What will happen to Statements under new SEN policy?

[LovelyLovelyWine]

I dont understand. Will current Statements still stand?

LAs from today will be refusing requests no doubt 'in line with the new strategy'!

Grrrrr

Dunno - VERY worried about the long term.

Current home too small & lea shit so will HAVE to move at some point.

I'm not seeing any "teeth" or "stick" at all in the new health education and care plans. The academies system also seems to lack any real protective mechanisms against illegal exclusion, provision of additional support etc. We all know that if ptb don't HAVE to provide support then they won't.

My initial impressions are that the caring carrots have won the battle, and parents of quite needy children will be fobbed off and patronised with a £100 parenting voucher for a course run by do-gooders with NO idea about specialist support for the partially sighted, deaf, asd etc child.

Universal credit and the slashing of the Medium care rate for DLA is another concern.

"Stuffed" is my technical term for it all.

One of my concerns is that the EHC plans will run to 25, but I can't imagine LAs are going to have anything like enough funding to cover the additional years.

What's happening in my LA is that the number of children eligible for a statement is being cut (again). LA say they can meet these children's needs at SA/SA+. (No evidence that this is true). And I live in an LA that is already one of the lowest statementing in the country.

So I can foresee a situation where the LA have to almost double the number of years funded by halving the number of children eligible just to balance the books.

I think it all comes down to the money.

So I have no problem with somebody saying here is the cash that you will require to support your child - ignore waiting lists and bureaucracy and go off and spend it, if you need any more, just ask. However, I am not sure that this is the plan...

Also, re: these changes I accept that there many be children who are on the borderline of being classified as having 'special needs'. However, if a child has not yet learnt to read, and the teacher needs the class to be able to read in order for them to access the material she is providing, this child will still need support, whether you call him SN or not. Removing the label or sacking the teacher doesn't remove the need for help, or the need for funding for that help.

And another thing (!), I suspect that as much as some children may be classified as SN when it could be argued that they aren't, I am sure that here are plenty of children who should have an SN label, but miss a label because of their background/speaking English as a second language, so I am not convinced about of children wrongly identified as having SEN'

Anyway, presumably, if a child requires additional help, that will still need to be specified in writing and agreed, so I think there will still be statements. They will just be called something different and everyone will be a bit mystified for a bit.

I strongly suspect that these personal budgets will end up being a case of "here's your money, here's the list of charities and large service companies that we've approved services from, good luck finding something suitable and within budget in your area"

Yes, I suspect LA's will have to 'approve' providers and they will probably include themselves in the offers, and there'll be so many caveats.

Lol Star and ourvyre - I'll be shocked if your predictions aren't correct if only to protect the jobs of those currently in the employ of local authorities!

I imagine current statements will stand for a while, and there will be a prolonged conversion process. I can't see it working otherwise. Mind you, I can't see it working anyway. Rumour is the pilots are really struggling because they can't get Health and Education to agree on what is needed and joint funding.

I don't really understand the logic of getting health to joint fund. I mean it is a sensible strategy in normal circumstances, but not when you are trying to dismantal the NHS.

Unless the point is to discourage dx.

I hope they will not be refusing statements as from today, ive just delivered my SA request!!

On BBC they were implying that 0-25 plans were for the most severely disabled 3%. That would mean a huge number of children missed out. What about children with late diagnoses of ASD etc.
I was originally told that children with existing statements or 139As (in FE colleges) would move over to the 0-25 plan. Doesn't sound as though hat is what will happen.
It would be lovely to think that my son's problems at school would have been dealt with without a statement, but in reality I think he would have just been permanantly excluded.

I think the point of that is that some of the services that come under the umbrella of SA+ and statemented provision are provided via the NHS - SALT and OT, for example. And face it - this government have already done a good job of dismantling LA funded education. I'm sure SEN/SN provision will also end up centrally funded and no doubt, pretty hard to secure even compared with now.

Anyhow, the boys have their reviews (actually 6 monthly, rather than annual atm), next week. The agenda for DS1, in particular is already packed (School and us are agreed that mainstream is not looking like a viable long term option for him, but local special schools are totally inappropriate - TPTB need some convincing) but if I get chance, I will do some probing to find out what the future for their statements might look like. (LA is one of the best for getting useful statements from but very pro "inclusion" even though the reality ends up not being very inclusive at all in many ways)

"On BBC they were implying that 0-25 plans were for the most severely disabled 3%"

Well, with that, you have to bear in mind that currently Statements are issued to around 2% of children nationally. So, in theory, what it means is that the existing statemented children and a further half again of that number who, perhaps, have medical needs but not educational (speculation, but if it's a combined plan it has to include those children from that end of things) would transistion over.

It's one of those things that sounds great, unless you take into account the general SEN context.

It's a worry. Especially as there's no mention of tribunal rights, yet. As it stands, DD1 has her special school place, and all the school does each year is advise the LA that she still needs it (in a nutshell). What happens if SS is conveniently written out of their plan for DD1?

It's a bit of a strange one really, because the current system is not working.

But there is nothing wrong with the law or the policies or even the system as it is supposed to work.

The problems lies with the accountability side, the lack of adherence to the laws and policies with no deterents, and with Local Authorities being able to authorise legal teams on a whim using tax payers money.

So my point is I guess, is which one of those two is going to change with the new system?

I have a feeling that the legal teams are simply going to have even more teeth, Star. And that's it's going to be a lot harder to get to that stage if a request of whatever the assessment of special educational needs will become is brushed off.

What is working with schools holding the budgets as they do now, is the collective benefits - for example buying in services, resources and advice for one child with a movement disorder which can then be disseminated and used with other children who need some degree of help in that respect. If the school is not in charge of the overall budget, then if an individual budget isn't going to stretch that far, a parent isn't so likely to make use of that service if all that is paid for ends up being a 1:1 for fewer hours than their child really needs.

My boys don't get 100% directed funding from their statements for their full time 1:1s - the school makes up the difference between what their audit bands fund and what they need from the general SEN pot. I'm wondering what is going to happen to this school managed SEN fund under the new rules. The cynic realist in me is concerned that this will be hit hard.

Ah, health.

Well, the NHS 'commissioning bodies' will be totally freed from geographical boundaries and be responsible only for their own pre-registered patients.

They will outsource responsibility to commission the services which they think are required, subject to financial constraints. The full EU tendering processes will apply, cheap bits of provision will continue to be cherry picked, bankrupting the more comprehensive services. Current and future 'providers' are not obliged to have services which are not profitable economic to run.

The new NHS can define health in quite a narrow, technical sense, and is likely to become more of a social insurance brand than an actual organisation.

No one appears to have financial responsibility for unregistered patients, and the milk-toothed equalities act may not be enough to force NHS bodies to commission and pay for expensive and media-unfriendly services. Services which don't have drug companies to fund clinical trials, services where seeds of good practice are lost in a field of caring carrots.

We've been here before, the closure of the asylums, the loss of cottage and long-stay hospitals.

Link to ipsea's response here:www.ipsea.org.uk/Apps/Content/News/?id=450&dm_i=PWP,T11C,3JHNZ5,2DADB,1

Right, so school say ds4 won't cope without a statement when he starts in Sept. Two of my older 3 have them and are in SN Bases.

Is it even worth bothering applying for ds4? I am far too exhausted to be a test case.

here

Trialling giving children a right to appeal? Are they having a larf? DS3 didn;t even think to complain when his sibling ahd tied him up with video tape and left him in a corner!

It's interesting- a leading charity for the visually impaired is very up for this whilst the NAS (Auitsm) are worried- is this going to be yet another hit at kids with less physical needs I wonder, along the lines of PIP? Dh thinks that was the undertones of the Minster's speech today about abd aprenting causing problems- a hard back to refridgerator parenting

Bottom line WILL all this actually make the schools work with you? Most dont want to work with us now or even let in current salt or OT services. Cant see it being any different wether we control the purse strings (vouchers) or the LA does.