Webchat about educational provision for children with SEN on Wednesday 18th August 12.30pm

[JuliaMumsnet]

Hello

We’re delighted to announce a webchat with Ms Alice De Coverley. Alice de Coverley is a specialist education, equality and public law barrister. She has notable expertise in cases involving special educational needs, school exclusions, child sexual abuse and discrimination. Alice acts on behalf of children and young people, vulnerable adults, parents and carers, schools, local authorities, charities and NGOs, government departments, students, and universities. She is ranked by legal researchers at Chambers and Partners UK and the Legal 500, and is described in these directories as “very knowledgeable and passionate” barrister. She is also on the Legal Reference Panel for the Centre For Women’s Justice, and the co-author of “A Practical Guide to School Exclusions” and contributing author to “Patterson and Karim on Judicial Review”

Alice has kindly agreed to join us for a webchat to answer your questions about the getting appropriate educational provision for children with SEN and/or disabilities. As always when we ask experts to talk to MNers about legal matters, there will be a limit to how specific her advice can be, but she's been recommended to us in glowing terms and we hope the webchat will help to provide good general advice for parents and carers.

Please join us here on Wednesday at 12:30pm. The webchat will last one hour. If you can’t join us on the day, please leave your question here in advance.

Please remember our webchat guidelines - one question per user, follow-ups only if there’s time and most questions have been answered, and please keep it civil.

Many thanks,

MNHQ

Thank you for replying, Alice, it has been interesting reading.

Apologies, reading back I can see my question could have been clearer. I was thinking more along the lines of your suggestions rather than the more involved science practicals taking place at home. I would like my house to remain standing, and DS1 doesn't need any encouragement to cause chaos! It is reassuring to know it could be possible and is worth pursuing further. Thank you again.

Interesting and useful thread, thank you!

10greenbottles, do you think it'd be worth looking to see if the Open University could help? They have (or at least they used to) facilities for science practicals for students studying mostly remotely, and the recent magazine I got from them made great play of their access arrangements (I realise DC may be too young).

Thank you @AlicedeCoverley - really helpful advice.

OneinNine the LA can't force the NHS to provide provision. However, if therapies (e.g. CBT, art/Lego/music/play/equine... therapy, OT, SALT, physio) are specified and quantified in section F, as they should be because anything that "educates or trains" should be, if the NHS won't provide them the LA must commission independent provision. If they don't/won't you can enforce it, via Judicial Review if necessary.

Sometimes you will find the NHS change their mind once provision is included in an EHCP and conversations are had behind the scene.

Phineyj that's a good idea for the future, at the moment DS1 is too young (nearly 12 but socially and emotionally 5/6) for their courses and wouldn't cope in a group situation.

It's not necessarily about finding someone to deliver the practicals, but more somewhere willing to let DS and the science tutor (or another science tutor if they aren't willing) use their lab space and equipment, so maybe it is worth contacting the Open University and the nearest universities as well as local schools.

Try posting on the Staffroom thread. Perhaps a kindly Science teacher might have suggestions. I'm not Science unfortunately.

@OneinNine my child's EHCP specifies provision in section F that local NHS/LA don't offer. The LA fund independent specialists instead.

The LA did try to argue, during the Working Document stage, that the interventions and expertise our expert reports said he needed aren't offered locally as a means to close down the request, but I was advised (by Alice, in fact) that the only way to defeat expert reports specifying provision is to have countering medical evidence that that provision is medically or educationally ineffective, and as what we sought is well established as helpful, that didn't apply.

It's irrelevant if they can get an NHS or LA person to provide it; they have to fund it if the Tribunal order it (or the LA concede over it), and with expert reports specifying that it's the best way to meet an identified need, then most of the time a Tribunal will order it.

It matters which section the provision is in, as to who is responsible. IPSEA have a page on how it works, and what to do, here.

@perfectstorm

Hi Alice, and thank you for doing this.

In the years I've been on Mumsnet, there's a real pattern. Women post that their child is really struggling and in a very bad way when at home, but totally fine in school. Over and over, people say that their child's school school insist all is going well there, and parenting courses are then suggested. The parents question themselves, do the courses to no avail, and while their gut tells them there's something really serious going on, at the same time they worry that the school's right and 'it must be mum'.

Almost always, things reach a crisis and the child becomes so overwhelmed and overloaded that they lose it in school, or an acute mental health crisis develops, and the problems are suddenly obvious to everyone. But to an extent it's too late, because by then the child has already been harmed by all the lost years. An EHCP assessment gets underway, because the child's disability has stopped only harming them, and started to impact people outside the family, and the assessments almost always find significant unmet needs, and mental health damage that could have been reduced or even avoided had anyone listened in time.

Everyone always says early intervention is key, but nobody with any clout listens to the mother until the intervention is, by definition, late and triggered by the damage that's by now been done coming out in the child's behaviour outside their own home.

So as someone to whom the above must be as familiar as it is to us: if you could go back in time and speak to parents when they first start trying to tell the school, what would you tell them to do? As people who, individually, can't change the system in time for that child, what can they do within it as it presently stands, to try to get their child effective help before terrible damage is done?

This question!

My daughter is almost 4 and diagnosed with "High functioning " autism, incredible expressive language and she masks like a professional at nursery.

At home her anxiety is unleashed and she is driven to be in control, causing demand avoidance. Her distress caused by her high anxiety levels is heartbreaking for us to see.

How do I communicate with professionals to get them to listen to our concerns for her, without shutting us down as anxious and over protective parents?

Thank you!

Give me advice on finding a school for physically impaired youngsters who are able to learn properly without help.

Thank you for the comments. Actually, for us it's too late as ds2 is now nearly nineteen but my question was really for people who might have been in our situation eight years ago. I guess part of our problem was that whilst CAMHS documented difficulties they never wrote down a strategy of therapeutic work to help that could have been incorporated into the EHCP plan. Maybe we should have got private reports done.

OneinNine unless DS is going on to HE now then there's still time as the EHCP can go up to 25.

Languagelover do you have any ARPs within travelling distance? Or any MS that are fully accessible?