‘Crackdown’ on SEN?

Daily Mail headlines often make me want to sigh, groan or emigrate. The Mail’s recent coverage of the publication of statistics about children with special educational needs (SEN) referred to a “crackdown” on SEN to prevent parents trying to “claim extra funds”. Let’s be clear: parents do not get cash because their kids have SEN. Even those who are entitled to get Disability Living Allowance if their child is disabled often struggle to get it.

And what does a “crackdown” on SEN actually mean? Does it mean simply taking children off the SEN register as the article implies? Or does it mean “giving children and young people with SEN better access to the high-quality support they need” as the Department for Education has actually said?

The reporting on SEN stats reminds me of the annual stories about how exams are getting easier (until we marked a whole year of learners down a grade, so it could be reported they were getting harder instead). It’s not just that both stories are misleading. It’s that they completely miss the point.

What’s important about exams is whether they help young people move on in life. Not an arbitrary view of how many of them should be allowed to get an A. What’s important about SEN is whether all children in classrooms are making progress. Not how many of them we put into categories.

So are pupils in the UK making good progress? Recent international comparisons suggest not. And we know from countless government reports that parents of children with SEN still have huge battles to get the support their children need at school. But why do we insist on addressing these two challenges as two separate issues?

Newspapers that are up in arms about our low international scores for literacy and numeracy are the same ones that lambast schools and parents for “over-identifying” SEN. The blunt point is that some children need different or additional support in order to learn. If we want to improve our international educational ranking – and give every child the chance to achieve their best – then they should get it.

Are some children wrongly identified as having SEN when there is something else going on? Probably. Are some children with SEN languishing quietly at the back of classrooms, in pupil referral units or at home, because their SEN has not been identified? Definitely. We hear from parents of children in this situation all the time. This is the real scandal here.

Kate Williams is head of policy and public affairs at Ambitious about Autism.
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