Are neurotypical kids being left behind?

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A contentious question but with a lot of information in the media just now about funding for SEND kids and a push in the next few years for more neurodivergent kids to be expected to manage with an unclear level of support in mainstream, what does this mean for neurotypical children who are often not mentioned?

I can only speak from my own experience and obviously this does not apply to all cases nor is it a generalisation of all SEND kids but my child’s class has a lot of disruption in their class from SEND children who currently do have support including violent outbursts, screaming, throwing things during lessons etc

They say up to 40% of kids within a class now have additional support needs and for the kids who do not, it feels like they are considered less and less.

It doesn’t seem like the education system is working for anyone and I’d argue the new white paper is just as worrying for neurotypical children as it is neurodivergent as inclusion in mainstream, in my view and experience, is not working for the most part.

I appreciate how hard it must be for parents of children with additional needs and the fight that it involved but are neurotypical children being left behind in a school system where most of a teachers energy has to go into managing behaviours which will
only get worse with potentially less support in the years to come?

As a KS1 teacher, yes. My class this year has been so disruptive. Lessons are constantly interrupted by a small number of children, none of whom are diagnosed with anything. The rest of the class gets to watch whilst the adults are assaulted and eventually the child is removed to outside. Then I sit back down and try to continue my lesson whilst the screams continue outside. I have no idea where I'm up to in the lesson, I'm flustered and stressed, and the whole lesson suffers as a result.

Why are there so many children with SEN now?

Yes they are. So are SEND children. Because there have been real terms cuts to school funding every year for the last ten years at least.
I’m a primary school teacher, and I’d say the worst affected neurotypical children are the second lowest group in each class who aren’t low enough for any interventions but aren’t literate enough to be independent.
there’s literally no time in my day I can help them, unless I take them in from beaktimes early, which I’m not prepared to do because they need to play.
This generation have been totally failed by consecutive governments coupled with the impact of tech and the internet and parents who no longer parent their children. Add to this a curriculum that is not fit for purpose in school buildings that are falling apart.

I work in a small village school with 94pupils. I cannot remember the last time a day went by without at least one full on physical fight between children and/or an adult being hurt. This is BY both SEN and neurotypical kids, we get a lot of parents who encourage violence “in self defence” or to defend a sibling, and parents who take their child’s lies as the truth about such incidents so don’t reprimand them at home. The result is no consequences for kicking/punching/spitting at staff and pupils.
today I had a neurotypical child throw their pencil case at me and scream in my face because I insisted he write the date in his book, scream at me to F off and refuse to leave the room.
I’d say my current class are average behaviour wise, not the worst in the school, but I estimate at least 1hour of lost learning every day as a result of poor behaviour by pupils.

I dont think the inclusion hubs idea intended for the majority of schools are particularly for the benefit of sen children. I think they are as much about removing disruptive children from the classroom for the benefit of the other children, without the full expense of a special school which would probaly be more appropriate.

(If they end up properly staffed and resourced then they will also be for the sen children)

Yes why? People keep saying it’s because we are now more aware and children are diagnosed now but this level of disruption just didn’t happen 20 years ago. Even if undiagnosed children were in class. So what’s changed?

They won’t be properly staffed or resourced because there is no money, or at least the government don’t want to spend money on this. If they did, they would expand or build more specialist schools and create specialist SEN teacher training programmes like a PGCE for teachers who have a passion to work with complex children.

It’s not a new thing though, when I was young disruptive kids would stop the class, none of them had sen. If you breakdown a class group into eg people working hard, those not quite getting it, those not paying attention and those who are out to disrupt, Id guess it’s all always been similar. And each cohort are losing out in one way or another and would benefit from the dream scenario of a smaller class size and the ability of teachers to help one to one and yet still keep them in a big enough group that they get the right socialisation for them.

There are other chats about this but the short version is
societal:
two working parents not one/increase in single parent households plus breakdown of the traditional tribe of carers around a child growing up

different childhoods now, less time in nature less face to face interactions under age five, less participation in talking/reading/singing=decreased exposure to language and non verbal communication/socialisation as well as less ability to regulate

screen time and technology

permissive or lazy parenting, lack of boundaries, lowering of standards eg children not potty trained/can’t talk/can’t sit down and eat with a knife and fork. Eg when did you last go into a restaurant and see children at the table without devices?

less physical play under five = less motor skills when they start

so id say it’s an overall lowering of all standards across the board for children. Alongside this, parents and society don’t back schools up so any bad behaviour goes unchecked

Yes(teacher)so much time is wasted managing behaviour of children who are neurodivergent. Also, we’re specifically told to focus our teaching and questioning on the bottom 10% of children in our class.
Not a surprise that the able children are losing their love of learning and become bored as they never get asked questions, so they lose their enthusiasm.

It’s also because the new curriculum in 2014 front loaded a lot of formal learning before children are ready, so lots of these behaviours are because we are expecting five year olds to sit down and write sentences and eight year olds to do long multiplication, plus children are now assessed every half term in schools so are much more pressured than before

I suspect a lot of the "extra" SEN children have PANDAS/PANS as a result of their immune systems having not had the opportunity to develop properly during the covid years. The kids we are seeing come through school often didn't get so much as a cold for a year or more which didn't allow their immune system to develop normally. Now they are misfiring and creating neurological symptoms which can look an awful lot like neurodivergence or plain old bad behaviour.

Unfortunately it is very hard to get it recognised on the NHS, and so children are not getting diagnosed or treated. Which is a tragedy because for many children it is entirely treatable or even curable.

What teachers thought might be autism in my child turned out to be PANDAS. His apparent ND traits were resolved by antiobiotics and steroids. But we were lucky. We could afford the thousands it cost us to get him diagnosed. The treatment itself was cheap.

If we hadn't I suspect he would have been diagnosed as autistic in due course. Or maybe just written off as naughty as he continued to spiral downwards. Now he is doing so much better and teachers are no longer expressing any concerns.

There are very few specialists in this area, but they are privately saying that they're seeing a huge increase post covid. But they don't have the funding or support to do the studies to prove it.

I think all are being failed. I don’t think it is just one sub-section who are being left behind.

Can I also point out, some NT DC still have SEN. SEN and ND are not synonyms. DC can have SEN and be NT. I think SEN cohort who are not ND often get forgotten about.

Although there hasn’t been as huge an increase in recent years as some people like to portray. The most recent statistics released last year show 19.5% of pupils have SEN. In 2010, so before EHCPs, it was 20.9% or 21.1% (depending on which statistics you look at - I think it is a rounding issue adding up SA, SA+ and SSEN (anyone seeing resemblances to targeted, targeted plus and specialist?)). In 2005, it was 18%. Going back several decades to the Warnock report in 1978, “some 20% appeared to need some form of special educational help. This may even be an underestimate…”

This really has been my experience. Within my child’s class they have dealt with frequent violent outbursts, persistent disruption, frequent attempts to abscond, and on and on. The class has been taken several times by the TA as the teacher tries to grapple with a handful of children who are just not suited to a classroom environment.
I don’t blame them, but what about those children wishing to learn in a calm atmosphere? My very timid 5 year old was left hating the chaotic school environment.
I really can’t see that there are any winners at all.

Yes. The level of disruption is absolutely unacceptable. I’m also beyond pissed off that my daughters school use an ‘umbrella’ policy where if the same handful of children cause issues, the whole class suffer and lose privileges they’ve all worked hard for.
It’s a real issue at the moment in my kids school.

Yes they are. I’m a teacher.

Yes!

My son always had.to be given extra extension work by teachers, that's hardly a new thing. DH and I were both moved up a year at our respective schools but found that hard socially (and it didn't really fix the work being too easy issue). We'd have happily bought in workbooks from home

Primary school teacher here and yes OP it is crowd control and constant interruptions. Everyone on high alert and feeling anxious. The whole class can be at the mercy of one child every single day and it is relentless, exhausting and soul destroying and it's not fair on any of the kids, the disruptive child included.

Inclusion doesn’t work much.

Whether it’s the least worst option I don’t know.

Not sure how you justify megabucks on unfixable ND, absolutely no idea how to tell the horrified parents that. I’d be livid too. But ND doesn’t make you more important than your classmates.

I've 2 NT and 1 ND. The NT DC are doing great in education, no concerns at all. One of the NT had additional smaller class sizes for maths in primary with other children working above the expected level, in secondary he has an extra curicular programme for children who were working above average. ND child is doing okay considering but he does have 1:1 support. I suppose it depends on the school, some seem to manage to cater to a wide range of needs.

Quite an ignorant post there. By Unfixable do you mean someone doesn't stop being ND? That would be correct, but it doesn't mean they can't learn and achieve. They just may need a different approach and/or extra support to manage.

I am a primary school teacher and parent of two ND DC. IMO the current system doesn't work for anyone. I teach KS1. In almost all.of our classes we have at least one very high needs student who may be unintentionally disruptive. There is almost no support in planning for or providing resources for these students even when they have an EHCP. Most of them would get an education much better suited to their needs. If a student is non-verbal and at a developmental stage of 18 months they need specialist communication provision and access to a range of early years amd proper sensory resources, not being stuck in the corner of a mainstream classroom with a few puzzles and playdough (often paid for out of the teacher's own pocket IME).

If a child is completely dysregulated within the mainstream environment then they need a much smaller, less pressured specialist environment where they are emotionally ready to access learning. Sadly some children display their dysregulation by becoming physically aggressive and disruptive which must be awful for them and often completely stops the learning of everyone else.

Then you have other ND kids who are capable of accessing the learning but become low-level disruptive or anxious because of the rigid and overly packed nature of the school structure and curriculum. Even in KS1 the curriculum is packed and dull. Phonics lessons twice a day. The whole morning packed with reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, maths. Even the curriculum for the foundation subjects is completely based on learning and retaining facts rather than exploring and developing skills. When I started teaching 20+ years ago things were far from perfect but the curriculum at least allowed for much more creativity and practical activities so children were often more engaged in their learning.

As for secondary schools, the archaic curriculum and rigid behaviour policies and uniform make them unpleasant places for the majority of students. The ones who are ND often can't cope at all, which is why I have a 16 year old who is perfectly academically capable and would never disrupt anyone else's learning who can't be in school at all.

We need an overhaul of the whole system. Changes made to support ND students.would undoubtedly benefit all other students too.

I've 2 SEND kids. DS1 autistic, intelligent and introverted. Inclusion didn't work for him either because he couldn't focus and do his work in a noisy, disruptive environment, often due to kids with different SEN to his. He went to a specialist STEM secondary and did much better there because there were more kids like him. It was one of those rather strict, zero tolerance kind of schools, which I know some people on here say is bad for SEN kids, but actually because DS1 likes rules and consistency, it was good for him.

DS2 is AuDHD and not as academic, masked less in school than DS1 and he was probably one of the disruptive ones early on. The school's strategy was send him to a "quiet room" but that made things worse. Then we moved out to a rural area and he went to the small village primary. Smaller class sizes, teachers knew the kids and families well. The school had a lot of parent and grandparent volunteers who came in to do things like reading practice with the kids, so adult supervision levels were high. We got our animals then too and I had DS2 up with me before school doing feeding and watering and things. Meant he wasn't an absolute livewire with energy to burn by the time he got into class.

DC are 16 and 19 now and they were not seeing anything like the kind of SEN I see described on here though. There weren't kids in nappies or with multiple and complex physical, emotional and educational needs for teachers to manage with very little TA support.

Excellent point I fully support.
veryfewchildren have a positive experience now and probably not many teachers.
the Labour government are ruining lots of services and have now turned to education