Yes! I can name 3 local parents off the top of my head whose children have been at home, long-term, unable to attend at all (or for eg an hour a day) while the school is getting up to £26,000 of additional funding for their SEN.
I would also agree that primary schools tend to block assessment rather than encourage it, because the longer they can, the more it becomes a secondary school's issue. The norm in this country for autistic kids is for them to fall apart in secondary, after a primary history of parents increasingly frantically asking the school for help, while the school insists there are no problems other than poor parenting and that, "they are fine in school". Then you have 12 and 13 year olds with suicidal ideation, unable to learn, being sent to eyewateringly, wince-inducingly expensive specialist schools - I'm talking well over a hundred grand a year - because they have become so profoundly harmed that any mainstream,
even a small gentle independent, is a pipe dream, as is a life without significant intervention in psychiatric terms. These are kids who could have been fine, if picked up on and supported earlier. I know, because I have one of each. I ignored the school with my second, had full assessments done when tiny, got the EHCP by applying myself, and we have a child in mainstream who is showing every indication of remaining there. My eldest has PTSD, has suffered unbearably badly, and costs the state a fortune. Which of them is the model to emulate, in provision terms? Yet right now, the damage option is the norm.
One of the other problems is the insistence on a misinterpretation of the concept of 'inclusion' - and at all costs. Nobody would insist that a girl should be the lone student in a school full of boys, and that she should in all ways appear indistinguishable, because that would be as dangerous as it is impossible - but with autism, that's seen as the ideal. Why can't we have 'mainstream plus' schools, along village school models? Smaller overall, smaller classes, plain walls for lower stimulation, PE that can be Pilates and FIZZY (the standard intervention for dyspraxia) for all, staff who are trained and who get it, and the curriculum delivery tweaked, so it's accessible for neurodiverse kids? A school that was just adjusted for kids like mine would mean all they needed was the Notional SEN Budget per child, not special school levels, so they wouldn't need an EHCP. It would save the state money in EHCPs, CAMHS, the criminal justice and the benefits systems, not to mention the lifetime costs of adults so harmed by their school years that they can't ever work - and it would save children such trauma.
We know the existing system doesn't work. We know the costs rocket alongside the harm. So why can't we try something else? Autistic children think differently, and see the world differently, and in many ways, not worse. Different. Yet we force them into schools designed for the most robustly neurotypical, and are then surprised when large numbers emerge profoundly harmed, and unable to work, or function, in adult life. Why are we not looking for a different approach? How is this norm allowed to continue as such?
It is not inclusive to force autistic children into large comprehensives at all costs, even if that causes them genuine, and profound, trauma. Anyone trying to force that as the model is mandating abuse. We can, and should, do better.