Understanding special educational needs
Arlen Pettitt, our first guest editor of the summer, shares his family’s fight for a fairer future in special education.
By Arlen Pettitt
Our six-year-old son is one of the 14.2% of school pupils in England who receive support for special educational needs (SEN), and has recently become one of the 3.3% to have an Education and Health Care Plan (EHCP).
He grapples with sensory processing disorder and is currently on the 18-month or so waiting list for an assessment for autism and ADHD.
What that means in practice is he struggles with busy, bright or noisy environments, like a school, for example.
The daily challenges of sensory overload
The overwhelm he feels comes out in what they call emotional dysregulation, and his poor nervous system spends a considerable portion of the day on the edge of fight or flight.
In the past two years, he has attended two different mainstream schools, been suspended on four occasions, and spent an entire term on a reduced timetable, which shortened my working week down to 16 hours.
We are, remarkably, to be counted among the lucky ones.
He now has an EHCP and, from September, a place at a specialist school which should have the expertise and resources for him to thrive.
In a mainstream setting, the sensory demands are too high, the class sizes are too large, and everything else is too rigid.
Our son is, without a doubt, the smartest, most curious and most imaginative six-year-old I have ever met.
He will tell you about volcanoes and the Voyager spacecraft. He will create worlds for he and his friends to play in, full of dinosaurs and freeze rays and superhero-like stretchy suits.
There is not one single thing about him I would change, but I would rip up every single part of the process we have just been through.
A system under strain of rising demand and stalled resources
The system is creaking because the number of EHCPs has skyrocketed, up 80.4% since 2019, while funding has increased by just 41.2% in the same period.
More than half of the cases miss the 20-week legal deadline for a plan to be issued, and an incredible 99% of appeals are upheld nationally.
There is no doubt that reform is needed. In the Autumn, the government is to publish a Schools White Paper.
Ministers have refused to deny rumours that, as part of that, they plan to scrap EHCPs for pupils in mainstream schools - part of a push to make mainstream more inclusive. I do not know how they plan to achieve that.
What I don’t think policymakers realise is that the current Labyrinthine SEN system has created an elite group of battle-hardened advocates, and so any changes are going to be met with an incredibly bright spotlight.
Help us advocate for SEN children and tell the full story
I’m getting out of the gate early with some work of my own analysing suspensions - eight in ten go to SEN pupils - and I’m gathering parent views on that, and on the SEN system more widely.
Please click through to find out more and complete my survey. Also, please free share it with anyone who might be interested in contributing.
All of the statistics in this editorial can be found via the House of Commons Library’s SEND dashboard.
