Young people with SEN deserve support when leaving school

Some of the young people I know are preparing their “personal statements” to help them apply for college – a moment to think about who you really are. The transition from school into whatever comes next is one of the biggest challenges any of us face – for young people and also for their parents.

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.

I have been spending time with several such parents and young people recently, as part of a Department for Education-funded project that is trying to identify good practice in transition work for sharing with a wider audience. Some things have changed from my time on the frontline, but much is depressingly familiar. Let’s be positive – let’s look first at what is improving.

The new legislation just might make things better at the time of transition. The joint education, health and care plans are good in principle. They should prove better than the previous assessments for young people aged 19 to 25, and should provide stronger accountability over what health agencies deliver than has previously been possible. The loss of the protection of a statement of SEN at age 19 has always seemed so negative, so credit to the government for grasping this nettle. Will it make a real difference in practice? Cynics would say that at a time of rapidly dwindling funding, it is hard to see how services can do anything other than decline. But even at times of decline, it is good to have a system for robustly assessing and identifying needs, and for bringing together the key statutory agencies to agree together what should be provided.

From next year, local authorities will have to publish their “local offer”, setting out what they and their partner agencies provide to support young people with SEN as they prepare for adult life. In the past, it has sometimes been desperately hard for parents or young people to find out what might be available to support them. In principle at least, from here on the information desert should be somewhat more irrigated.

Today’s disabled young people are more accustomed to having their views asked for than in previous generations. Most schools and services can now show how they use “person-centred planning”. I have seen some great examples of how creative adults find ways of tapping the views and choices of young people who find it extremely difficult to communicate. Mind maps, pictures, recordings – new technologies and new jargon are finding new ways for voices to be heard.

At times of rapid change in local budgets, though, it is so hard to align some of this emerging good practice with what actually happens. Transition advisers tell me how their working conditions make it impossible for them to plan in the way they know they should. Even if they start planning for a young person’s post-school placements at aged 14 as the code of practice suggests, funding decisions will frequently not be taken by the funding panel until just before the young person leaves school. So the principles of planning ahead, involving the young person, working across organisational boundaries and preparing the young person carefully for any move are all set aside by a decision-making process that is driven by the need to manage a declining budget. Put crudely, the government can say what it likes in its high-minded legislation. While the right hand of government describes what should happen, the left hand withdraws the funding that could enable it to happen.

Sir Paul Ennals is a children’s services consultant and former chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau