Has our views on disabled children changed?

[Ktbbzxx]

Hello, my names Katie and I am a trainee teacher writing a dissertation on today?s views of disabilities.

What are your views on the rights of children with disabilities?
Is it different to what you remember from your own childhood?

Any shared personal experiences or contributions would be great.

Thanks, Katie

It's far worse! My sister had a serious disability but in those days parents were regarded as "experts" on their own children so were listened to when they raised concerns. The automatic assumption that it must be poor parenting just wasn't there, which one less battle for parents to fight and a starting point where teacher and parent were working together to find the best solutions/approaches for a specific child without the endless interference of irrelevant government dierctives from phonics to SATS.

Teachers had the freedom to adapt the curriculum to suit the needs and interests of their classes, so REAL differentiation could take place. They could focus on LEARNING instead of targets that are often totally meaningless (if a kid can't count to 15 @ 15 or read an English newspaper, making them sit in a French lesson is a waste of time - they'd be better off using the time to learn to read english as a very simplistic example of the damage a blanket adherence to the National Curriculum can cause). Teachers were free to adapt to pupils differing learning styles and modes as needed and instantly, not after seeking approval from on high. Oddly while knowledge of many conditions wasn't so freely available, the ability to teach to NEED not dictat meant many children ended up with a FAR better education.

The EYFS actively undermines many varieties of SEN, especially those with sensory or asd spectrum issues & so leaves children far less prepared for formal schooling than they would have been even 10 years ago. The closure of many special schools has meant that those children MOST in need of experienced, well qualified teaching staff are now MOST likely to spend their school days in a corridor with an unqualified teaching assistant. Parents are supposed to accept that this is "integration" with peers, when in fact it makes the child's sense of isolation from their peers so much more hurtful and stark. SEN was removed from standard teacher training in the 80's and nowadays some SENCO's are woefully untrained and unsuited to the role.

In short the right to a decent education for those children with disabilities is one that is FAR harder to obtain than it was 20, even 10 years ago from my perspective.

I think its a tough question to ask a parent who has a child/children with SN's . I have strong views on disabled childrens (and adults) rights but thats because of the way my life is effected now, before i had a child with sn's i guess i didn't really think about it (i didn't have to).

Things have come along a lot sinse i was a child (sn children did not go to ms schools, know one knew what Autism was ect...), people are more aware of sn's.

I think it's a numbers game. There are just so many more kids out there now with SN of all types: partly because medical science mean kids who would have died now live but with high-need disabilities, and partly because of the increase in things like ASD and ADHD which isn't just down to better diagnosis. Only anecdotal, but my mum says she simply didn't see kids with mild ADHD and ASD in her classroom - well, maybe one or two, she recognises now what their behaviour meant - but compared to the numbers in school now, very few. So the total cost of supporting kids with SN has rocketed.

At the same time, the inclusion agenda has pushed kids into mainstream which has taken the support and funding decisions away from people who chose to work with SN for a living and put it in the hands of education departments and governing bodies. So it's not a question of can the Special School squeeze another child in, it's a question of get a new LSA or replace the unsafe bannisters in the Science Block.

Plus the more kids there are in mainstream who shouldn't be there, the more disruptive it is and the harder it is to give them differentiated learning and still carry on with the rest of the class. So children with disabilities in mainstream are in a far more hostile environment: they are a financial burden and a burden in the classroom.

At the same time, the legal rights of children to education & therapy have been tightened up greatly, partly because the internet age makes it easier to know your rights and middle class parents in particular will take LEAs to court and so the law has been clarified by test cases. On paper their rights are clearly better.

So, I think the balance and the mechanics of it has shifted. It used to be about separate schooling where the family had to trust that their benevolent special school knew what they were doing and had the child's best interests at heart - far more like the NHS in this regard, and like the NHS quite often these schools justified parental expectations though if they didn't there wasn't much you could do. Now parents are much more empowered to fight for what their children need, but the problem is that it is only by fighting - and quite probably poisoning your relationship with the school - that your child will get anything approaching what they are now, in theory, legally entitled to but which aren't in the schools' interests to provide.

That's very much an education answer. The situation for NHS and Social Care is simpler. With Social Care it is only about money. Our ageing population take a vast amount of cash from Social Care and not a lot is left over for the increasing number of kids with disabilities. Also less special schools means less residential schools so more burden on families. With NHS it's hit-and-miss: the miracle life-saving stuff is improved beyond recognition, of course, and very often there seems to be budget for expensive scans and operations. But what kids with disabilities need on a regular basis is therapy and the budgets aren't funded to provide it for increased numbers. The Physio, OT (occupational therapy) and SALT (Speech and Language Therapy) available to our children nowhere near meets their needs; it's one of the really big failures of the current system.

Hth.

I have difficulty answering your question because a few months before DS2 was DXed I had no knowledge of SN or SEN. At my MS primary there was one boy with CP, I realise that now, but at the time he was just RG with the runny nose and strange walk. (Not meaning to be offensive here, that was my 10 yo perspective) I also know now that the fact he was in MS must have been an almost unique situation, as there was no-one else like him in my large secondary. I presume all the children with SEN were in local SS or residential SS. There was no-one with Down's syndrome, hearing aids, wheelchairs, anything resembling ASD beyond the few eccentric but coping DC.

All I know now is that I spent three years, (right in the middle of my DS2's DX and early interventions, when it was all really raw and really intensive,) as a parent governor trying desperately to keep my DS's SS open. This drive for inclusion at all costs has meant that hundreds of SSs have closed, loads of expertise has been lost or diluted, OTs and SALTs working with children on site and in the classroom are now seeing children once every 3 or 6 months for a review rather than for any actual therapy!

Poorly trained TAs are now teaching the majority of our most vulnerable children in corridors in isolation in MS schools. My DS, as it happens, is correctly placed in MS, and I am a TA supporting another correctly placed child, but we are definitely in the minority.

I believe that children who benefit from a MS education should be given that option, but equally children who would benefit most from a SS should also have some options. And it's all such a battle. Only those children whose parents have it in them to learn the system and fight for them, get anything like reasonable provision. What about all those parents who think the schools and LAs know best, they are sometimes getting nothing?

It is good that disability is seen as being more mainstream, nowadays, I think public awareness has increased, but it's not good if the result is loss of expertise and decent provision.

Ok, rant over for now.

What Marne said. Of course my views on children with disabilities are going to be different now that I am the parent of such children from when I was a child myself (and without disabilities). I am not sure that tells us an awful lot about changes in societal attitudes, more about the psychological effect of having something strike your own family.

On the one hand, I think there is more support and at least schools have a feeling they ought to clamp down on bullying (even if they don't all do it). On the other hand, higher expectations on children and their families mean greater pressures on disabled children.

When my grandmother was unwell as a young girl, she was taken out of school and sent to stay with relatives on a farm until she grew stronger. When my dd starting missing days off school, probably due to the same genetic condition, the Welfare Officer was involved and the head reported us to Social Services. Noone suggested the farm option.

Cory has summarised the difference for me VERY clearly - as recently as the 1980's it was assumed that parents always acted in the best interests of their kids UNLESS PROVEN OTHERWISE. Nowadays there's always some "know nothing" official in the way of getting of parents being able to do much to help their children without official sanction of some sort or another. This covers everything from the child who gets chicken pox and flu in the same school term and so whose child misses the attendance targets, right through to the Mum who finds herself referred to mental health services because she complains her child isn't learning in the sausage factory, or dares ask for a second medical opinion.

I don't agree that parents are empowered, I feel it's quite the opposite. Family rights, especially those of parents, considered sacrosanct for generations have been removed at a bewildering pace over the last decade and it's those families with SEN children who are most at risk of falling foul of the state, through no fault of their own.

Hi OP, it's an interesting topic, but the question is huge, and I would be interested in whether you have narrowed down your focus...

"What are your views on the rights of children with disabilities?
Is it different to what you remember from your own childhood?"

What rights do you mean? Do you mean rights as recognised by law, (which should be straight forward to track down) or rights as percieved by the child themselves, or by their parents, or by the school, or other organisations etc etc.

Also the rights may or may not be different, but we will all have differing understandings of the experiences of children with disabilities during our childhoods, depending on whether or not we knew any for example.

Also what do you mean by disabilitity, do mean specific areas, or diagnoses, or instead do you mean SEN?

Sorry if that sounds picky, it's not intended that way, just that the question is so huge...

PS I am presuming you have also posted this where it will read and replied to by disabled children themselves and by disabled adults who will have their own perspective on it....

Have you considered how the methodology which may be needed to request this information from individuals with disabilites, different formats, etc etc...

Hope those are useful questions....