SEN0375

Written evidence submitted by Mrs Margaret Farrell

I wish to start my evidence by talking a little about my experience I have always worked in primary education I have always worked in challenging schools. For the last 16 years I was a head teacher of a school with high levels of deprivation in Rochdale, we also strived to make it an inclusive school. I have been retired for two years. I am a grandparent of a nonverbal autistic child which gives me another insight into the SEND system.

The challenge is that not all schools embrace SEND this makes for an uneven system and an unfairness in provision across the country. Schools should be celebrated for the inclusive work they do and the creative initiatives that they have developed to support children with varying needs.

The whole education system needs to open its eyes and open its doors to support children who are different and this will only be done if there is a complete rethink of what mainstream primary schools; multi academy trusts are “allowed” to do.

Professionals should be given the authority to say this isn’t right at this time for these children. Professionals in schools should be allowed to adapt and amend the curriculum provision to suit the needs of the children, Many schools are working exceptionally hard to support children with special educational needs and disabilities.

To improve the system there has to be fairness and clarity between schools. Although many schools open their doors and welcome all children, there are other schools who with gentle persuasion and at times distinct putting off, close their doors to any child with special educational needs.

This needs to be addressed so that all schools are inclusive and supportive.

Outcomes for children with special educational needs, need to be looked at in a sensible and realistic way if we continually measure SEND against those with no special educational needs and disabilities it will always appear as if SEND children are doing poorly at school.

We have the Olympic games and the para Olympics so that athletes can compete, achieve and excel against other athletes in their particular category. Why don’t we have separate outcomes for SEND children so their achievements can be celebrated and not measured against how far behind able bodied or neuro typical children they are.

SEND training provided by professionals working in the field needs to be obligatory at teacher training colleges. Policy needs to be produced by professionals currently working in the system.

There should be a National Qualification for Tas/Support assistants. In SEND provision and practice.

All schools should have additional funding to release the SENco to support work across the school.

A school can be regularly criticised for what they are trying to do by professionals who have not been involved in the day-to-day running of a school for many, many years. This needs to be addressed.

Current practitioners need to be involved in teacher training.

Local authorities need to use the Addition needs teams and base them in schools, From here they can complete their outreach work. More time to work with children and less time spent on repetitive form filling. This is a huge issue within SEND system. Repetitive paper work and form filling. Repeated observations of the same child by numerous professionals all arriving at the same targets and advice.

Special schools that have been built under the PFI initiative need to be freed from the strict contracts so that they can develop and enhance their buildings without huge cost. All special schools need to have teams of outreach workers that need to be funded that can support mainstream schools in their locality.

Education Healthcare plans need to be uniform across the whole country.

Teachers and parents need to be listened to and believed. There is a protracted process of having to get reports children having to be observed schools and parents having to wait weeks for somebody else to come and observe their child where the outcome is not going to be changed by repeated observations use the expertise of well-trained teachers and parents who know their children best to arrive at conclusions about their children

Current and future models

Local authorities and MATs need well organised databases that contain information from parents, settings and health visitors about children who have got special educational needs and disabilities many times it seems that agencies are trying to gather information, complete more observations, fill in more paperwork about children that are already known to settings, parents and professionals

Multi-agency working needs to be exactly that but multi-agency working needs to listen to professionals across the different agencies all too often when planning and providing send places local authorities are working from a budgetary model. Professionals out of school often have an unrealistic model of what schools are able to do.

Many schools are being innovative in their ways of supporting children with special educational needs unfortunately some of these schools are not sharing their innovative approaches because they are concerned that this practise will be not looked on favourably. I will address this in the ofsted section later

Work needs to be addressed on  the high exclusion rates of SEND children.

The discussion needs to focus on the needs of individual children many children with special educational needs struggle with some of the rules and routines that have become the norm over the last 10 to 14 years. Health needs of children with special education  needs and disabilities could best be met at school by providing a fully qualified member of Staff who could administer medical procedures

FINANCE

There is limited funding provided directly to schools or nurseries to support with identification of needs. The expectation is that teachers can identify this need express their concerns to local authority support officers and then join the queue for people to come in and observe and look at the children the setting. I fear this creates an awful waste of time. Experienced and trained school professionals can identify the need with out all the extra further red tape that goes on

The issue with funding is mainly because to place a child in specialist provision is incredibly expensive, if it is the right provision for that child then the money should be spent however changes to the curriculum in mainstream school and changes by Ofsted to inspections of mainstream school could make the sustainability of maintaining children with special educational needs and disabilities in mainstream a more positive experience and a way forward.

OFSTED should be listening to Head Teachers about the different provision they are making for children instead of asking ridiculous questions like “when does he learn about the Great Fire of London” When observing a non verbal autistic child with ADHD who has severe anxiety in school.

The government interventions like delivering better value send and the safety nets unfortunately seem to sit at local authority level and rarely if ever appear to have an impact in schools. Over the years there have been many initiatives and many ideas rolled out from the government through the local authority that don’t seem to address the need at school level.

The government and this review needs to understand that people working in inclusive schools are those best placed to support policy moving forward. Involve more teachers by paying supply costs to support the schools,

Funding is not sufficient in school to provide the support that children with special educational needs and disabilities need.

The most vulnerable children need the most highly qualified staff but this will come at a cost and this is where the system is failing. Many local authorities have huge teams for additional needs, speech and language therapist and other outside people who have to spend a significant amount of their time filling in and writing reports these people will work better if they were based in schools and did outreach work from schools

Ofsted need to totally change their approach when they are supporting schools and inspecting schools where there is a high proportion of children with special educational needs. The educational needs data is still compared to those children who do not have special educational needs and as mentioned earlier we have an Olympics and we have a Paralympics so that those two distinct groups of talented athletes can excel in their own disciplines.

The whole narrative around special educational needs is a deficit model of what these children can’t do because of the top down accountability system of data and testing in the mainstream school

Ofsted need to understand the challenges and the benefits of running an inclusive school that welcomes all children they need to understand that the teachers and the head teachers are best placed with the parents to understand what is best for their child. As a grandparent who has a non speaking autistic grandson age 4  we want him to be happy and safe we are not worried about his baseline assessment his good level of development his phonic acquisition because at the moment that is not appropriate for our grandson

When inspectors are questioning senior management if children with special educational needs are having some specific and different support (1 to 1 or in a small or quieter space from the classroom) Asking about when are the children going to do their work on the Great Fire of London the whole notion of special educational needs and adaptations and what we need to do differently is completely and utterly lost. This is why schools are closing their doors in all sorts of ways to children with special educational needs because they are concerned about data and concerned about ofsted.

If you add into that mix schools that are an exceptionally challenging; areas that have higher percentages of SEND, higher percentages of poverty and deprivation, more challenging families and more challenging children to deal with and yet they will never attain the dizzy heights at schools where the biggest problem is they’re wearing brown shoes and not black ones

Having a family member with special educational needs and disability is a constant fight. The whole education system is about trying to fit every single person into the same system. Over  the past 14 years the doors have got significantly narrower and as the child walks through those narrow doors they have limited space to learn and grow if they are neurodivergent or if they have special educational needs.

The narrative needs to change from they’re just using this label to get away with being naughty to what do we need to do differently for this small percentage of children that are coming into our mainstream schools.

Until there is an acceptance that the curriculum will need to be changed that the day might look significantly different and that there is a recognition that it is not 1 size fits all, the SEND system will always be in crisis. Many schools would be more inclusive if they didn’t think they were going to be judged on data, many schools would be more inclusive if we didn’t start comparing our send data to our non SEND data.

January 2025