Dear Ms. Phillipson
I’ve listened with mounting alarm to your announcements putting the onus on parents to “think differently” about the provision for their children with additional needs.
You say you plan to make mainstream education “more inclusive” as an alternative to the current expensive, but failing, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system.
Inclusion is a good and noble objective. It’s hard to argue against your assertion that schools should welcome more diversity and accommodate a greater variety of need. For many children, a little extra expertise and child-centred early intervention will make all the difference and could well be cost effective in cases when it works.
I can understand the pull of this narrative. It must be tempting to assume that this is an option for all our children and make a name for yourself as ‘the education secretary who solved the issue’.
The fight for help
There’s no denying SEND funding is in crisis. We parents live this every day. The current annual budget for SEND provision is £10bn. Yet as you know, parents of children with SEND frequently talk of a fight to get the help our children need.
This is not loose or figurative talk. In 2022/23, local authorities in England spent £100mn on failed attempts to block SEND funding, winning only 1% of cases. In this context, it’s horrifying to learn that local authorities are lobbying you to make it harder for parents to appeal.
The needs of SEND children are not a figment of their parents’ imaginations, however inconvenient they may be for those who hold the purse strings. Authorities could have chosen to spend that £100mn getting on with their job of educating our children. For a little perspective, imagine how the public would view it if councils were spending this much to avoid providing adaptations for physically disabled children. It would be a national scandal, and so is this.
I beg you to look beyond the bottom line and the simple solution. Our children, whether SEND or not, are individuals with diverse needs, abilities, and aspirations. And they are being failed.
My autistic 12-year-old son attends a mainstream autism base, which offers specialist support combined with mainstream education where he can manage it. This may be a template for the inclusion you seek. It works well for many children through some or all of their schooling. The staff at my son’s base are excellent and he has been very happy there for the past four years. However, needs, and children, change.
Struggling to cope
As he reaches adolescence, the current level of anxiety my son experiences in a mainstream class is destroying any chance he has of reaching his academic potential. He needs a more regulated environment. I wish it were not so, but no amount of my “thinking differently” will change it. When I asked him to explain his experience in preparation for our recent Education and Health Care Plan review, this is what he told me:
“I’m really struggling with school, maybe because there’s too much mainstream, which is noisy and makes it hard to concentrate. Also, sometimes I don’t understand how the work is explained. And one example is, in English they keep giving us papers in such a small space and it’s cramped because there are lots of people on the desk. I mainly think it’s because I’m autistic that I’ve been placed in lower classes with people who are loud and have other needs or disabilities or kids that are naughty. I respect their needs, but sometimes it’s a bit too much when they shout and stuff.”
Walk in our shoes
If you’re still sceptical, I invite you to spend an evening with us after he’s been to school; to hold him as he cries and repeatedly tells you he’s struggling and he feels sad all the time; to watch his ritualistic, anxiety driven behaviour; to absorb his angry outbursts because he just doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore.
You should be with us when we hear that he’s too scared to sleep alone and visit the paediatrician with us to beg for help only to hear he needs to be suicidal to qualify for individual talking therapy. You might witness our discussion about whether we can afford the £500 it would cost for a single private consultation with an autism and anxiety specialist, someone whose livelihood is presumably predicated on the failure of the statutory services to help children like my son.
You might then understand my apprehension when I hear you speak of parents like me as though we are the ones who need to change. I just want my child not to cry every day because he can’t cope. Am I being unreasonable?
When you talk of SEND parents needing to “think differently”, you forget of whom you speak. We are a highly experienced bunch well placed to decode your message. We know that to think differently about our children’s provision means to lower our expectations.
You should be aware our expectations are already squashed as low as they will go. After years of form-filling, evidence gathering, waiting, assessment, appealing, and more waiting, we are fully aware that any support is given grudgingly and can be withdrawn on a whim. Know your audience. Dressing your cuts up as innovation just won’t wash.
A low base
Inclusion is a difficult thing to get right across an entire system. As the saying goes, “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person”. Sensory needs, processing challenges, physical support needs, and coping behaviours differ wildly from child to child and over time.
Considering also that autism is just one facet of SEND, you are asking a great deal of teachers and a school system that is already creaking under the weight of the socioeconomic pressure that defines modern life in the UK. Teaching neurodiverse children is a particularly challenging job requiring a different skill set that often takes years of experience to develop.
As a parent of two children, one with SEND and one without, I’m in a position to compare two different approaches to education. I should warn you that the school system as it stands is ill-equipped to accommodate children’s individual needs. Successive governments have boiled education down to a list of “must dos”. There’s so little room now for inspiration and joy of learning, for using different methods for kids who think differently or need more processing time, or for celebrating diversity and progress in all its forms and magnitudes.
I kid you not, I was told by a teacher at my daughter’s school that her reading her own books at home “doesn’t count” because they are not part of the Accelerated Reader scheme. Her enjoyment simply doesn’t count. Think about that for a moment.
If you believe a child like my son can be educated in this way, you have a steep learning curve ahead. No child should be educated this way unless your aim is simply to turn out standardised economic units instead of people with a wonderous variety of passions and aptitudes.
That’s life?
Some say that children like my son should learn to cope with the world “the way it is”. I’d ask those people to recall when in their adult lives they have been forced daily into an environment they find uncomfortable, even distressing, with 30 of their peers, and told they must learn to cope. Outside of the prison system, I can think of no examples.
I genuinely hope you make changes in mainstream education, not because it will help my son, who could never cope in a mainstream class full time, but because my daughter might benefit from a more flexible and inspiring education.
However, from such a low base, the inclusion you seek across all education settings and for all children will not be cheap. If I were a betting woman, I’d wager it would cost more to get it right than the current system.
If you want to understand the consequences of getting it wrong, you simply need to ask your nearest SEND parent. I guarantee they will have a long, sad story to tell.
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