“The Send [Special educational needs and disabilities] system is broken: completely and irrevocably,” said David Wilson, a deputy headteacher at an inner-city Manchester primary school where there are between six and 10 children with Send in each classroom. “This impacts everyone – children with and without special needs.”
Wilson, who spent eight years of his career as a Senco [special educational needs coordinator], was among hundreds of people who shared their experience of SEN provision in the UK. Parents, teachers and Send specialists from across the country overwhelmingly agreed that things had become the worst they had ever been.
The number of children and young people entitled to government support in the form of education, health and care plans [EHCPs] is due to double to 1 million within a decade, a report found. The investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) found that despite record levels of spending, there had been no signs of improvement in the lives of children with SEN.
Local authorities, the report further concluded, were being forced towards insolvency by rising demand for special school places and “high-needs” funding for specialists such as therapists, psychologists and teaching assistants.
Hundreds of teachers and parents of children with and without SEN told the Guardian that mainstream schools had no hope of providing adequate support for the growing number of children with increasingly complex special needs.
“There is a huge increase in social, emotional and mental health needs (SEMH) and subsequent dramatic increase in children disrupting their own learning and that of others,” Wilson said, echoing the remarks of many, including those of a deputy headteacher of a primary school in Nottingham who said the number of children with significant Send had “risen massively” over the past five years. Their needs, this deputy added, were often now so complex that teaching assistants who once supported groups of children in each classroom now had to focus on the needs of a single child they had been assigned to.
Wilson said he and many of his colleagues believed that the main reasons for this sharp increase in SEMH were “Covid, Covid, Covid”.
“It had a devastating effect: children lacking social skills – the ability to turn-take, reciprocal play, sharing, resilience. They went from a low-demand environment to one where they’re expected to follow social norms, school rules, the rigour of the curriculum.
“In addition, I believe the stress put on teachers is transmitted to the children, and vice versa – a vicious self-perpetuating circle. Staff are exhausted dealing with constant crises. The energy expended by teachers on children with behavioural needs is not sustainable.”
Like hundreds of others, including parents, teachers and Send specialists, Wilson believes that the concept of inclusion – providing education to children with Send in a mainstream school setting rather than in a special school – is no longer working because of the explosion in pupils needing extra support.
Record amounts of funding for Send – with the bill for special needs education in England having hit £10bn a year – “have been and are being wasted for a set of poor and damning outcomes”, he feels.
“We need to massively expand the number of specialist places. The government needs to listen to what teachers are reporting and fundamentally change the way we meet the needs of SEN children. It cannot be fixed on the cheap – or we’ll be having the same, tired old conversations in three, five or 10 years’ time.”
Wilson said waiting lists had spiralled, as had appeals made by parents whose children had been denied EHCPs, leaving “children unable to access what is legally theirs”.
Many parents said it had taken years of “battle” to get EHCPs for their children. Several parents said they had been forced to give up their jobs as their children had been denied EHCPs and could not attend school without one. Others said they had been signed off from work due to stress because their children’s needs were not being met and they had to argue with schools and local authorities to secure adequate support.
Simultaneously, dozens of parents whose children had been granted an EHCP said the school struggled to adhere to it and routinely failed to deliver the specialist provision their child was entitled to.
Dozens of teachers shared this experience, saying there were simply too many children with EHCPs to look after, too few staff and not enough specialist training. Various teachers said that children with EHCPs were increasingly often assigned agency teaching assistants who could leave at short notice in the middle of the school year, causing additional disruption.
Tom, the father of a son with autism from Bristol, said his son had been progressing well in a mainstream setting thanks to an EHCP and one-to-one support in school – “despite the obvious challenges the school has had in ensuring provision for him”. Now, however, Tom said, this specialist provision was progressively worsening, as the school struggled to support him and other children with Send due to too little funding and too few specialist support staff having to be spread among too many children.
“This has affected him directly, as well as his friends and peers,” he said. “Some have left, some struggle on. Few thrive.”
His son had no choice but to try coping with higher levels of anxiety, worry and stress as there was, Tom said, no flexibility regarding school attendance and “no possibility of a specialist school place”.
“Our Senco recently said: ‘In 20 years, it’s the worst it’s ever been.’ This is a national emergency affecting not just the most vulnerable children, but all children, their families, their communities. Labour must act immediately.”
Fiona, a teacher from London in her 50s, said: “Far too many children with Send are just dumped into mainstream lessons with little support.” There was often only online support or a single teaching assistant to help several students with conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, she added, leaving classroom teachers who were already overstretched with the task of helping these students.
Amanda, from Surrey, who had to give up work to care for her two children with autism, was one of many parents who described their children’s time in mainstream schools as traumatic.
“My twins have each fallen out of mainstream education,” she said. “They both have EHCPs and are academically very able. One of them achieved a distinction in their level 3 qualification because their self-esteem was rebuilt by the specialist school, where they were kind, understanding and flexible. The other twin still has a long way to go to recover from their experiences in mainstream.”
Like scores of other parents, Amanda highlighted diagnostic assessment waiting times of several years in her area, as well as attempts by her local authority to obstruct the issuing of EHCPs.
“The only way local authorities can save themselves some money is to delay [applications for Send support],” she said.
Various parents, teachers and staff from local authorities said the system was pitting the needs of individual children against endeavours by schools and authorities to invest in improvements of the state school sector, with many saying that funds spent on obtaining, implementing and reviewing EHCPs often did not yield desired outcomes.
Dozens of teachers also raised concerns about the EHCP system being unable to target support at those with the biggest needs.
“SEN resources are directed towards the parents who push for it,” said a primary school teacher from Sussex who wanted to stay anonymous, describing overly ambitious parents trying to get EHCPs to secure extra academic attention for their children in crowded classrooms, even if they did not struggle. Other parents, he said, were pathologising normal behaviours such as occasional forgetfulness, or were trying to get medical diagnoses for minor issues such as a child’s inability to tell the time.
“Meanwhile, we have children who can’t read but will never get an EHCP as their parents won’t ask for it,” the teacher added.
Another teacher working in the suburbs of the capital said the “inclusion illusion” meant that councils were at the mercy of tribunals demanding that needs must be met, regardless of financial deficits.
“Children in mainstream classes are watching adults in crisis managing emergencies, feeling emotionally and sometimes physically unsafe, knowing that they are not a priority. It’s a breeding ground of resentment and intolerance,” he said.
“No one is triaging the children most in need. Many of them now languish out of formal education, unable to access an appropriate curriculum. Here, the educated and well-resourced fight to demand provision.”
Some parents rejected such characterisations, with one mother of two boys with SEN from Lancashire saying she and her partner felt “penalised for being good parents”, as hard-won support for her son had been withdrawn again after the family had developed their own additional coping mechanisms to better meet their children’s needs.
A number of parents reported that they had been trying to obtain EHCPs in the hope that this would help with their children’s poor mental health, after they had been unable to get adequate NHS mental health support.
Many parents said they felt betrayed and believed their children could be thriving with the right support, among them a single mother from Leicestershire with two children who have additional needs.
She had only learned during the Covid lockdown, she said, that one of her sons was unable to write a simple sentence, after the school had reassured her that he had been progressing fine.
After an ADHD diagnosis, spending money on a private assessment with an educational psychologist as well as on a solicitor to take her case to a tribunal, and a two-year wait, the council finally agreed to assess the needs and capabilities of her son, who by then had entered secondary school.
It took another year for the EHCP to come through, but, she said, her son “still hasn’t received the emotional support he is entitled to, nor the support in the lessons he is entitled to”.
“I do understand that teachers are overwhelmed, that councils are strapped for cash and that the NHS is inundated. But most of these children, with early intervention, would be able to participate and contribute to society.”
