possible which is also more expensive than a EHCP.

I would be far from the only parent willing to do that to fight for their child to access suitable education.

"I would sooner the budget was given to schools, who can provide the right support, at the right time, regardless of needing an EHCP."

You couldn't put all children regardless of need in the nearest school and then give each school the same amount of money.

What I was reading yesterday of the leaks was about removing the rights of parents to appeal/go to tribunal and that would be down to the school going forwards!

It feels like a sticking plaster, rather than a truly holistic, multi-system approach. A holistic approach might look to include amendments to the curriculum and school environment, outdated behaviour management policies that are based on outward behaviour rather than underlying neurodivergence, greater investment in earlier neurodevelopmental diagnosis.

I applied for an ehcp when dd was 6, despite her not being diagnosed, because teachers are not medical professionals/ mental health experts. We knew she had unmet needs, but her presentation was masked at school. So we applied for an ehcp to get access to an Ed Psych who could advise school on what was likely happening to our dd. Without that, we'd have been none the wiser and school would have still been treating her as a neurotypical child who was choosing not to attend school, rather than unable to.

My biggest fear is that children like my daughter - the ones who cope until they break and their families reach crisis point - will be wrongly deemed to have less severe difficulties because they present as academically able, compliant and well behaved at school but fall apart at home. Then it becomes parents' words against school's because nobody is seeing the whole picture.

Dd is now 9 - four years later and just about to finally receive a diagnosis.

It doesn't sound to me as if that is the intention. Ime children's needs increase as they get older and they find secondary education more challenging, both from pov of coping with the new system and academically. There is certainly extra money being allocated to SEND.

Of course. I should've known.

High schools are going to be chaos with SEND children having support removed.

I am actually scared. Both my children have very obvious disabilities (e.g. severe learning disabilities) and so we never got the 'they don't need an EHCP' thing.

That said, we have still needed to assert our rights many times over the years and have used the tribunal system a couple of times. Without this both kids, but particularly one of them, would have been left in an absolutely horrendous state. My eldest's life would have been ruined and that is not an exaggeration.

But that is what I think the Government want to stop. Its nuts to have half a million kids going through the process that you describe. The school system is based on the vast majority of kids being educated roughly the same way in classes of 30 odd. Sounds to me like they think EHCPs are getting out of control and want to move back closer to that. Maybe with a under resourced "hub" somewhere on site.

For DD I'm hoping for learning 'adjacent to' her peers, rather than actually in the class with them all the time. Neither she, nor they, would like full integration. So I need a proper unit within a mainstream school, rather than a SEN school (none of which are 'right' for her).

My son has very obvious disabilities too but not a learning disability and is in mainstream with a EHCP and my concern is that because he is mainstream, they will deem him not disabled enough and decide he doesn't need one any more.

If that happens and I don't even have the right to appeal it, I honestly don't know what I will do. I assume send him until school say it clearly isn't suitable and then go through the EHCP process again? What a waste of everybody's time (and again, money).

I'm scared too.

I bet you are. My heart goes out to the mainstream-appearing children, it really does.

I hope you get what's right for her <3

I'm thinking about the children who have massive behavioural needs being shoehorned into mainstream classrooms, or even units, leaving absolutely everyone stressed and unhappy.

The word "Detectable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence when it takes years of fighting to make the powers that be agree to attempt any such detection. In many cases the attempt to "detect" doesn't happen until long after the y7 transition so those cases wouldn't be directly affected by the proposal to reassess for y7 (though would indirectly cause worse problems by tying up limited EP resources in reassessments so that the waiting lists for initial assessments get longer).

SEND often go undetected in yR-y5 because the schools are focused on getting every child up to a baseline of literacy and numeracy and a lot of neurodiverse kids with real and complex difficulties that won't become overwhelming until the more complex senior school years are quite capable of learning to read and do basic maths whilst being entirely incapable of surviving a mainstream secondary school all the way to y13.

If a child's SEND is detected before the end of y6 their additional needs are not going to have disappeared at any point so reassessment (beyond the existing annual review) is not going to reveal them to have got better. Meanwhile for many children the increasing demands of schools that ramp up gradually between y5 and y13 will obviously mean that some children will reach the limit of what they can cope with at different times. SEND doesn't imply low intelligence and a highly intelligent child with significant and complex SEND can get quite far through the mainstream system before everything collapses and falls apart.

The only reason I'd consider going through that process is if they took his EHCP away in the first place. Do you think parents want to have to go through all of that just so their child can access education?

If less time was spent on setting children up to fail in settings that weren't appropriate for their needs and parents didn't have to go through that process in the first place, a lot of money would be saved anyway. The issue usually starts with sending children to inappropriate settings in the first place.

Or in my son's case, if they decide that a EHCP isn't necessary because he is currently in mainstream with an EHCP and ignore the fact that it's only due to his EHCP that he can be in mainstream.

If some money was going to be put into paying teachers to work in resource hubs, then I would feel very differently, but it won’t be. The lack of money means that experienced teachers are being hounded out of the job on support plans once they hit UPS so that new teachers can be hired on £20k less. Those same school budgets aren’t going to pay for teachers in a job, when TAs on minimum wage will do.

You are right to be scared-if you’re not, you’re not paying attention.

It’s just another opportunity for them to take the support away.