There has been endless speculation in the media since the beginning of the year about the government’s intentions for provision for children and young people with special education needs and disabilities (SEND).
Ministers have promised far-reaching reform and have repeatedly quoted the previous Conservative education secretary, who memorably summarised the SEND system as “lose, lose, lose”.
But rather than providing details of their thinking or reassuring parents that children with SEND will retain the legal right to education and support that meets their needs, ministers have allowed rumours to run rampant while we wait for a schools White Paper that is now due in the autumn.
Will EHCPs be restricted?
Comments from government advisers and Whitehall insiders suggest that the right to an education, health and care plan (EHCP) may be restricted to children attending special schools and removed from mainstream schools, or even scrapped entirely.
This has galvanised SEND organisations, including legal advice charity IPSEA and parent-led website Special Needs Jungle, to create the 貹.
We want to protect a child or young person’s right to have all their special educational needs identified, to have the provision that’s reasonably required to meet these needs specified and to attend a suitable school. This is what the EHCP process covers.
Our fear is that, instead of tackling the real problems in the SEND system, such as the need for proper funding and accountability, the government is listening mainly to local authorities, which want EHCPs drastically reduced or removed altogether.
Funding problems
What would this mean for schools? It could mean shifting costs from local authorities’ budgets to schools’ budgets.
EHCPs in mainstream schools can enable a child to access things they need to help them learn, such as support from a teaching assistant, assistive technology, therapies and other services not routinely available in these settings. Without the funding that comes for individual children via an EHCP, it’s far from clear how schools would make this type of provision available.
What is all too apparent is that schools often simply don’t have sufficient funds to support children with SEND. And as the general SEND budget isn’t ringfenced, the tendency is to use it for other, non-SEND-related needs. This is driving the crisis in SEND support, which is, in turn, driving requests for EHCP assessments.
Removing EHCPs from pupils in mainstream schools risks leaving hundreds of thousands of children without the support they need to progress or even to access education at all.
Without providing statutory support, underpinned by the necessary extra resources for schools, it’s extremely unlikely that ministers will achieve their aim of more children with SEND thriving, or even surviving, in mainstream education.
Tribunal trouble
Campaigners don’t disagree that the system for supporting children and young people with SEND is broken. But it isn’t the law itself that’s at fault.
Much of the criticism levelled by policymakers is that the system is “too adversarial”. But the process for securing an EHCP for a child or young person isn’t intrinsically adversarial.
It becomes adversarial when the law isn’t followed, and when parents - who find themselves having to become experts in SEND law because non-compliance by local authorities is so endemic - don’t accept this and appeal to the SEND tribunal.
The SEND tribunal’s role is to uphold the law, and so, of course, parents’ appeals are upheld in huge numbers.
Strengthen the law
The solution to this isn’t to remove children’s right to statutory support and to hope for the best - that mainstream schools will manage to support children with all kinds of needs from within existing resources.
The system has become desperately difficult for many families to navigate because obstacles are routinely put in their way.
Changing the law might reduce what’s available for children and young people but it won’t reduce their needs. There’s no evidence that a non-statutory system would improve the likelihood of children and young people getting the support they need.
The answer, instead, is to protect, strengthen and enforce the law, not to pull the rug out from under the children and young people most in need.
Catriona Moore is policy manager at IPSEA (Independent Provider of Special Education Advice)
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