I agree that it totally varies, I also believe that special needs not special needs is a meaningless divide - that there is a spectrum. Some DCare far enough along the spectrum to be labelled and some are not.
THe DS I am talking about on this thread is actually DS2. DS1 is what everybody labels as special needs - he has a diagnosed condition (Lissencephaly - which means smooth brain) occasioned by a random genetic mutation, which in practice means that, despite being almost 17, he has the capability of (at best) a 5-7 month baby). He cannot walk, he cannot talk, he has regular epileptic fitting, and his (special) schooling involves physiotherapy and hydrotherapy and eye gaze machines. That is the extreme end of the special needs spectrum.
But at the other end, DC blend into the normal spectrum, which is also a spectrum. A lot of parents of special needs children end up fighting for special consideration, because they are so much closer to the norm that the council does not want to spend money on them. The council doesn't want to spend money on my DS1 either, but certain things it can't argue, like the need for a statement.
As well as dealing with epileptic fitting at night, daily care and the management of such and the stresses and strains of hospital visits for DS1, and the borderline ADD/ADHD of DS2 (will CAMUS take us seriously, i don't know, we shall see, he has so many compensatory strengths that means that they may not be prepared to offer any support), I am also dealing with issues with DD, who is in Year 7. But with DD, I am suspicious that a lot of that is undermaturity. She is a summer baby, and if they had been saying you could keep them back when she was iin nursery, I might have done just that. I am now thinking seriously about taking her out at the end of Year 8, giving her a year of "home schooling", and putting her back into Year 9 a year later, as I really wonder whether that might not resolve a lot of the issues, giving her the maturity to face GCSEs with much less assistance than I am putting into her Year 7. I really don't feel she was ready for a week of exams (three exams a day) which she just had this week, and the idea of independent revision was completely foreign to her, and yet there was reasonably little support from school - Math teacher: go look at the text book, work out what you are weak at, and practice that for an end of year exam on every thing they have done during the year! I don't know about the others in the class, but my 11 year old is just not capable of doing that. So I ended up doing up for her a practice paper, with questions from each of the topics she had covered during the year (culled mostly from flicking through her workbook), and she sat down with it, and we then worked out which of the topics she was on top of and which she wasn't. And those she wasn't we did more practice and I explained them a bit more, and then she trotted off to the two maths papers she had this week with reasonable confidence. Without that, I suspect her grades would end up being very significantly lower than I am hoping they would be, and then she would have told me she is "rubbish" at maths (when actually she is a reasonably able mathematician), and that would have become lodged in her head, and I reckon we would have lost another girl/woman to maths. Despite all the other demands, this seemed important enough to me to do (despite the time involved in generating a practice paper from scratch). But if she had been able to go to the textbook and work out what she was weak at (fractions, indices, but not angles), then I would have been thrilled to let her just get on and do it.