Bridget Phillipson, Secretary of State for Education, has finally turned her attention back to her brief – and there is a big group of school parents who wish she hadn’t. Parents whose children have special needs are up in arms about the latest announcement that has come from the Department of Education.
It was bad enough to hear that, given Phillipson’s other pressing commitments (her doomed attempt to be elected deputy Labour party leader earlier in the Autumn being one), the publication of the white paper on schools’ special needs (SEND) provision would be postponed until next year. Concern over this delay – sinister murmurings about a total overhaul of the system have also alarmed parents already struggling to navigate this labyrinth – has been overshadowed by reports that children with ‘lower level’ needs may lose one-to-one teaching assistant support.
Assessing ‘special needs’, psychologists like Dr Johnston point out, is a messy business
This is not the one-hour taxi ride from home to school that some commentators have seized upon as proof of scrounger parents gaming the system. Support can be as little as getting a teaching assistant (TA) to meet and greet a very anxious child at the school gates in the morning or reading with a child struggling with their dyslexia three times a week for 15 minutes.
‘We are not speaking about a velcro TA who sticks to the child all day – that’s outdated, and it’s not sustainable,’ says Dr Sharon Johnston of the Inclusive Learning Partnership group. Her organisation, which supports parents with SEND children, warns that the proposed blanket ban will have the perverse incentive of driving more parents to apply for an education, health and care plan, as this still ensures local authority funding. ‘This kind of one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work – what does work is targeted and focused interventions.’
Assessing ‘special needs’, psychologists like Dr Johnston point out, is a messy business: cognition and communication skills may be easy to gauge, but what about wellbeing? Sociability? A child who is withdrawn may be shy but happily independent – or manifesting a symptom that should raise the alarm.
So what ranks as a low-level need? That’s for schools to decide. Mariella Ardron, headteacher at Chelsea Academy, is clear that:
Schools are best placed to do this. Often the support of a TA for a limited time (or better still, longer) allows for early identification of the need and the right intervention to be put in place.
Ofsted demands that schools and local authorities provide the right help at the right time. Dr Johnston agrees that the right time is early in the child’s life: ‘Early identification and support can foster positive learning… and strengthen home-school collaboration.’ Hannah, whose nine-year-old daughter is neurodivergent, remembers how staff at preschool had begun to raise questions about her child’s failure to meet certain milestones. ‘But then Covid came, and services shut down. By the time she was in school, the issues had grown unchecked. She felt overwhelmed, anxious, and had withdrawn into herself.’
Unfortunately, the child who disrupts class, acting up and hurling abuse at staff, will get on their teachers’ radar while the child who sits immobile through their lessons, quietly failing in every subject because they can’t read properly or have speech impairments, will be easiest to ignore. And when that child inevitably risks compromising the school’s performance outcomes, someone from the school will call in their parents and regretfully explain that limited resources mean there really is no way to meet their child’s low-level needs.
Except that by then, without having received any support from school, the child’s needs are no longer low level: in the interim, they have grown to unmanageable proportions. That’s when parents have to step in. Angry, well-resourced parents who know their rights and are prepared to put money where their mouth is can hire lawyers to help them browbeat a school into doing the right thing by them.
Those parents who stoically soldier on, stretching themselves financially and emotionally to breaking point all too often fail to sustain teachers’ attention. ‘At first,’ Hannah remembers, ‘we had a really wonderful TA who, over 12 weeks, gave our daughter one-on-one attention… because she did not feel overwhelmed by classroom learning or intimidated by her classmates they were making real progress. But then the TA got ill and the school decided they would not replace her.’
Hannah had been hopeful that in Surrey, primary schools would be capable of supporting her then 7-year-old. She learned instead that support is patchy and gaps in understanding the needs of SEND children significant. ‘Within days I could see our daughter withdrawing again. She couldn’t keep up in class. The school called us in and said they could not meet our daughter’s needs. They took her off the roll.’
If the government thought that reducing TA assistance for low-level needs would be popular with teachers, they are mistaken. At Chelsea Academy, Mariella Ardron, warns that ‘taking away TA support would absolutely add pressure on schools’. And not just in terms of a SEND child’s attainment: according to official government figures, more than 10 per cent of these children miss more than half of their school days. An Education Department alarmed by ever-plunging school attendance figures should consider whether a TA’s salary (£25,000 average) might not be a modest price to pay for keeping our schools open.
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