Your say / Education
‘Bristol pupils are not receiving the necessary early intervention to ensure they have an inclusive education’
Let us be honest, before July nobody was talking about Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) funding. That was the problem.
Unless you were directly involved, few people were aware of the crisis that had developed in this area: the constraint on budgets; the failure of the council to comply with legislation, the poor relationship that has built up between parents, the council and schools.
Despite no consultation and no equality impact study – a key requirement in law – the mayor went ahead with the cut of £5m to this year’s SEND funding. At the budget council, not one mention was made about this cut.
is needed now More than ever
But one small group of parents were not so easily fooled. They discovered what had happened and did something extraordinary. They took the mayor and the council to court. They did not just win; they won on every single point and argument they made.
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Read more: £5m cuts to special educational needs budget ‘hidden’ from council
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Now Bristol will have to revisit the budget for SEND, and the legal ruling is clear that just making the cut again will probably not be lawful. Why? Because it turns out Bristol is in breach of its legal duties around SEND every week of the year.
Since the Children and Families Act 2014, statements were replaced with Education and Health Care Plans (EHCPs) which greatly expanded interventions and care for children with SEND and created a clear legal test on when a child should be considered for an EHCP.
Freedom of Information requests have revealed that hundreds of requests for assessment for an EHCP have been turned down by Bristol City Council. The council has also admitted that out of 136 appeals to the courts regarding EHCP decisions, they have only ever found in favour of the council nine times.
The council argues that it is facing unprecedented demand for EHCPs, but the Government statistics tell another story. Where Bristol is average for the number of children in secondary school with an EHCP, at primary school it is less than half. This means many pupils are not receiving the necessary early intervention to ensure they have an inclusive education. Sometimes those pupils, whose needs are not being met, go onto disrupt the education of others in the class. The answer is not lessening demand but providing the needed level of support which currently isn’t happening.
Half of Britain’s prisoners are functionally illiterate. The Government have also said that around half of prisoners have dyslexia compared to 10 per cent of the general population. Think about that. Now think about the ‘causes of crime’. Now think about this: Bristol City Council has no dedicated intervention programme specifically designed for children with dyslexia and delivered by dyslexia-trained teachers for primary school children.
It is clear that central government does not provide enough funding for SEND. With expanded rights and growing needs as disabilities are now diagnosed, government must provide more funding. At the same time, those that run Bristol City Council have been aware of this problem for some time. Instead of redirecting resources to achieve their lawful duties and statutory requirements, they tried to sneak through cuts that were discriminatory and illegal.
It is essential that the mayor now reach out to all councillors, parents, schools and groups who all have an interest in this area and bring forward new proposals that will ensure the service begins to not only meet its legal requirements, but the expectations of all those who are involved.
This may mean changing the way we deliver services. Ensuring there is better quality intervention at primary school level will have positive knock on effects not only at secondary, but for the rest of that child’s life.
Tim Kent
Main photo: Families protest against the £5m SEND funding cuts by Bristol City Council before July’s judicial review.
Read more: ‘Parents picking up the pieces of the education funding crisis in Bristol’
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