Private home teaching service for children with SEN -thoughts please

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Hi all

I am just wanting a bit of feedback regarding your thoughts about a teaching service I am due to start in the very near future. I am a qualified teacher and portage home visitor with extensive experience of supporting children with a wide range of special educational needs. I have been asked for many years by the families I have worked with if I would offer a private home teaching service to them. Up until now I have been unable to do this but as I have re-located I am now in a position to offer a home teaching service based on a portage approach to families of children age 0-7 years. The families I have worked with have had services cut and have had to wait for a long time for services to get involved.

I was just wondering from a family perspective if

1. You think such a service is needed?

1. You would be prepared to pay for a home teacher? If so how much for a 1-1&half hour visit?

Any other comments would be gratefully received and many thanks for your time.

I would have paid for you as a qualified teacher, to do really early academics etc

The portage side was nice, but not that productive for us

For a qualified teacher to tutor my son, I was recently quoted £25 an hour, but our area s crazy expensive

Hth

I'm based in Kent and 1:1 is £35/hour

I'm certain it is a service is needed, though I'm less certain of the benefit of just half an hour, unless it was in a consultative capacity to model techniques to others to deliver.

But for someone who really knows their stuff I have paid £50 per hour, though that included resources and a lot of training for us.

The perfect solution for us would be a package of an experienced SEN teacher (£30-ish, say fortnightly) with a student buddy (£10-ish, maybe 3 times/week).

I have an SEN tutor for my ds (dyslexic) £30/hour after school once a week, but that's her full-time job. She gave up her teaching/SENCO job to do home SEN tutoering full time … don't think she's looked back as she is in huge demand. Her main work during the day is obviously home educated kids with varying levels of SEN.

If we hadn't had similar on the NHS then yes I would've used your service.
IME access to support has only been more difficult since being discharged from early years.
So maybe a school age service would be of more benefit to us locally.

I was thinking more 5 to 11 yrs of age.

Thank you all for your comments and thoughts. It is really interesting and useful feedback. I would very much welcome anyone else's ideas if you have time. Kindest regards.

I can only advise from an autism perspective.
Direct payment workers (just to play with your child / give you a break) would be £8-10 per hour.
An independent ABA tutor would be £12-15 per hour - for that you would be looking for someone who could teach you how to teach your child, who can really engage your child in activities & would teach specific skills.
An ABA supervisor would be £50 per hour for that would you get systematic programmes of work for you / ABA tutors / nursery to implement with an evidence base and expect to see meaningful progress.
Academic tutors would be £20-30 per hour.
I think if it was play therapy / portage rather than systematic programming / intervention / academics then £10-15 per hour would be ceiling for me because like sickof that side of things didn't work for us and so we would have used the funds for ABA instead (for child with moderate - severe ASD). Most of the portage stuff we could do ourselves from books etc and it doesn't (for children with autism) have much of a research base to support it (in research it came out as well below ABA and specialist nursery in effectiveness).
Now (DS is year 2) I would probably pay £20 per hour for someone to write an academic curriculum for him as the school are not providing an adequately differentiated one and I don't really have time to do it. I would probably prefer someone with special school experience - but I have had a pretty poor experience of how children with SEN are supported (or unsupported) in mainstream.
If your area is a pathfinder authority then you should encourage parents to ask for direct payments for education to pay you - i can understand why you are trying to fill a gap while parents wait for services but its pretty appalling the gap exists and certainly when we paid privately for ABA it was a means to an end - to prove that it worked and that level of support was needed and to get evidence for a tribunal to order the LA to fund it. We could not have funded it long term.
Would you be willing to be a witness for tribunals? Thats something to think about as its likely to come up.
There is a political issue if parents pay themselves for service the child is entitled to get for free - then the LA will be in no rush to put services in. We really experienced this. The LA must have labelled us from day one as a family that would pay privately / home educate rather than see our child fail (before we had DS we had professional jobs, a nice house etc). As a result they blocked us from services for months / years eg denied DS a place at a SS nursery which he was eligible for while other children from more deprived backgrounds, but no more severe, got in. I don't mean that as a negative to the children who did get in, but I do think LAs use parental income as a gatekeeping strategy eg if we don't help this child they will not get any intervention, whereas that one the parents will step in and pay for it.
The SEN changes could be a great opportunity for those in the private sector to compete with poor LA services for eg you may be able to sell your services to schools and nurseries as well as families. So its probably the right time to get out there.
Be aware there are charities being commissioned by Govt to set up brokerage services - to advise parents on what services are around once (if) they get direct payments. I sort of resent the idea parents need to be told what services to buy as most I know can spot quality advice from poor advice / services without much difficulty. But you would potentially have to make yourself known to these brokerage services and get 'on a list'.
Most parents with a child with SEN have taken a huge income hit - many will have stopped work, so they will be using social care direct payments, DLA or savings to pay for advice, so you either have to be offering something that will give the parent a break (at the £10-15 mark) or something that will show definite progress (£20-30+).
Getting trained in Makaton or PECS could also be useful.

Thank you so much for your detailed and personal response. You have provided lots of food for thought and real insights. Many thanks for taking the time to respond. Kindest regards.

Yes to PECs. PECS changed my Ds' life chances and he was verbal.

We buy in help in two ways for our two - an ex-teacher who comes and helps them with strictly academic stuff (maths, spelling etc.) who costs £20/hr, and an ex-SENCo who comes in for 1.5 hrs a fortnight to do a home based social skills class (the school they go to won't let in outsiders, but luckily she knows the SENCo and the SaLT that work in the school.) She costs £60/hr and is invaluable.

This is drastically down from the ABA therapists, SaLT, OT etc that we were paying for a couple of years ago which we're still paying back the overdraft and loans for now.

We had to source each one by word of mouth and recommendation, but would have loved to just go to a central agency and get what our children needed! Especially ABA therapists - there needs to be a simpler way of finding them.