Do you want to lose your right to appeal for a suitable school for your child with SEND?

[GenialHarrietGrouty]

This is one of the proposals in the Government consultation on SEND. You will be able to appeal against the school named, but if the tribunal finds that it was unreasonable for the local authority to name whichever school it has named, the tribunal won't be able to order that your preferred school be named. Instead the LA will be ordered to go away and think again, and it is perfectly possible for it to name the same school. So you could be trapped in an unending spiral of appeals with nothing being resolved.

They are also proposing to take away the right to appeal against the refusal to send an EHCP after an annual review and indeed to take away all annual reviews other than for change to a new phase of education. So if, say, your child's school placement is about to break down and you feel they urgently need better support, where you would now ask for an emergency review, that won't be possible.

Perhaps most seriously, your child's day to day support will be defined only through an individual support plan drawn up by the school, with no right to appeal to an expert tribunal if you disagree with it. Instead, you can go through your school's complaints process where it will be dealt with by governors with no expertise in SEND plus a supposed SEND "expert" who may be something like a SENCO in another local school. That's if the school can recruit governors willing to spend all their time on such panels, of course.

Just a few of the worrying aspects of the White Paper. If you don't agree with this, please respond to the constellation - full details on the thread about this.

Deadline for responding tomorrow at midnight. Full details of white paper and how to respond on this thread - https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/special_educational_needs/5530447-send-consultation-deadline-at-1159pm-on-monday-18th-may

It won't be much use being able to compare schools if the reforms go through as planned, because your right to choose will be severely limited.

It's vital that as many people as possible respond to the consultation, otherwise the DfE will interpret silence as agreement to everything.

This is very worrying as my son will be in a phase transfer year in September 2030. He is currently in Y1 with an EHCP. He is at possibly the most progressive/understanding mainstream primary school in the city where I live and he is thriving. It is too soon to know what he will be like when he is older. I suspect he will fall down the gap between being too autistic to manage at the local massive mainstream secondary academy which has a diabolical reputation for SEN and special school. Many of the local maintained/academy special schools do not do GCSEs or if they do its Maths and English only. Its only specialist independent schools that seem to take more academically able students and offer more GCSEs.

I can foresee that I may well have to home educate my child from Y7 if the white paper become law and SENDIST lost the ability to name a school. The LA will name the local awful secondary and my son will spend all of his time stimming, flapping and spinning in an ‘inclusion room’ not being taught. This is a child that is expected to to get full marks on his phonics screening check next week and is note than able to access a mainstream curriculum wit the right support.

Have you contacted your MP about it? The more MPs, especially Labour MPs, who are alerted to the dangers of these proposals, the better.