Thu 31 Oct 2019 14.30 EDT
Last modified on Thu 31 Oct 2019 14.35 EDT
Your editorial (A less confrontational and better funded system for vulnerable pupils is needed, 28 October) was admirably understated. Its arrival on our breakfast table coincided with our grocery delivery, brought in by a cheerful young man whose job as a teacher and specialist in behavioural problems at a school in Cardiff had just been cut – along with the jobs of five others in his field. The reason given was that there was no longer any need for teachers specialising in behavioural problems.
At a time when young people are reported as feeling more anxious and stressed than ever, cutting jobs like these seems to be bordering on the negligent. Now that “ministers have belatedly realised that cash is the issue”, can it be hoped that some of these dedicated, skilled professionals will be re-employed as teachers, before they are lured away by the better pay and opportunities in other sectors?
In the meantime, how many more children’s lives will be blighted by the lack of support available to them? And how many teachers will leave the profession as they crumble under the weight of the additional responsibilities of trying to address their pupils’ special needs?
It seems that the damaging effects of austerity rumble on, despite the fine words of our former prime minister.
Dr Stephanie Williams
Dinas Powys, Vale of Glamorgan
• Your editorial implies that the education committee’s report on children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) doesn’t come up with a solution for vulnerable children.
However, there does not need to be a magic solution or rewriting of the rules, as the solution lies in the system that currently exists.
What we want is the system to work for all children with Send. Our proposals – including to increase powers for the ombudsman, introduce a more rigorous inspections regime from Ofsted, establish a neutral individual to help guide parents through the bureaucratic treacle, enable local authorities to build new specialist provision, and develop a strategy for employment opportunities for young people – will have a significant impact and increase the focus on the education and life outcomes for pupils with Send.
Ringfencing the additional £700m would be entirely consistent with our criticism of the way in which the implementation grant was used; it was distributed to local authorities with the following guidance: “Local authorities can spend this grant to help with the additional costs associated with the implementation of the Send reforms. They may, however, choose how to spend the money in order to best meet local need.”
We expect the Department for Education to have learned from the debacle of the implementation grant, and set firm parameters for spending, under our watchful oversight as a committee.
Robert Halfon MP
Chair of the House of Commons education committee and Conservative MP for Harlow
• Your editorial makes cogent points about the failure of central and local government to respond to the needs of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
As the chair of a specialist college which transforms the lives of young people via their interest and involvement in the performing arts every year, I know the torment visited on their parents as they attempt to obtain funding is appalling.
We also find that on appeal most of the students obtain funding which indicates that the applications are well founded but what hurdles the parents are made to jump.
Three particular issues illustrate this injustice. First, the lack of empathy in the system denies what grief and stress has been visited on the parents often since the birth of their child. How can a caring state treat them with such disdain?
Second, the parents who stay the course are those with money and the skills to fight the system. The poor and inarticulate often give up and keep their adult child at home until they die.
Third, as your editorial says, there are “Byzantine procedures to suppress demand”.
One of the cruellest of these is to defer funding decisions until the summer or even autumn of the young person’s final year in school. Imagine the stress and uncertainty for the young person and their parent(s) not knowing all summer where they are going in September.
Years ago social service departments and local educational authorities were required to agree a jointly funded care plan at 15 for the rest of the young person’s state-supported learning and care needs. Central governments in their wisdom changed all these structures and, as ever, disabled people dropped through the net.
There is a simple solution: require local authorities to decide by the end of the penultimate year in school where that young person could be funded to go when they are 18 and for central government to provide ringfenced funds for this.
John Beer
Farnham, Surrey
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/31/young-lives-blighted-by-a-lack-of-support
