Is this right to treat kids as customers ?!

[Inclusionreally]

Have name changed but am quite worried after a meeting at school today.
Saying about driving the shook forward they have to think of children as customers?!
There are not many kids who are Sen and if the resources and heads time goes to Sen then is by fair on the others?

I feel fuming is is right?/legal

It's bollocks. Each school has an obligation to meet a child's needs even if they have sen. Each school also has a sen budget to spent on .... sen .
I would not put my child in a school with such a shit ethos.

shook is school, right?

It is not fair that the head is not given sufficient resource to meet the SEN of the kids.

Parliament clearly intended that all kids with SEN should have their needs met, and if the Government (central or local) doesn't provide funding to do what Parliament wants, then the law is broken.

The trouble is, it can only be tackled child-by-child. I would have more sympathy for LAs if they stomped up to Governement and demanded more funds.

But no. Just squeeze the funds and fail the kids.

It was the head of governors. They are spending on Sen but he said that to be a governor you had to be impartial to treat all kids the same and as customers so for example I tried to discuss lateness and what it is like for a parent of sn child an how we can be late some days but he was very black an white saying others are later for other reasons so you can't have privilages. I bloody angry!
The head is lovely though but I feel he won't get a say and it's the governors drive in this.
He also said that as a school they can always say to a parent there are other schools you can attend.

What can I do is r complain to if he is the chair of governors?

It's an academy if that makes any difference too

How about the SEN governor?
Try suggesting that they do the IPSEA beginner course.

The code of practice applies directly to governors so you can throw that at them. It says each SEN child must be taken as an indicidual, or it did last time I looked.

Clearly barking to expect the same standards about lateness of anxious sn kids as mainstream.

Sen governor doesn't know anything about Sen I went in to see if I could help but got this trash! So should I ring ipsea? I can't have this opinion in school it's nonsense! He was all about sats results etc

Yes, I think you could try IPSEA. All schools do have legal obligations under disability discrimination legislation to make “reasonable adjustments” for children with disabilities / SEN. This (for example) It doesn’t sound as if he is aware of that.

And those adjustments could include being flexible about some expectations around behaviour, such as lateness, if they're due to a disability. Hopefully IPSEA could tell you what's "reasonable" and also what kind of language you need to use to get the point across.

Equality is NOT about treating all kids the same, it is about giving them the same opportunities. His attitude sounds very discriminatory. Not sure what you can do about it though so I'm not a lot of help.

I agree with bilberry some childreh need an awful lot of extra support to access school in general.

Inclusion starts with reasonable adjustment in my personal opinion!

At least two times a day, something happens that makes me so fucking glad my kids aren't in mainstream any more. "Customers" - Jesus wept.

This Chair of Governors is an ignorant clown. Academy or no academy, he won't be able to defend this policy. It's blatantly unlawful. Have they given you their inclusion policy in writing? Does it look anything like the spiel he gave you in the meeting?

Did you ask for the governors to attend? The reason I ask is that school governance is supposed to be strategic. Your problem sounds operational- something that the HT should be in charge of. The HT may need to explain himself to governors- but if you didn't ask for it, it's not the done thing for governors to dick around in individual cases.

Perhaps reminding the governor of the equality act may be a start!

Oh and sending him ?Polter's cartoon of the children standing on boxes to look over the fence.

I would also be very glad that with his attitude he is only a governor and not a teacher (well I hope not anyway).

Get hold of a copy of the academy's funding agreement. It might be published on the Department for Education website, though they tend to take a bit of finding - or you could ask both the school and the DfE for copies. It will say something to the effect that they are obliged to comply with the law on provision for SEN and the Code of Practice.

Also get hold of a copy of the school's complaints policy. I suspect that if your complaint is against the Chair of Governors you may have to take this issue to the Department for Education also, as the funding agreement is a contract between the academy and the DfE and it sounds as if they are in breach of it.

It's worth looking at this website for information about academies generally, and there's a section which specifically relates to SEN.

If it was me, I’d want to say something along the lines of “as I’m sure you are aware, all schools have legal obligations to make reasonable adjustments for students with disabilities so they can access the curriculum. That doesn’t just mean physical adjustments to the school, it also means adapting expectations of behaviour – within reason, of course – if it’s due to a disability, and adapting the processes and procedures for managing behaviour to take the disability into account. So if lateness is due to a disability then that is something that a school would be expected to make reasonable adjustments for. And that might not be true for other reasons for lateness.”

All organisations which have “customers” also have legal obligations. Time and money which the organisations spends on meeting their legal obligations is not wasted.

(It sounds as if you were trying to appeal to him as a sympathetic human being, but this governor might be more the type to respond to formalities.)