SEN shake-up could deprive vulnerable children of vital support

Support for children with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities is being radically redesigned under the biggest shake-up of the system for 30 years.

Following a public consultation into the government’s SEN green paper, which elicited 2,400 responses, the Department for Education has confirmed the changes it wants to make between now and 2014.

Statements of SEN are to be replaced by single education, health and care plans covering support from birth to age 25 – backed by a new integrated single assessment system.

Parents of children with these plans will be offered personal budgets and health services will have a legal duty to commission provision for children in partnership with councils.

The reforms are intended to improve support for children and increase parental choice. But fears have been raised that children at both the top and the bottom of the scale of need could miss out.

Single plan concerns
Laura Courtney, campaign manager at Every Disabled Child Matters, believes the government’s proposals are too narrowly focused on those children who currently qualify for statements of SEN. She argues that disabled children with predominantly health and social care needs could be excluded from having a single plan.

“We don’t understand why the new education, health and care plan is only available for children who have SEN,” she says.

“What happens to a child who is diagnosed with a complex health condition at birth and needs support straight away? My concern is that a range of children could fall through the gap. There is no strong narrative from government on how children without a statement could benefit from the reforms.”

Courtney warns the changes could inadvertently force parents to seek out educational support for their children in order to access the single plan, which they would not have done before.

“Without access to integrated support, disabled children will be at greater risk of experiencing social exclusion, poverty and family breakdown, and their families will be forced to continue to battle to access universal and specialist health services,” she says.

Brian Jones is chief executive officer of the Senad Group, which runs seven special schools and colleges, and a spokesman for the Children’s Services Development Group.

He believes that children with particularly complex needs could find it difficult to access the right school place under the new system. This is because parents will be unable to state a preference for whether their child should attend a non-maintained or independent special school, even though a large proportion of specialist care is provided through that part of the sector.

“Children with very complex needs deserve specialist care that is tailored specifically to them to ensure they are able to live the most fulfilled lives,” he says. “In many cases, parents will still have to battle to get the most appropriate provision for their child.”

Jones adds that greater use of personal budgets for children with SEN “must run hand in hand with true parental choice”, warning that such budgets must not be a cover for “an overall reduction in funding”.

Meanwhile, education professionals are concerned that children with additional needs, but who fall below the threshold for a statement of SEN, will be cut adrift by the reforms. At the moment, such children are provided with extra help through two lower tiers of support, referred to as “school action” and “school action plus”.

Lorraine Petersen, chief executive of Nasen (the National Association for Special Educational Needs), believes schools will need assistance in redefining how they work with children in these groups.

“Nasen does have a concern about the replacement of school action and school action plus with a single assessment process,” she says. “Schools will need advice and support on how to implement this new process. This will mean empowering our teachers through high quality training and professional development to meet the individual needs of all of their pupils.”

Petersen admits that there may be some “over-identification of SEN”, something that the government’s plans seek to eradicate. But she says the reforms must be used to offer all children and young people experiencing difficulties the best education possible.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, believes that estimates of the number of children wrongly identified as having SEN may be over the top.

Tighter rules
“We are worried that the government’s plans for tighter rules to identify children with SEN and its assumption that children are being wrongly identified will deprive some children of the vital support they need and is being driven by its desire to cut costs,” she says.

“The government risks undermining some of its more positive measures if it thinks specialist support for all the children who need it can be provided on the cheap.”

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, argues that the government’s plans will reduce schools’ ability to tailor provision to pupils with varying levels of need.

“The system of statements can be overused – although we should ask why we have a system that pushes professionals to such lengths. But the fact is there are indeed more children with special needs,” he explains. “More children than before are surviving to school age with serious conditions; and we increasingly recognise some behaviour patterns as being treatable conditions that would have been dismissed or ignored in previous eras.

“There are genuine traumas – such as the death of a parent or family difficulties – which do not qualify as identified conditions or disabilities, but which still mean that children require intensive specialist support. A too simplistic approach will let some children slip through the net.”

The SEN green paper: Next steps