ok, what can we actually do about this rubbish sen system

[kojackscat]

I read on here, day after day, about schools letting out kids down. Refusals to fill in ehcp forms, lies like ' you wont get a plan for behaviour problems ' and now I've just read 'ms schools don't do ehcp'

So, how do we get this system changed?
I know we are all exhausted from fighting for our children, but does anyone have the energy for one more fight?

We need publicity, petitions, lobbying, whatever else, to bring this to the publics attention.
We need teachers to be better trained in sen, sencos to have better understanding of the law, Las to have more/different duties, perhaps separate assessing and funding bodies.
Anyone up for starting a campaign on this? We cant let it continue to let our children down.

The law was written last year
I'm referring to the Children and Families Act 2014 section 19 (d) which emphasises the need for an LA to help the child or young person to achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes.

|It has no meaning. you cannot enforce a law that says I have to give you 20 apple trees if i don't have 20 apple trees. that is how it is.

It's an uncomfortable truth but it is definitely happening

Yes. It does.

I'm not sure I have any energy left for fighting just yet, but marking place nevertheless.

And the direct affect this has is ten of thousands o f people walk out of teaching, and schools are hopelessly short staffed and take on temporary agency staff instead.

This is what I did, left teaching and became agency. Because I NEED SLEEP. As agency staff I never agree to more than one day at a time, and no one tries to force me to do the impossible, because they know I will not return tomorrow if they try.

this is the only way to live a normal life for many teachers, but is disastrous for schools. Strangely, some of the most vociferous complainers are the very same people who caused staff to walk out in the first place!

I'm not sure I have any energy left for fighting just yet,

but all this acting out fighting, you just exhaust yourself, for nothing. Why do you do it? Do you somehow feel a better parent for saying you are fighting the education system?

I'm telling you what it is like from the other side, where I have been for decades. I do some SEN consultancy now, free lance, in one London borough.

So what do you expect us to do Charis? Just give up and let our kids be let down by the system?
We are doing the right thing going by the number of posters who win their sendist tribunals.
And rest assured i have never caused a teacher to walk out of their job. I work in a school at the moment and its not sen that is causing teachers to leave its the management team.

but all this acting out fighting, you just exhaust yourself, for nothing. Why do you do it? Do you somehow feel a better parent for saying you are fighting the education system?

We're very pleased with each of the tribunal outcomes.

I don't feel a better parent. I am exhausted and disappointed in the things we have seen. But I am proud that a suitable education was secured where previously next to nothing was offered.

Bless you for your concern.

There is money, there's no budget. All tax gets divided out but all comes from one central pot.

It's weather it's a better investment to spend say £2000 in intervention at a early age or a lot more later on. Uneducated people do still have to supported - until we loose our human rights.

It's not always marginal improvements. Some people with sen have high iq and can go on to have very profitable jobs.

I find that either the sencos I have come across aren't told about the law or they choose to ignore it. I don't know which. It was pointed out to our la ep he was breaking the law. Sen law is enforceable. Ultimately every one has to answer to law. So by law my la had to issue a statement in five weeks. They choose not to and they faced the courts. I don't see that as good way to spend budget. Spend a few hundred quid today writing a statement - or pay legal fees AND still pay that £100 wages to write the statement.

For some parents it's more than being a bit vocal. I don't belive I have distressed any teacher in the process. I was told my child had to fail for at least two years to get a statement. I walked away and took this up with the la.

Should a child who has low potential be viewed as a waste? Who knows? Not me I'm not in that position to comment.

But consider this. Your child has cancer. There is a drug. It costs the NHS 100,000 but it's proved to work. Do you think " that money could pay for 500 grommet operations or do you as a parent think - I love my child, I want that treatment.

Ethical questions which ultimately most of us with sen kids don't mull over. It's a basic law of nature to want your offspring to survive to pass on your genes. Right or wrong, selfish or not wanting the child to flourish isn't a something I mull over.

I don't physically fight for my son. But I'm happy to not really dwell on that either. Whatever I do I will be judged. You didn't do enough, you was to pushy, if only you had eaten organic while pg, married a lawyer.

I do what feels right at the moment in time. Hindsight is a lovely thing. Perfection I'm not interested in.

I don't apologise because I'm not sorry - so far, about anything

I have dyspraxia. Someone believed I wasn't a write off. I got lucky I'm not a write off I don't remember the mediocre people. It was the passionate ones who take credit

Charis1,
I understand your views on this. However this thread is to organise a campaign to help our children. If you do not think they need help, that's your opinion, buy please start a new thread to discuss it, please dont derail this one.

Eebahgum,
Thanks for your input. perhaps I was too hard with the word lie, perhaps school staff are just not properly trained. I do believe that teachers have children's best interest at heart. But many many parents have been told things that are untrue. I was told by the senco that 'you cant get a plan for behaviour, there is no such thing'. But when I preserved my ds got a plan for,oh yes, behaviour. It was one of the listed options that the panel could choose from. So I was told a blatant untruth. I dont know if the senco was lying, misinformed, badly trained, or just trying to save money, but whatever the reason was, what I was told as fact was not true.

I think there's not enough consistency and sharing of good practice between schools.
So many primaries are run like small, isolated queendoms with a selection of serfs that either don't know that the entire educational world isn't like that, or who don't want to bring grief down on themselves from the SLT which can result in a string of 'unsatisfactory' judgements on them and their teaching.
We all know that some schools are fantastic at inclusion,. So what's the barrier to all schools being fantastic, having the same shared knowledge about what is possible, legal, required or just common sense?
Why is it the children of articulate and informed parents who often get a better deal?
I want a high-end chainstore mentality. Look at the best and make it the standard for all, and FFS share and be consistent.
I stopped posting or reading the SN boards because I began to feel that as a teacher and as a parent of children with AS, I couldn't deal with the anger on here.
But I agree, there should be a campaign asking very basic questions and insisting on answers.

I don't think it is parents that makes teachers leave, I think it is the system.

perhaps school staff are just not properly trained this is one of my concerns. Being one of the most highly trained people around, I am in a position to be able to that most training contradicts other training, much of the training is based on "educational scientific research" ( otherwise known as hookum, being neither scientific or research), and much is considered outdated almost before it is delivered.

This is what I mean by parents wanting a magic wand. You want the teachers your children come across to be "trained", but with what training? There generally isn't "training" that prepares a teacher to care for a specific need.( The worst is ASD, where the LEA training directly contradicts the AS training in every aspect) but dyslexia training is also close to being hysterical.

The training you want us to have doesn't exist. The knowledge about the neurology doesn't exist. This is my conclusion, although lots of people tell me otherwise, and tell me loads of things that all contradict each other.

The staffing doesn't exist, all these things just don't exist.

i'm not derailing your thread. If you come up with a workable suggestion, I'll be the first to sign up, but fighting me is not a workable solution. You are fighting me largely for things that don't exist.

So if you want to be involved in a campaign, either in a big or small way, please pm me and ill start getting a list of people together.

I mean training in the law. I dont expect teachers to be medical experts. However, that is what the ehcp process does. It brings all the medical experts together to assess and advise on what help the child needs.

I dont understand why you think teachers cant be trained in this area of law? It only needs a few hours to explain it to them. But I think it should be part of itt, and any legal changes can be communicated in inset training.
It will stop all this 'our la doesn't do x,y or z' when the la has to by law.

teachers are trained in the law, every year, and it is different every year. It comes under child protection.

I think the way forward is actually medical, not educational.

Conditions just multiply all the time. This is partly because children with problems are studied and classified more, but also because people invent conditions, or use an ill defined diagnosis to mean all sorts of things it was never meant to mean.

Proper medical research into neurological development and the ways it can go wrong will give a basis for understanding and supporting problems. Unfortunately it is incredibly difficult to set up ethical investigations, and it takes 25 years or more when you do.

Why do teachers need to know the law? Surely it's the LEA and the head teachers who need to know their bligations as they are also in charge of any resourcing rather than the chalkface.
We need practical training and resources to enable us to support an individual child.

our la doesn't do x,y or z' when the la has to by law but the law cannot make somebody do something impossible! And a lot of laws change, become obsolete, even come back again.

And, as I said earlier, the insistence that teacher HAVE TO by law do something which is not actually humanly possible is one of the reasons so many thousands leave. it doesn't help any body. You might be right or wrong about whether something is the law, and lots of parents are wrong, and wrongly advised ( some are still using statements etc) but even if you are right about something, it can't happen if it can't happen.

We need practical training and resources to enable us to support an individual child

if it exists.

Charis, when I say fight this is what I mean.
Ds showed serious issues at age 2. He got excluded from nursery, then in year r excluded several times, put on a reduced timetable, and threatened with permanent exclusion. All the time I kept asking for a statement, so he could get 1-1 support, which was proven to help him and manage his issues. I was told there was no such thing as a statement for behaviour. Also got told that he didn't need one. That was crap, cos the school obviously couldn't meet his needs.
Only a year of nagging, letter writing, asking and pleading finally got the school to agree to apply for an ehcp. That was in july 2014. Almost a year on, I'm still in negotiations with the la to get him this support.

You are telling me that what I want doesn't exist. Well it does. He needs small class sizes and 1-1 person who has lots of patience and training in how to manage his sensory needs. I can even do the training myself, its not hard, just what we do at home.
I know this is costly, but it certainly does exist. Please don't tell me it doesn't.

I do some SEN consultancy now, free lance, in one London borough

Well, that certainly explains your perspective, although I really would recommend some refresher training in the law and its practical application.

You can ask your London borough to dip into the £31m that the DfE found behind the sofa expressly for the purpose of training SEN staff in the new framework in this financial year. Although apparently, of course, there's no money. Your LA are spending it on training, aren't they?

The law cannot be upheld

This , and this , and this say otherwise.

It has no meaning. you cannot enforce a law that says I have to give you 20 apple trees if i don't have 20 apple trees

See the links above - across the country, the law is enforced every day of the working week - all too often by judicial order. Because the law trumps all - even if many public bodies and (yes) some parents try to disregard it.

basically the money a lot of parents want simply doesn't exist

Right now, I'm looking at the Section 251 returns that my LA gave the DfE, explaining where and how they plan to allocate the money they've been given.

The LA was allocated £771m for the 2014-2015 financial year. You might be interested to know that there are entire countries around the world that run fully-functioning nuclear weapons programmes on less funding than this each year. But that's by the by.

Anyway, about 8% of this LA's budget has been earmarked for SEN - notional budgets for mainstream, high needs for units and special schools, the full works.

This LA is choosing to cut its spending on SEN by several million pounds this year. However, it is also choosing to increase its spending by about the same amount on line item 2.0.4 of its Section 251 return.

Line item 2.0.4 is school improvement. That's not improving physical infrastructure - it's ensuring that the LA and its maintained schools get all the support they need to successfully jump through the ever-shifting hoops that those clowns at Ofsted put up.

We might not agree on much, but I'd hope we could agree that the current Ofsted accountability set-up is a noxious parasite sucking the life out of education. The trouble is, it's also sucking the money out too - and guess who is paying the price?

This LA has the funding to meet its legal obligations to kids with SEN. It chooses not to. As many, many others do.

You can find out for yourself here . Or, of course, you can stick with the lazy tropes that LA middle management and school senior leadership teams wheel out.

One last question, charis. Are you a member of a union? A body whose avowed purpose is defending the employment rights and future prosperity of its members?

Good on you if you are - given the assaults on the profession over the last decade, you'd be mad not to.

The thing is, my kids don't have a union. They don't have anyone to stick up for them when someone tries to run roughshod over their rights, and pretend that they have no choice.

What they do have, on the other hand, is their mum and dad. We're their union. That's what we're there. And I'll fight for their life chances with my last gin-soaked breath if I have to.

Hag, I used imprecise language. When I said teachers i meant school staff, ie heads, sencos etc. I know classroom teachers have more than enough on their plate.

'Nothing, basicaly the money a lot of parents want simply doesn't exist'

Parent's don't want money. Why on earth would you say that?

Despite the awful system, there are pockets of excellent practice. Where that happens there is a true and genuine relationship and partnership between the school and the parents and no lies. Those schools also stand up to the Local Authority with the support of the parents.

This can happen. This does happen. It is rare. It should not be.

'We need practical training and resources to enable us to support an individual child

if it exists.'

I've seen good practice in a number of schools, my DS experienced a number of excellent teachers and a school that really wanted to support him and found ways of doing that. It exists in pockets and patches in different places, and there aren't enough links and connections being made to create a network that creates both experienced trainers and good resources and strategies.
It's too easy to give up, say it's impossible, 'Computer says No' mode

Good Gods Starlight, you and I have cross posted. Never expected that!