Opinion: Young people with SEN deserve support when leaving school

If we think about a young person with severe disabilities, this moment of transition becomes infinitely harder. For many parents, school really is the best days of the lives of their children. Of course it is not always so, but often severely disabled children find themselves a good and supportive school place, where their needs are understood, where good teachers and other support staff get to know them. Although short breaks budgets have been badly hit, even in these times of austerity, education budgets for severely disabled children have so far been largely protected.

But the future, when school comes to an end, can seem a very hostile place. Hostile for young people, who may have very little experience or knowledge of adult living to draw upon, and who may not find it easy to know what they want to do with their own lives. Hostile for parents, who often feel that social services support seems less personal, less organised and much less resourced than education services, and who worry that the responsibility for managing the needs of their child will fall back upon their own shoulders, and so find it hard to "let go" the reins of responsibility. Hostile too for teachers - I vividly remember my time working in schools with disabled young people many years ago, worrying about what was to come for them. Worrying that my own efforts to improve their life chances might come to nothing when the reality of a resource desert became clear.