Almost three-quarters of parents of children with special education needs or disabilities in Bristol say they don’t feel the city council has the best interests of their child at heart.
That’s the damning verdict of a survey of SEND parents, conducted back at the start of this year, but whose findings have only now been published.
The survey also discovered that 70 per cent of parents have had to complain about how their child has been dealt with in the past two years, and almost four in every five parents say the council and other authorities are not taking their concerns more seriously.
Read more: Bristol council staff monitored social media posts and photos of SEND parents
The survey was undertaken at the start of 2022 by the Bristol Parent Carer Forum, but only published this month - on July 15.
That was before Bristol Live revealed the city council’s education department had collected information and even wedding photographs from the social media accounts of SEND parents.
And there was more controversy last week when, just after the council claimed it had collected that social media information after a request from the Bristol Parent Carer Forum, who had demanded evidence from the council to back up the council's claims that parents on the forum were ‘campaigning and lobbying’ about the SEND issue.
The survey was commissioned by the Bristol Parent Carer Forum in January, and between 180 and 225 parents and carers responded to different parts of the surveys, giving their impressions of how things had changed since the publication of a damning Ofsted inspection into the way Bristol City Council runs its provision for special needs and disabled children.
Back in the start of 2020, Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission declared Bristol City Council’s SEND department was ‘not fit for purpose’, amid huge waiting lists for assessments and a shortage of places in special needs schools.
Two years on, the BPCF asked parents and carers a series of questions about their experiences in those two years - and found little had improved.
In answer to the question about whether parents felt the council and the other health and social care agencies were taking concerns more seriously, a total of only 22 per cent said ‘Yes’, while 78 per cent said no, there had been no change.
The survey reveals that those who filled it in where highly likely to be parents who had complained about the way the council, their school or the health or social care authorities had or were dealing with their special needs child - of those who replied to the survey, 70 per cent said they had made a complaint since March 2020, and of those, two-thirds said they were not happy with the way their complaint was dealt with.
The survey asked parents and carers whether they believed Bristol City Council ‘has the best interests of the child you care for at heart?’ and only 17 per cent of those who responded said they did believe that. Some 72 per cent - almost three-quarters - said they believed the opposite, while 11 per cent weren’t sure and replied ‘maybe’.
The results were better - slightly - for the other agencies and authorities who deal with children with special needs. That 72 per cent figure for the council dropped to 50 per cent for social care services, and down to 28 per cent for education settings - schools, mainly - which means the majority of parents believe schools do or maybe do have their children’s best interests at heart, in stark contrast to the impression parents have of the council.
One of the biggest issues facing parents and children with special needs or disabilities is a lack of funding. Of those parents whose children had been given an EHCP - a formal and legal plan which outlines what kind of support should be in place to support that child in school - only 26 per cent said the school were able to ‘immediately’ put in place the provision outlined by the EHCP.
But the parents of 61 per cent - three out of every five - children given an EHCP in Bristol reported that the school had told them they would ‘have to wait for funding’ to put the provision in place, and another 14 per cent of parents said they were unsure.
A spokesperson for the Bristol Parent Carer Forum, which has now been told it won’t be funded through the council, said that, at the end of December 2021, there were 461 families who had gone through a needs assessment for their child but were still waiting a decision on whether an EHCP would be issued, whereas the average backlog for councils the same size as Bristol was just 96.
“Accountability is a key issue for parents and carers,” the spokesperson said. “When things go wrong families want honest answers about why decisions have been made. They want leaders to make sure that the people running the services take the right action to make things better,” they added.
In April, when the council published a progress report two years after that damning 2020 Ofsted inspection, the director of education Alison Hurley, said: “There have been improvements since 2019, but we’re not where we want to be as a council. This is an area that has been impacted by Covid, staff shortages and increased demand in the system.
“Waiting times overall have reduced and there are families that have had a positive experience but there’s still a lot to do to ensure all families receive a more efficient service,” she added.
Back then a Bristol City council spokesperson said: “Our performance data and feedback from many families demonstrates that we have made significant progress across all areas of our special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision since the Ofsted/CQC inspection in 2019, but we’re still not yet where we want to be as a council.
"We understand the concerns of some families and since our Ofsted inspection we have focused on SENDCo training to help increase SEND leadership in schools and improve early identification of children with SEND which we know is key.
"We have overseen an increase in SEND specialist provision places, with 282 new places that are secure and will be opening on an ongoing basis between now and September 2023. This is significant progress towards meeting the Mayoral pledge of 450 new specialist school places by September 2024,” they added.
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