There are more than 1.7 million children and young people in England’s schools who are recognised as having special educational needs and disabilities (or Send). When you factor in their parents and carers, it highlights the huge number of people who anxiously watch this area of policy. All of them know that the systems those kids depend on are dysfunctional and broken. And they are also keenly aware of something else: that whereas their experiences once tended to be ignored and overlooked, they have now crossed from the online world into Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The One Show, Good Morning Britain and all the rest, as a huge conversation about the politics of all this gets louder and louder.
Beyond the worsening Send crisis itself, there are obvious reasons for that: months of anonymous briefings and rumours, and the prospect of a legislative white paper that, we are told, will finally arrive at some unspecified point “in the autumn”. At the department for education, Bridget Phillipson – the secretary of state who is also running to be Labour’s deputy leader – says she wants many more children to be included in mainstream schools, and is aiming at a system that is more “timely, more effective, and actually maximises support”. In the vaguest of ways, that might sound reasonable enough, but there have also been rumblings that have caused many Send families no end of concern.
