As though we didn't all have enough to deal with!

Rather than waiting to give out all of the information below in my New Year update in January 2011, I have decided to prepare an update now focused on a number of things.

You will probably already be aware that there has been quite a lot happening in recent months and a lot of discussion about issues which affect (or will affect) children with SEN. I have tried to summarise here some of the things which I feel are important for people to know under the headings of: 'SEN Green Paper', 'OFSTED Review on SEN', 'Comprehensive Funding Review', 'Further Statistical Information' and 'Legal Aid Cuts'.

Rather than providing detailed information (although it may seem that way) I have instead provided links to other articles/documents for people to visit if they want to find out more. However, you may want to print this out.

SEN GREEN PAPER

The previous Labour government conducted a number of Inquiries into special educational needs provision such as:

• Brian Lamb (on parental confidence in provision for children with SEN and disabilities);
  
• Toby Salt (on provision for children with severe learning difficulties and profound and multiple learning difficulties);
  
• John Bercow MP (on meeting the needs of children with speech, language and communication difficulties);
  
• Sir Jim Rose (on teaching children with literacy difficulties and dyslexia); and
  
• Aiming High for Disabled Children (on better support for families).

But after the Coalition Government came into power in May 2010, they considered it necessary to consider again the whole issue of SEN provision. 

On 10 September 2010 the Minister of State for Children & Families, Sarah Tether, invited views from everyone with an interest in services for children and young people with SEN or disabilities in England.  There was a dedicated page regarding the consultation on the Department for Education’s website which said that all views and perspectives received would be considered as part of developing proposals for a Green Paper on SEN and disability to be published in the autumn. The BBC ran a news article that day entitled 'Minister seeks more parental choice on special needs'.

The closing date was 15 October 2010.  The consultation document was available online (with the ability to also respond online) and known as the ‘Green Paper: Children & Young People with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities – Call for Views – Consultation Document’ (Download).  Unfortunately, the consultation did not seem to be very well publicised so many people were not aware of it that should have been.

The Introduction to the Consultation stated, amongst other things:

'One of the first commitments made by the new Minister for Children and Families, Sarah Teather MP, was to improve the wellbeing and achievement of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, as well as the support for their families. In the Autumn the Minister will publish a Green Paper to outline the Government's approach, and what it means for children, parents and those who work with them.

In preparation for the Green Paper, Ministers and officials have been listening to and meeting people who know a lot about what is and isn't working, including parents, teachers, and representatives from local authorities, charities and campaigning groups. A number of recent reviews in this area have contributed to our understanding, along with reports from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).

If you have a special educational need or disability, or your child needs extra help for this reason, or you work closely with young people or families with these needs, we want to hear from you too. Your views and perspectives will help make sure that policies affecting you have been developed with your needs and your experiences in mind.  Your ideas about where improvements could be made - big or small, national or local, specific or general - will all be considered.

The questions in this Call For Views are based on the topics frequently raised, but please pass on your views about any aspect of current policy or services. We are particularly keen to hear about areas or examples where things are working well, so we can help to share successful practice through the Green Paper. We will make good use of your responses. They will help us to develop proposals for the Green Paper.'

You may find it interesting to read IPSEA's response here.

At the time of writing the Green Paper is still awaited.

OFSTED REVIEW ON SEN
At around the same time (coincidentally) on 14 September 2010 Ofsted issued a document entitled ‘The Special Educational Needs & Disability Review – A Statement is Not Enough’ which had been commissioned by the previous Labour government, whose remit was:

‘… to evaluate how well the legislative framework and arrangements serve children and young people who have special educational needs and/or disabilities.’ The published review stated that ‘It considered the early years, compulsory education, education from 16 to 19, and the contribution of social care and out-services.’ 

The Review and Summary is available on the Ofsted website by clicking on the relevant links below:

• The Special Educational Needs & Disability Review (Word) (PDF)
• The Special Educational Needs & Disability Review – Summary (Word) (PDF)

The Press Release stated as follows:

'A major review of special educational needs and disability arrangements published today by Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, reveals a range of concerns about the current system and how well it is serving children and young people.

For the ‘Special educational needs and disability review – a statement is not enough’,  inspectors carried out 345 detailed case studies of young people’s experience of the current system, held discussions with many other young people and their parents, and visited 22 local authorities and a total of 228 nurseries, schools and colleges. The review considers a wide range of evidence and covers the early years, compulsory education, 16 to 19 education, and the contribution of social care and health services.

Inspectors found many pupils would not be identified as having special educational needs if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all. The review also found the current system is focusing too much on statements of need, and checking pupils are getting additional services, and too little on how much this support is actually helping children progress. The review recommends that schools should stop identifying pupils as having special educational needs when they simply need better teaching and pastoral support, and that there should be more focus on evaluating the quality and effectiveness of services for children with special educational needs.

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Christine Gilbert, said:

“Although we saw some excellent support for children with special educational needs, and a huge investment of resources, overall there needs to be a shift in direction.

“With over one in five children of school age in England identified as having special educational needs, it is vitally important that both the way they are identified, and the support they receive, work in the best interests of the children involved. Higher expectations of all children, and better teaching and learning, would lead to fewer children being identified as having special educational needs.

“For those children with complex and severe special needs, schools often need the help of health and social care services. All these services should be focused on the quality of what they are doing, and how well young people are doing as a result. At the moment too much effort is going into simply checking that extra services are being provided.”

1.7 million school age children in England are identified as having special educational needs or a disability. These pupils are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, are much more likely to be absent or excluded from school and achieve less well than their peers both at any given age and in terms of their progress over time.

Parents that inspectors spoke to felt that under the current system they needed to “fight for the rights” of their children, and often saw a statement of special educational need as a guarantee of additional support for their child. But inspectors found that the identification of a special need or disability did not reliably lead to appropriate, good quality support for the child concerned.

Inspectors also saw some schools that identified pupils as having special educational needs when their needs were no different from those of most other pupils. They were underachieving, but this was sometimes simply because the school’s mainstream provision was not good enough, and expectations for them were too low.

The review recommends that where a child or young person is underachieving, the school or setting should start by analysing the effectiveness of their mainstream teaching and support.

Inspectors found that for children with the most obvious and severe needs, access to appropriate provision, from a range of services, was relatively quick and started at an early age. However, where diagnosis was more complex, access to services was not as straightforward.

For young people aged between 16 and 19, access to appropriate provision varied across schools, colleges and post-16 training providers. The choice of education and training opportunities at 16 was limited for many young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. It was rare to find education provision equivalent to 25 hours over five days for a college course for young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, although this was common for post-16 students in the schools and independent specialist colleges visited.  Past the age of 16, young people with learning difficulties or disabilities comprise one of the groups most likely not to be in education, employment or training.

Some schools and other organisations were working effectively together and focusing on the outcomes for the young person. Others were concentrating simply on what services were being provided or on processes, without focusing enough on the outcomes for individual children. What consistently worked well was rigorous monitoring of the progress of individual children and young people, with quick intervention and thorough evaluation of its impact.

The best providers had a good understanding of how to help young people become as self-reliant and as independent as possible, and the ambitions expressed by the young people were taken into account.

Taken together the implication of these findings is that any further changes to the system should focus on:

• improving the quality of assessment
• ensuring that, where additional support is provided, it is effective
• improving teaching and pastoral support early on so that additional provision is not needed later
• developing specialist provision and services strategically so that they are available to maintained and independent schools, academies and colleges
• simplifying legislation so that the system is clearer for parents, schools and other education and training providers
• ensuring that schools do not identify pupils as having special educational needs when they simply need better teaching
• ensuring accountability for those providing services focuses on the outcomes for the children and young people concerned.’

Ofsted’s Chief Inspector Christine Gilbert also appeared on the BBC ‘Today’ programme on 14 September 2010 to outlines what measures might be taken to reduce the number of children being diagnosed with SEN.

The mainstream media quickly seized on the fact that schools were ‘over-diagnosing’ special needs and using special needs to badly or wrongly label pupils with SEN in articles such as:

• ‘Ofsted says schools using special needs too widely’ (BBC)
• ‘Ofsted says pupils wrongly labelled with SEN’ (Teachers TV)
• ‘Half of special needs children misdiagnosed’ (ITN)
• ‘More than 700,000 pupils wrongly classed as having ‘special needs' (The Independent)
• 'Ofsted: schools exaggerating special needs to hide poor teaching' (Telegraph)

However, teaching unions and a number of organisations representing children with SEN also quickly sprang into action, saying that schools were not to blame for varying special needs provision and Ofsted was scapegoating teachers or being too simplistic, with articles such as:

• ‘SEN review exposes policy shortcomings rather than school failures’ (NAHT)
• ‘Teachers are not to blame for varying special needs provision’ (NASUWT)
• ‘Media Response: Ofsted’s Review of SEN and Disability’ (NAS)
• 'TreeHouse Response to Ofsted SEN Report in Today’s Guardian' (TreeHouse)
• ‘Education: more than just teaching’ (BBC Today)
• ‘Ofsted Report on Special Needs comes under fire’ (Guardian)

You may also like to read articles such as:

• ‘Is this really a growing problem in our schools? For and Against’ (The Independent)
• ‘Ofsted Special Needs Report: Too Simplistic’ (Channel 4)
• 'So special needs is a con, is it? It's not a very clever one' (Guardian)
• 'Time for a rethink on special educational need' (Guardian - Letters)

Baroness Warnock also quickly stepped into the debate again with an article entitled 'The cynical betrayal of my special needs children' (Telegraph)

COMPREHENSIVE SPENDING REVIEW
The coalition Government then issued its much anticipated 'Comprehensive Spending Review' on 20 October 2010.

This detailed major cuts for a considerable number of Government departments of around 35%.  However, it was said that Department for Education’s spending on schools would rise from £35.4bn to £39bn over the next four years and that this money would go directly to schools. 

It appeared though that there was little change in the money being allocated to education in real terms as Councils in England are also facing an overall 7.1% cut in revenue which will have a ‘knock-on’ impact on auxiliary services to schools.  The Review also stated that many grants to local Councils would no longer be ringfenced (which means that they would no longer have to spend the grants on prescribed services).

Other things announced were that 'personal budgets' would be introduced and extended for children with SEN; there would be more support for children with disabilities and long term health conditions and there would also be more provision for adult social care but no details were given about this. 

You can read a summary on the NAS website together with their media response (although it focuses on Autism the principles apply more widely) .

Just as an aside, the cuts/freezes are also going to affect the training/recruitment of Educational Psychologists. You may wish to read the article entitled 'Psychologists: training freeze - service at risk' in the TES (Times Educational Supplement).

FURTHER STATISTICAL INFORMATION
Just a month after the publication of the Ofsted Report, on 19 October 2010, (coincidentally the day before the first ever United Nations World Statistics Day) further statistical information was published by the Department for Education.

This stated that 1 in 4 boys in state schools was found to have special educational needs and this has risen from 19% (1.53 million of school age children) in 2006 to 21% (1.7 million of school age children) in 2009. 

It was pointed out that in many cases children had been diagnosed by the school themselves and again the media caught onto this by arguing that many thousands of children were simply ‘underachieving’ because teaching standards were not good enough and expectation of pupils was too low. 

It was suggested that ‘state schools were being encouraged to over-identify pupils to attract more funding from local councils’ and boost their positions in league tables that give weighting to schools with higher numbers of special needs children (‘Quarter of boys have special educational needs’ (The Telegraph – 19 October 2010) and ‘Special Needs more likely for boys, study finds’ (BBC – 19 October 2010)).

Whilst it has always been accepted anecdotally that there are roughly 20% of children of school age who have special educational needs of one sort or another (more in secondary than in primary) and only 2-3% of the pupil population have a formal statement of special educational needs (the number of which has actually dropped since 2006) the latest figures state that 25.4% of primary school boys have special needs (with or without a statement) compared with 14.3% of primary school girls. In secondary schools, 26.5% of boys but only 16% of girls have special needs (with or without a statement).

LEGAL AID CUTS

And finally...if that were not enough, on 15 November 2010, the Government unveiled its plans for reform of the legal aid system. (Click here for the BBC coverage).

The Law Society Gazette summarised the situation well by stating that:

'A wide range of civil cases will no longer be eligible for legal aid, and fees paid in civil and family cases will be cut by 10% across the board, according to Ministry of Justice plans set out in a consultation paper, Proposals for the Reform of Legal Aid in England and Wales, released today...

Under the plans, £350m will be saved from the MoJ’s budget by 2014/15 if its proposals are implemented in full, the government estimated.

The key civil and family cases that would be cut from the legal aid scheme are:

• Private law children and family cases (where domestic violence is not present);
• Employment;
• Education;
• Immigration where the individual is not detained;
• Clinical negligence;
• Ancillary relief cases (where domestic violence is not present);
• Consumer and general contract;
• Welfare benefits;
• Legal help for the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority;
• Debt matters where the client’s home is not at immediate risk; and
• Certain housing matters.'

Understandably, there was a general media outcry again, including in relation to the plans to cut funding for Education cases (see 'Legal aid cuts 'deprive justice' to school-dispute families' (TES)). Many people concerned expressed surprise that education (which is comparatively a very small area of legal aid funding) was on the list of cuts to be made as it would affect some of the most vulnerable children.

CONCLUSION

The Chinese have a curse which roughly translates as: ‘May You Live In Interesting Times ...’ These past few months have certainly been very interesting for those of us involved in SEN issues. I guess we'll just have to see what 2011 brings.

In fact, that curse has an interesting ring to it. I think I will title my next update in January 2011 just that!

I hope that this information is of interest to you.

With good wishes

Douglas

P.S. OFTSED has also just published its Annual Report for 2009/10 on 23 November 2010. You can download the Key Themes here.

P.P.S. The Govrnment published ‘ The Importance of Teaching – The Schools White Paper 2010’, outlining its proposals for reform of the education system on 24 November 2010. 

 

 

 

 

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