Email from my child’s infant school uk? I’m sorry but this all seems wrong?

[Frazzledmomma123]

Dear Families,

I wanted to address a concern that has understandably been raised regarding the use of a ‘safe word’ to move children out of the classroom. On reflection, we recognise that terms such as safe word and evacuation can raise anxiety and concern.

We agree that children should not have to leave their own classroom in order to feel safe. However, there are times, though not daily, when moving the class is the safest option for all children. This has happened a few times, and only when absolutely necessary. We fully accept having to go to such measures is a worry, but it is a system that schools are having to turn to more and more. I appreciate this provides little comfort, but hopefully helps you hear that supporting emotional regulation has become a real focus and factor for schools nationally.

The children themselves were involved in choosing the word, and the purpose was to minimise panic and keep the situation calm if it needed to be used. Our aim is always for every child to feel safe, happy, and able to learn in their classroom, as is their right. We are putting a range of steps and strategies in place to work towards this, and we do not intend this approach to become the “go‑to.”

We also want to reassure you that we are supporting children to understand that behaviour is a communication of feelings, but the way those feelings are shown must still be safe and appropriate. We do not condone unsafe behaviour, and we share parents’ concerns about children seeing this as “normal.” I have spoken with the class to reiterate that message and reminded them that they should always talk to a trusted adult if they feel unsure or worried. In school, children choose five trusted adults; it may be helpful to have a similar conversation at home about who your child feels they can talk to at school.

We are very aware that things are challenging at the moment. We do not want this to continue, and we are actively putting support in place to help all children feel safe and settled in their learning environment.

Thank you for reading, please keep speaking to us about your concerns.

Many teachers have a poor knowledge of SEN law.

"The majority of children who are violent and disruptive are NOT disabled and these children also need moving to another type of school which is set up specifically to cope with those problems which need a totally different approach because their behaviour is caused by social issues not disability."

@Eridian - what have you based this assertions on?

"Need" is not always exactly the same as "cause". Many children with FASD have very similar difficulties to some autistic children. Some of the needs will be the same, require similar provisions but have entirely different causes.

I'm an ex teacher

Also, while there is much overlap, the definitions of disability and SEN are slightly different legally, so technically a CYP can be disabled and not have SEN and vice versa.

No, I understand what the legal definition of SEND covers. That’s the problem.

A large amount of the funding that was meant for children with disabilities is being siphoned off to deal with behavioural issues from children who don’t have any disabilities and are being falsely included under this same umbrella, and therefore having their behaviours excused when a completely different approach needs to be taken with social services involvement with their families rather than the problem being lumped off into schools, and appropriate separate educational facilities for violent and disruptive pupils with behavioural issues to be moved to with intensive support and properly trained staff working with social workers and mental health staff to deal with their issues without this disrupting education for everyone else.

Children who have behavioural issues in schools due to their disabilities are a different case and should be dealt with as such. The approach for them needs to be entirely different and the funding and support should be kept separate. The point I was making about this was precisely that the lumping them together under the same umbrella as now is completely inappropriate, that disabled children are often stigmatised for behavioural problems in schools that largely have nothing to do with disabilities, that disabled children who DO have behavioural problems often have their families blamed initially rather than the underlying cause (inappropriate school environment for them) addressed in a timely fashion, and means that the very different approaches to deal appropriately with the different underlying causes in these two different circumstances and therefore make appropriate interventions in each case are not clearly separated. This also means that funding is inappropriately allocated and many disabled children who don’t have behavioural issues in school don’t get the help that is meant to be funded for them because instead a large proportion of this is being used for non-disabled children who have social/ family problems leading to behaviour issues, which is unacceptable and needs to change as this should be dealt with via social care budgets etc not via education budgets for disabilities.

These issues - although clearly just by chance there will be some overlap as dysfunctional families will sometimes also by chance have children who do have medical issues - need to be clearly identified and dealt with separately because they require different interventions and responses from the education system. It helps nobody to pretend they are the same. In fact, it’s hugely damaging to large numbers of children and their families and prevents appropriate responses taking place, as well as misdirecting funding.

Some DC with SEN not receiving the support they need is not the fault of other DC with SEN who are receiving support.

It isn’t helpful to blame other DC with SEN or their families just because your DC aren’t receiving the support they need. Neither is it helpful to pit one presentation of SEN against another.

Those other children still have SEN. You may not agree they do, but they do. They haven’t been falsely included no matter how much you want to think they have. They are just as entitled to SEP as your DC. Their families are entitled to pursue the support required and enforce it just as much as you are.

On the one hand you wrongly say such pupils are falsely included under the SEN term but then you want them to have “appropriate separate educational facilities” with “intensive support” from “trained staff”. That is specialist provision. That is SEP.

Schools have historically done a pretty poor job of determining which children have SEND (particularly autism and ADHD) and which are "just naughty" because of poor parenting. This is not only because there are so many different factors at play (can you not see how many children for which both are true?), but also because biases are significant. Black children are disproportionately more likely to be labelled "naughty not needy" and white children given an autism diagnosis to understand the exact same behaviours.

It's just not true that there is no link / correlation between SEND and challenging behaviour or that most violent incidents in the classroom are from socially deprived neurotypical children. Usually over 80% of children in the PRUs I've been in have identified SEND and are neurodivergent. There's actual reasons for this, that I've said previously- sensiry overwhelm, lack of understanding, inability to communicate need etc.

Having worked with lots of children, in lots of different settings, I can barely count a handful of children with violent challenging behaviour who didn't have SEND.

It's a real phenomenon. It absolutely does not mean all children with SEND are violent, but we can't just pretend this stuff isn't true.

Thank you - put better than I managed.

Well now you are falling into a diagnosis-based assessment which you (rightly, although obviously it is clear I was never arguing otherwise) rejected. My entire point is that you cannot ascertain the support needed by a child by presentation. Saying a child is “autistic” tells you nothing. Just like saying they are asthmatic tells you nothing about how it affects them personally, or epileptic, or have allergies, or have learning difficulties. You have to understand the specific impact of the condition on the specific child, hence things being needs-based.

But in a broader sense of course it is necessary to understand the cause of the child’s difficulties in order to have a hope of understanding how this impacts the specific child and designing appropriate educational provision for them. This requires the detailed EHCP assessment by specialists. How can you possibly know how to help a child if you don’t know even the basic information about whether their difficulties are caused by abuse and neglect, or instead they have a loving family and a medical disability?

School staff only see outward presentation and behaviours. They have absolutely no idea what the causes are or what the child needs as a response because they are not medical specialists. Needs-based doesn’t mean “based on presentation and behaviour in school”. It means a thorough assessment of the child’s difficulties and what is causing them by qualified specialists is required in order to establish what would actually HELP the specific child, which cannot be determined by what teachers who know nothing about their medical conditions (or absence of medical conditions, in the case of difficulties being caused by social/ family problems) because teachers are not doctors. That’s the whole point of the 2014 laws and EHCP assessment process. There’s nothing wrong with these laws, they’re entirely sensible and would have worked very well to establish, based on needs, which children could manage in mainstream schools and with what support/ adjustments when this is appropriate and which children should be in other settings and what kind of setting if these laws had ever been funded and implemented properly, rather than parents having to engage in years long legal battles in individual cases to fight against LA attempts to circumvent the law in almost every case for as long as it possibly can to save money, because there are no financial penalties or other penalities for breaking the law like this deliberately and systemically so they are financially incentivised to do so.

It’s not the current law that needs changing, it’s that it needs to finally be implemented properly, with sufficient placements at alternative settings for the children who need them being put in place, and those settings being differentiated properly to meet different kinds of needs that can’t be met in mainstream schools (because currently for some children no mainstream or specialist setting to meet their needs exists at all). And for support for those children who CAN be in mainstream schools with help to be put in place in a timely manner as the law states, not delayed for years via Local Authorities deliberately obstructing it and the child’s difficulties then escalating during the delay of years while tribunals take place, and other children in their class also suffering in the interim as a result.

But no functional system is ever going to be in place without the detailed assessments of the child’s specific problems and what is causing them and why, hence the law being designed as it is with such assessments being mandated. Removing these assessments will mean school staff who are unqualified to do so categorising children and guessing what their problems are and why they are having difficulties and what to do about it. Then having no money to actually do what they guess might help (which will often be wrong) and no way for parents of schools to appeal for the child to be moved out of mainstream school where this is clearly inappropriate and the LA refuses to do it (which as we know from the current tribunal statistics, is in almost all cases already, and in 98% of those cases they are subsequently found by the tribunal to be wrong about this. Removing the right to take them to tribunal to rectify this won’t stop them being wrong about it, it will just mean all of those children who shouldn’t be in mainstream school remain there).

Yep. I completely agree.

My son is severely physically disabled and incontinent and attends mainstream with an EHCP which includes 2:1 support. I'm worried that because he can cope in mainstream that he will be deemed not disabled 'enough' and his EHCP will be removed at his next transition which is high school without any consideration that the only reason he can cope in mainstream is because of his EHCP and the support it means he gets because of it.

I'm a teacher. I've got an excellent knowledge of SEN law (I agree most teachers don't - there's no requirement to have).

It makes bugger all difference at work!

@eridian,your post makes a lot of sense. It articulates how disturbing I find all this as a subject teacher.

There aren't enough subject teachers anyway. There certainly aren't spare ones to pop into a unit or base and teach a bit of e g. GCSE Geography. At best you might get a cover supervisor who will hand out work (which is what might happen already in internal isolation). Such work often doesn't get done, and certainly very rarely makes its way back to the teacher. When the work is requested at short notice all you can really do is provide a revision guide. Even a worksheet often needs supporting resources or someone to give some context.

It’s not the current law that needs changing, it’s that it needs to finally be implemented properly

Agreed. That means using the actual legal definition of SEN, not what you want it to be. So that means recognising those DC who you say have been falsely included under the SEN term as actually having SEN as they meet the legal definition.

@Phineyj my post was in relation to pp saying ‘ask teachers’ rather than about any practical teaching in schools.

Yes, I understood. I wanted to add that if classroom teachers were meant, it's not really to do with knowledge anyway but with a system that ignores anything short of a crisis. Even then it requires extremely assertive parents.

My attempted SEN referrals disappear into a void!

I didn’t say there was no correlation. Clearly there is some overlap, just due to statistical distribution of social issues and disabilities throughout the population, and then a further level of overlap where SOME children with disabilities will have behavioural issues caused by those disabilities, as I’ve stated multiple times if you’d actually read my comments.

It is extremely tiresome having people try to misrepresent perfectly clearly written and nuanced comments that highlight the various factors involved and the overlaps but also highlight the fact that in the large majority of cases there is not an overlap.

Your latest comment about racial discrimination and false perceptions and assumptions serves to further emphasise my point that it would be wholly inappropriate for unqualified teaching staff (who are trained to teach, not to do medical or psychological assessments, and are therefore likely to be far more susceptible to such biases and are only able to make surface level observations based on behaviour and outward presentation which can be very misleading, and only in one specific environment: school. People who have no medical knowledge. Therefore, obviously, extremely limited ability to identify why any particular child is struggling and without this no ability to identify what is the appropriate action to take) it’s imperative that there is a robust assessment by medical specialists and child psychologists etc to ascertain the actual cause of the child’s difficulties so that appropriate support for them can be put in place that actually addresses the causes of their problems - ie. The EHCP process.

The idea that these thorough assessments, which weed out as much as is possible these biases within a human system via multi-disciplinary assessments by numerous specialists who are actually qualified to assess the causes of particular difficulties of a specific child using proper medical statistically validated assessment techniques and models that are actually comparable and statistically validated rather than based on the perception and opinion of a particular teacher - who, let’s be honest, barely knows most children in their class because they have classes of 30 and hardly ever spend time with a child 1:1 and obviously only ever see them in school! - can be replaced by schools “categorising” children into broad groups without having a clue even WHY they are struggling is for the birds, frankly.

Poor birds.

Obviously nothing is set in stone, but looking at the proposed timetable for transition, from previous threads I think your DS is old enough that he will be safe for phase transfer to secondary. If the proposed timetable is what actually happens, transition for him will be while he is in secondary school.

The other advantage specialists have is their caseload. A teacher might only teach a few kids with situational mutism in their career (I've taught fewer than 5 in 15 years). No doubt a SaLT sees such kids daily.

Thanks.

No-one is trying to misinterpret anything . Just because people disagree with you doesn’t mean they are misinterpreting your posts.

Completely mad. Not to mention discriminatory.

Thank you. I honestly don’t know how you are coping with your job in these current circumstances, and I fear this will get far, far worse for all children and teachers.

It’s really depressing to have had people attacking me for raising the issues that seem so clear to me through talking to my many friends who are teachers, the SEND lawyers and advocates who I have been working with for the last few years to try to get support for my children in place, discussions with the ASC team at the LA here and with our school’s SENCO, as well as my children’s psychologist, educational psychologist, SALT and all of the other professionals I know (unfortunately too well) who are regularly involved in this process.

I’ve tried on this thread to explain what it happening to the parents of children who don’t have disabilities and to encourage them to respond to the consultation to try to stop these reforms which will make things ten times worse for their children as well as children with disabilities and for teachers.

I understand why so many people are angry having lived through this myself and watched my children disintegrate in front of my eyes since starting school, the law broken over and over again with no consequences for those doing it, all of it costing me tens of thousands of pounds and trashing my physical health and career as well as my children’s mental health and education.

I also understand why parents whose children aren’t disabled are angry seeing the education destroyed for everyone by this refusal by Local Authorities and schools to comply with the law, and then being fed news articles blaming disabled children and their families, or making fake claims of “over diagnosis”.

I had hoped that this thread might open the eyes of some of the parents of non-disabled children to what is going wrong so they can stand up with teachers and the parents of disabled children to stop these damaging proposals being enacted which will make everything so much worse for everyone, so it’s disheartening that all it has resulted in is people trying to misrepresent my comments and start an argument which I have neither the time or inclination to get involved in, given the whole point of my posts was to try to bring people together to ensure that the Education Secretary isn’t able to make things even worse than they are currently.

No-one has attacked you, tried to misrepresent your comments or start an argument.

This is a big wall of text! Unlikely anyone is going to go through this point by point, I'm certainly not.

You say "School staff only see outward presentation and behaviours. They have absolutely no idea what the causes are or what the child needs as a response because they are not medical specialists." However you also say that you are very confident that most violent challenging behaviour in classrooms is caused by neurotypical children from neglectful and abusive homes. Your only evidence for this was to tell me to talk to teachers. So which is it? The teachers know the true causes or they have *"absolutely no idea what the causes are".

I understand you want to distance your own (nonviolent) autistic children from children with SEND who are violent but you can't just say this other group actually don't have SEND. You're falling right into the trap of the "real SEND" vs "shit parenting" narrative, you've already used the term "diverting funding". Don't fall for it, there's no guarantee your children will come out of this ok. In fact, they very much might not as "most complex" is starting to be used to exclusively mean "learning disabled" and you could see your own kids pushed out of the "real SEND" category in the public narrative. That and school trauma responses and masking can look a lot like trauma responses to ACEs / chaotic home life - it might not be all that long before people (wrongly) start saying that children who present that way mostly have abusive parents because teachers think so.

The SEND community is stronger together.

I’m so sorry. The same worry here. Finally now one of my children has an EHCP. They are still in mainstream currently even though the school has stated neither it nor any other mainstream state school can meet their needs due to the unchangeable aspects of the mainstream state school environment. No SEN school can, either. So DC should be being transferred to a private school, which would cost less than half as much as them being where they are with a 1:1 to supervise them NOT being in class all day (despite being gifted and talented) because there are too many people in the class for them to cope. But LA has dragged its heels despite this costing them far more so they continue either not going to school at all or not being in class.

If they then FINALLY get transferred to somewhere they can learn and then this is taken away at secondary transfer, by the time it is reassessed and put back in place their entire education will be trashed and they’ll end up with NO qualifications rather than likely straight A*s in an appropriate setting.

I can’t see what possible justification there is to remove EHCPs that take years to put in place just because a child has reached an arbitrary point in the school structure where they move from primary to secondary. It’s insane. Children like yours and mine will all have their educations destroyed by this.

Sorry, did you say you were a teacher? And you consider 5 paragraphs to be a”wall of text”?

If you can’t be bothered to read what someone has written then why engage in the discussion? And why respond to me if you admit you haven’t even read what I’ve written (which would explain some of your previous responses to me which clearly evidenced you hadn’t read the previous comments you were responding to, either). This makes any attempt at discussion with you utterly pointless because you have been responding to things you have made up which are the opposite of what I have actually said, or just single sentences taken out of context and therefore you’ve misunderstood the comments because you hadn’t actually read them, so forgive me if I extend you a similar courtesy and don’t bother reading further comments from you. And, since you have misrepresented multiple times what I’ve actually written and instead therefore seem to be arguing with yourself, I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from responding to my own comments further given there’s no point in you doing so without having actually read them.