Too many children with special educational needs are living in poverty. It’s a waste of public funds

I want us to stop leaving children with special educational needs and their families out of the conversation about what is best for them. I want families facing long waits for diagnosis to be supported, and for it to become crystal clear to policymakers that SEND is a portal to poverty for too many families.

I want us to stop trying to push the narrative that one size fits all and that mainstream school is somehow the silver bullet. It isn’t and the pressure on schools to provide care for children who have complex needs is so great. It cause fractures in support for the families of those children.

Children with SEND are often ostracised in school settings and the community we need to help our children develop disappears because of the misunderstanding around unmet needs. Without support, such as asking for help around childcare from other parents, we can’t work properly, we can’t be consistent, and we can’t reach our own full potential. Supporting our children shouldn’t be this hard.

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I want school staff and professionals to appreciate that the experience of parenting a child with additional needs is isolating, and we have not done this before. It is so hard.

We have appointments to attend. We are called into school, almost daily in some cases, to collect our children or to work out what’s going on with them. Our employers often do not make allowances for this and we lose our jobs or something has to give.

We face social stigma, our children face this too, daily. And ultimately their academic progress takes a back seat as we fight hard just to help them get support to be ready to learn. 

I am not a lazy parent. I did not neglect my son, but the system in place to support him and I failed, it failed not once, or twice, but consistently as we sat in a diagnostic vacuum. 

The issues around social, emotional and mental health difficulties are huge. There are often no pathways to support for children who remain undiagnosed. If the government thinks it is spending too much on welfare to support people with mental health needs, we need to realise that early intervention for children and early support in place from specialists is essential to mitigate the long term impact of leaving children and families to face these issues alone

The current provisions for children’s mental and emotional health are appalling. Expecting existing school staffing structures to provide scaffolding and complex needs interventions is untenable and specialists need to be brought into the environments where children and families are able to be reached so that we can have more timely support and ultimately better outcomes.

We are paying out tens of thousands of pounds per child to non-maintained schools and education provisions unnecessarily. Children’s wellbeing and education should not be a commercial concern and nobody should be making money off the back of this, ever. It’s an abhorrent waste of public funds when we already possess everything necessary to become great, if only we invested in wraparound support from the beginning. 

Children cannot be expected to wait years for an education, health and care plan (EHCP), then cram all of their education into a fraction of the time their mainstream peers receive. Dreaming up new college courses for disenfranchised young people is a sticking plaster on a gaping wound and does not address the damage experienced by children on the way to that new qualification.

Poverty for us began with a high-conflict separation. It was then compounded by inadequate service provision and support to the point that we lived in abject poverty. Parental blame helps no one and while we have the chance to change the story for all of our futures, it would be criminal not to take that chance and invest in a better public system to educate all of our children.

Differentiated education is not impossible, but paying private organisations to do this is not the answer. Equip and fund the schools we already have and look to place based education as a possibility to change the story for communities and ultimately the economy as a whole.

This is a circular issue and as long as we continue to ignore the root cause of this type of poverty, we are simply creating tomorrow’s low income, social security reliant people. When traditional education is continually failing our children but we keep pushing this as the answer, we deserve nothing more that the outcomes we are seeing. If we don’t support families, we are not only losing one person’s economic output.

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