FIGURES released by the Department for Education in July show a record number of suspensions from school in England last year — up 36 per cent from the year before, which itself broke the previous record. Almost half of these cases were for persistent disruptive behaviour.
The number of exclusions rose even more sharply, up 44 per cent from 2021/22.
The Revd Steve Chalke, the founder of Oasis Trust, which runs 54 academies across England, says that a significant factor in this is the worsening crisis in provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
“What goes first for a child is their engagement in education. Once that’s gone, what goes next is their attention. And once your engagement and attention have gone, your behaviour falls apart. We need an approach to education that is able to engage every child.”
Too many schools, he says, “have an SEN policy and a behaviour policy — which is all about sending a child out of class, detentions, demerits, suspensions, exclusions, all of that. The point is this: poor behaviour is a special educational need. If you have a really robust, thought-through, 21st-century SEN policy, you don’t need one for behaviour.”
A recent study by the Isos Partnership, commissioned by the County Councils Network and the Local Government Association, came to a bleak conclusion: “The SEND system is broken.”
Melody Drinkwater
Claire Brenner, a mother of two autistic boys who is active with Oxfordshire SEND Parent Action Group, traces the problem back to the 2014 Children and Families Act. Its well-intentioned reforms introduced tailored Education, Health and Care plans (EHCPs), which are legally enforceable and set out, in each case, exactly what the individual child needs and what provision they must be given to meet those needs, and also the desired outcome.
Unfortunately, she says, when David Cameron’s government introduced this new scheme, it did not provide any extra funding to local government to implement it — and, all the while, austerity was in full spate.
At the same time, the Institute of Government has suggested, the state-school system was not able to absorb the surge in demand, owing to “variable levels of inclusivity in mainstream schools and limited capacity in state special schools”. This led to “widespread use of independent provision — funded by local authorities, at a cost far greater than that of a place in a state school”.
Diagnosis of special educational needs was already becoming much more common. For example, a recent study has found that between 1998 and 2018 the number of people in Britain diagnosed with autism increased almost ninefold. Today, it is believed that one child in 36 is “on the spectrum”.
The lead author of that study, Dr Ginny Russell, of Exeter University, has said that there is “no plausible reason” to believe that autism cases have multiplied. Rather, she suggests, “diagnoses have increased because of ever-wider assessment boundaries — boundaries that are still moving outwards.”
Whatever the cause of that increase, Dr Brenner believes that neurodivergent children now find it harder to cope in school. “The environment has become more and more incompatible with their needs,” she says.
In the past, children had more opportunities for being outside, for doing physical activity, sport, or art, and for being by themselves. “There are lots of small things that add up.”
She has come to the conclusion that she herself is autistic, as well as some of her older relatives. “But we’ve coped in life in a way that our children now can’t, because of the pressures society is putting on them.”
MELODY DRINKWATER has two daughters with SEN. Her eight-year-old has dyspraxia, which affects her motor skills, and ADHD, and is also on the way to being diagnosed with autism.
“She has struggled to attend school since she started Year 1,” she says, “but for the first 18 months the school didn’t think she had any special educational needs whatsoever, and would not talk about it, even as evidence started to come in from other professionals.”
Her daughter does not have a learning difficulty and, indeed, is “very academically able”, but finds it hard to make friends, to deal with noise, crowded spaces, and constant demands on her time, and to sit still. She has not gone to school since April, and is now recovering from burnout and extreme stress, which had given her abdominal migraines.
School has been made less congenial by another innovation of Lord Cameron’s government, Dr Brenner says. “They brought in an education adviser who believed that, in order to improve results, schools had to be much stricter, handing out detentions and suspensions for minor things like talking in the corridors, or not wearing the uniform exactly right.”
Some children with SEND can thrive in such an environment, she says, but the majority do not.
“In fact, it encourages them to mask their needs, so that they feel unable to ask for help if they’re struggling. It increases anxiety, and can lead to what is now called ‘emotionally based school avoidance’.” Children cannot face going into school, she says, and become very distressed. Some may even misbehave expressly so that they will be excluded.
Today, she argues, “ableism is almost part of the DNA of many schools.” This particularly affects neurodivergent children, whose disabilities may well be invisible to the casual observer.
Mrs Drinkwater suggests that there is still “a bias within the school system, and amongst medical professionals, where even obvious signs that girls have SEN can be dismissed as something completely different. You know: ‘She’s a dreamer’; ‘She’s away with the fairies’; ‘She’s shy’ — things like that.”
THERE are about 1.7 million schoolchildren in England with identified special educational needs. The rapidly growing number who have EHCPs — up from 232,000 in 2014 to 434,354 last year — has imposed severe demands on local authorities’ resources. Many authorities seem reluctant to issue more.
“The law set the bar for an assessment very low,” Dr Brenner says. “The criteria are very broad, so that most children who are struggling in school should be eligible.
“But the policy [adopted by local authorities] is very much at odds with that legal standard. So, the policy will say that, before the authority will consider an assessment of need, a child must be more than a certain number of years behind their peers, say, and the school has to present a huge dossier of evidence of all the different [measures] they’ve already tried.”
That discrepancy between law and practice means that when parents challenge a local-authority decision and go to the SEND Tribunal, “they win well over 95 per cent of their cases.”
Catriona Moore, policy manager at IPSEA (the Independent Provider of Special Education Advice), the leading charity in the field of SEND law in England, says that the law is routinely disregarded.
“Too often, the only way children with SEND receive the support they need, and to which they are legally entitled, is when parents inform themselves about the law and appeal to the tribunal. But this is an option that, obviously, isn’t available for every family.”
The process of getting an EHCP is in any event very complex, Mr Chalke says. “It is shrouded in mist and mystery. In some places, people will tell you that on average it takes eight months; in other places, it takes two years — if you get one at all.
Claire and her nine-year-old autistic son, whose education at home is funded by the local authority
“Schools don’t have anybody in a full-time post who is expert at dealing with local authorities — and local authorities are understaffed, because they’re all skint. Parents often get so frustrated they give up.”
Inevitably, the situation discriminates heavily against children from less affluent families. “Middle-class parents have got more connections,” Mr Chalke points out, “and usually the better-off you are, the more free time you’ve got to invest in your child.”
The “investment” required can be enormous. “It takes a lot of time to go through the legal process,” Mrs Drinkwater says, “and those who can access it will be those who have the ability to learn quickly, know where to find the information they need, and have enough confidence to tackle professionals in the local authority who will, it seems at times, fight you tooth and nail every step of the way.”
She herself is about to go before a judge yet again. After two tribunals, her youngest daughter has finally been granted an EHCP, but “the plan is not sufficient, and the local authority has ignored vital evidence.”
For “many, many parents”, she says, this level of effort is “simply not do-able. They haven’t got the mental capacity, the financial ability, or the time. All of those elements become hurdles that for a lot of parents are just too difficult to overcome.”
Families can spend a small fortune pursuing an EHCP, Dr Brenner says. “I know one family that has spent over £60,000. You have got to be desperate to go to tribunal.”
THE ISOS report — commissioned by local government — maintained: “The challenges in the SEND system are not the result of any group behaving in unreasonable ways, but, instead, the result of an incoherent system that inadvertently perpetuates tension, creates adversity, and sets everyone up to fail.”
Others are less generous. The parent-led website Special Needs Jungle declares: “The system is not incoherent, it’s chronically underfunded, and the people administering it have little care for legal compliance. What it’s also lacked for the last decade is the will to implement the 2014 reforms fully.”
Funding is, clearly, a significant issue. The cost of EHCPs makes up “a huge part” of a local authority’s budget, Mr Chalke says. Indeed, since 2019, the Government has been allowing councils to keep expenditure on SEND off their balance sheets, because otherwise a number of them would have gone bankrupt. The County Council Network reports that the total accumulated deficit in England has now reached £3.2 billion, and is projected to rise to £5 billion by 2026.
When the House of Commons Education Select Committee reviewed SEND provision in 2019, it found that schools were struggling to access outside services, such as speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and educational psychologists — not to mention the NHS’s child and adolescent mental-health services (CAMHS).
The overall situation was made only worse by the pandemic. Lockdown had “a huge impact”, the educationist Sir Kevan Collins recalls. “When children are unable to attend school, it has consequences for their social, emotional, and physical, as well as their academic development, and the impact was greatest on disadvantaged children and those who find learning particularly challenging.”
Claire’s three-year-old autistic son; every school consulted has said that it cannot meet his SEND needs. The family do not know where he will go to school next year
When he was appointed as “education catch-up tsar” in 2021, he asked for a budget of £15 billion. When the Government instead allocated £1.4 billion, he immediately resigned.
“Sir Kevan predicted that an avalanche of emotional and social needs was going to descend on schools, and would overwhelm them if we don’t deal with them,” Mr Chalke reflects. “We didn’t deal with them, and now they have swamped us.
“We now have children in our schools who don’t have the command of language or vocabulary you would have expected before the pandemic. Some of them are still in nappies. Some can’t even walk properly.”
The problem, Mr Chalke says, is made ever more complex by the emotional, social, and mental-health needs of parents who also felt the impact of the lockdowns.
Meanwhile, years of cutbacks have stripped classrooms of teaching assistants, whose job is “just watching out for the kids who are faster, or slower, or need special attention. Without them, many children can’t thrive.”
IS THERE hope for improvements under the new Government? In 2019, the Commons Select Committee concluded that “unless there is a systemic cultural shift on the part of all parties involved, additional funding will make little difference to the outcomes and experiences of children and young people with SEND.”
Sir Kevan Collins has just accepted an appointment as a non-executive member of the DfE board.
What is needed, he says, “is a full-blown resolve to tackle this issue, a shared commitment from all of us to support families, support teachers, and support schools to be inclusive places that can meet the needs of the broadest range of children and maximise their progress. Everything I’ve heard about Labour’s proposals indicates to me that they are serious about this.”
No child suffers if you make the whole classroom more inclusive, Dr Brenner says, “but the children with additional needs all benefit. The benefit of inclusivity is that children whose needs may not have been identified — particularly girls, particularly children whose first language is not English, particularly children from more vulnerable communities — would be getting automatic access to these supports: access to sensory aids, things to block out noise, the right to a quiet space they can access, visual support to help with learning.
“A lot of good schools already have these as standard, but they’re not universal.”
Mr Chalke, whose book A Manifesto for Hope: Ten principles for transforming the lives of children and young people was published by SPCK last year (Features, 22 September 2023), wants a more joined-up approach across education, health, and care.
“Someone senior in the Home Office contacted me: ‘We’d like to talk to you about the causes of youth violence.’ I said: ‘You might like to talk to me about school suspensions, or permanent exclusions, or special educational needs, or . . .’ I ran through a list of related issues, and he said: ‘Yes, but those don’t sit in my department.’
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Because they’re all aspects of exactly the same basic issue.”
ipsea.org.uk
specialneedsjungle.com