Future of SEN provision hangs in the balance

Will the original promises of the green paper be fulfilled or will it all become a damp squib? And how will the most severely disabled children fare from the proposed changes? Sit comfortably, and listen to the murky tale I have to tell of high hopes smothered and ambitions dashed.

There was a great fanfare at the publication of the green paper on SEN by the then children’s minister Sarah Teather in 2011, with the sector enthusiastic about the apparent commitments to create a more joined-up assessment and care system, extending up the age range to 25. Despite the ravages of the government’s austerity programme, they seemed to be trying to do the right thing.

But when the draft bill was published a few months back, the enthusiasm was decidedly more muted – the planned new education, health and care assessments seemed not as new or extensive as had been hoped, and the proposed new single plans appeared to have much less impact on service delivery than the current statements. Still, people thought, at least they still extend up to 25, so some of the traditional challenges of transition into adult services might start to be smoothed over.

This September, the Night of the Ministerial Long Knives saw both Sarah Teather and Tim Loughton unceremoniously sacked, and a new Health Secretary appointed who declared his aim to focus almost entirely on older people. Whispers said that Teather’s departure was down to her failure to translate the ambitions of the green paper into anything deliverable in the new world.

In particular, said the whispers, Teather’s proposals were incompatible with the new health structures, and her desire to create a stronger system for holding authorities to account for providing health services to children with SEN simply ran counter to the rest of the Department of Health’s thinking.

Next came the Night of the Civil Service Long Knives. We learn of 50 per cent planned cuts in Department for Education officials; Michael Gove’s interest is almost entirely academies, so the great bulk of the cuts will come in children’s services and special needs. Officials are told to “down tools” in developing the SEN parts of the legislation any further; the date for the planned publication of the final Children and Families Bill seems to drift into the interminable future, and lessons from the SEN pathfinders are not now expected for another 18 months.

New whispers talk of the SEN parts of the bill being shelved, to be tacked onto some future education bill next year, while the parts tackling adoption and the children’s commissioner could be added to a social care bill.

For many of us who were involved in preparing the original green paper, these are worrying times. SEN provision has always been the Cinderella service in education and, as the torrent of changes to the mainstream system rushed through, systems for supporting children with SEN have seemed ever more outdated.

The current legislation talks of local authorities having the duty to monitor provision in mainstream schools, but they no longer have the power to enter the premises of an academy. The current code of practice speaks of the role that local authority advisory services play in offering support, when most local authorities have been cutting these services to the bone and beyond.

As the world changes around us, provision for disabled children and those with SEN needs to change or they will become left behind, with a dispirited workforce feeling overlooked and a set of families feeling bereft.

I have recently rejoined (temporarily) a charity I worked for in the 1980s, working with severely disabled children. In those days, we argued that individual local authorities could never develop the specialism to meet the needs of deafblind children, and that they needed to collaborate regionally to provide for low-incidence, high-intensity needs.

In an era where local authorities were in the ascendance, regional planning did not take off. But today, I detect a new enthusiasm for this approach. Many in local authorities can read the writing on the wall; if specialist services are not to be hived off to private sector providers, a new delivery model needs to emerge.

2013 will be a critical year for SEN provision. We have to hope that something new emerges from the ashes of the current services.

Sir Paul Ennals is interim strategy director for Sense, the national deafblind charity