The SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) Crisis and the Campaign for Equality for Disabled Young People.
Edition 5 May 6th. The Tories' plans for SEND don't tackle two major flaws in the system: funding and accountability. Inequality for disabled people is being addressed by a new project
Transform our Education System by Supporting UK Disability History Month. Help Get Young Disabled People’s Views.
Richard Rieser ( Managing Director of World Inclusion and UK Disability Month Co-ordinator, rlrieserr@gmail.com) explains the principles which should lie behind an inclusive education and an opportunity for young disabled people to share their experiences.
Disabled people continue to be the largest oppressed minority in the UK and worldwide. Women and girls are the largest oppressed group. They have their lives and life chances significantly curtailed by the thinking and actions of misogynist men and boys. Sexism is imbibed by all and only a few consciously actively challenge it, so with disabilism.
Disablism is discriminatory, oppressive, abusive behaviour arising from the belief that disabled people are inferior to others. Disablism refers to prejudice, stereotyping, or "institutional discrimination" and is about people's attitudes. It refers to conscious and unconscious discrimination.
Before the 1970s, disabled people were viewed as medical failures and victims of circumstance, deserving of pity. These were the chief characteristics of the ‘medical model’ of disability, which placed the problem firmly with the individual and assumed disabled people need a medical ‘cure’.
Against this dominant model, a major shift in thinking took place in the 1960s/70s, initially in the United Kingdom with UPIAS 1975, the development of the social model and in United States, with the ‘independent living movement’. The paradigm shift sees the solution in the restructuring of society and removal of barriers. This is referred to as the Social Model and was adopted by Disability International in 1981.
“Impairment is the loss or limitation of physical, mental or sensory function on a long term, or permanent basis.
Disability is the loss or limitation of opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical and social barriers”.
The key to this change was to recognise that those with a long-term impairment might need medical treatment and rehabilitation, but their major need was to have the barriers of attitude, environment and organisation adapted and removed, so they could live their lives with dignity in the community. This paradigm shift was merged with human rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Person with Disabilities (UNCRPD). The UK ratified this in 2009 but has been slow to implement it, particularly in education in England. Policies of inclusion have been undermined by the introduction of a narrower curriculum, high stakes testing, competition, rigid behaviour policies and academisation. An incoming Labour Government must reverse these measures, and develop an education system based on a curriculum for all.
The General Secretary of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres’s vision statement based on the Transforming Education Summit September 2022 was aimed at a world which has failed in Education for All over the last thirty years. The aims are just as valid in the Transformative Inclusive Quality Education System Labour must initiate for all. Learn to learn, Learn to live together, Learn to do and Learn to be.
To achieve this, transformative education must support learners in the following four key areas.
Learn to learn: This calls for equipping every learner with the ability to read and write, to identify, understand, and communicate clearly and effectively. It will help every learner to acquire and develop numeracy, digital, and scientific skills. It should also instill the curiosity, the creativity, and the capacity for critical thinking and to nurture social and emotional skills, empathy, and kindness.
Learn to live together: In a world of rising tensions, fraying trust and existential environmental crises, education must help us not only to live better with each other, but also with nature.
Learn to do: The world of work is undergoing fundamental change. Technological advances are creating new jobs and making others obsolete. The green, digital and care economy transitions hold enormous potential to align economic activity with social and environmental outcomes.
Learn to be: This implies the deepest purpose of education, which is to instil in learners the values and capacities to lead a meaningful life, to enjoy that life, and to live it fully and well. In part, it is a biproduct of learning to learn, to live together, and to do.
Finding out what disabled young people in all settings think about their experiences will help us include this excluded group.
Exploration 2023 Disabled and Young in UK, a creative exploration aimed at young disabled people, is open for entries.
Disability History Month (DHM) 2023 is asking young disabled people to share their experiences - the good, the bad and the changes they would like to see – as part of a new exploration
UKDHM use a social model of disability. This means entrants must have long term impairments of body, senses or mind, and that their disadvantage is caused by socially created barriers of attitude, environment and organisation. Disabled people have human rights which are often denied by prejudice, bullying and discrimination. This approach should be applied in contributions.
Entries can take any creative form, including poetry, prose, artwork, film and signing, and will be judged for their insight in four age group categories (from under 8 years, 8-12, 12 to 16, 17 up to 25 years). Submissions can be by an individual or a group in any format or form.
The judges, including Michael Rosen, NEU executive member Colleen Johnson, and disability campaigners and teachers, will be looking for the most insightful, powerful and interesting contributions.
Labour Must Commit to Better Accountability and Increased Funding for Children with SEND
The Tory plans for SEND will not improve the experience of parents or provision for children argues Amanda Bentham (SEA NEC). Instead we should insist Labour puts SEND at the heart of its education policy.
SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) and inclusion is at the core of the SEA’s campaign for an education system that is fair, inclusive and accountable. Effective support for children with special needs and disabilities benefits all children and young people yet SEND is taking the sharpest cuts. The legal framework is sound, but systematic underfunding, lack of accountability and marginalisation of parent/carer voice all too often reduces SEND provision to a paper exercise.
Currently 82% of children with SEND are educated in state-funded mainstream schools, 10% in state special schools, 7% in independent schools, 1% in state alternative provision (AP). Pupils with SEND and those in AP have poorer outcomes than their peers. Their attendance rates are lower (especially since Covid), and they are more likely to be bullied and excluded from school. By age 27 they are less likely than their peers to be employed and more likely to be the victims of crime, or criminalised. Children and adults in custody/prison are twice as likely to have special educational needs as those in the general population.
Inclusion is being destroyed by funding pressures, cuts to specialist services, the lack of adequate training for staff, a shrinking curriculum, the pressure of league tables and the drive to academisation. Almost 97% of all SEND tribunals go in favour of parents/carers – indicating fundamental needs are not being met and the disability duties in the Equality Act are not being applied. This past academic year saw a 29% rise in in SEND appeals, tripling since 2014.
The central plank of the Green Paper and the uninspiring Improvement Plan published in March, is a set of new statutory ‘National Standards’ designed to tackle the postcode lottery and provide ‘clarity’ for families, practitioners and providers. Clarity is not what’s needed. The existing SEND legal framework is very clear about assessment, and the EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) process. What’s needed is action and funding to ensure schools, colleges and local authorities fulfil their existing legal obligations.
Most of the ‘National Standards’ proposed in the plan won’t even be implemented nationally for another two years and some don’t have a timescale at all. The Tories have stepped away from a few of the most unpopular ideas in the GP, such as limiting parental choice of setting, and mandatory mediation between Local Authorities and families. They are still pressing ahead with most of the original proposals. These include:-
more special free schools instead of improving inclusion in mainstream schools
training for up to 5,000 early years SENCos - for one year only
extra funding to train more educational psychologists for two years only
improved access to speech and language therapy
a new, less rigorous, qualification for SENCos
a long-overdue single national digitised EHCP template.
The plan represents a monumental missed opportunity because there is a total failure to address the lack of accountability which lies at the root of the SEND crisis. In many cases local authorities, schools and colleges are simply not adhering to the existing legal framework. How can they afford to? Under the Tories, schools have seen a 14-year freeze on per pupil spending, with no ring-fencing of SEND funding. Councils have lost around 40% of their central government funding since 2010. With High Needs budgets at breaking point, the national ‘overspend’ is expected to top £3bn this year. The government response is the ‘Safety Valve’ programme offering bailouts to those authorities with the highest deficits, in return for imposing strict conditions such as EHCP rationing and cuts to remaining central services.
The SEA’s manifesto (see below) is just the start. The SEND campaign has strong potential to cut across traditional internal Party divisions to win the demands set out by the SEA. We need to connect with parents and carers, young people, activists, educators, governors, Labour councillors and MPs to unite our voices and get SEND and inclusion on to Labour’s agenda and into its next manifesto. Join us!
SEA Manifesto on SEND and Inclusion
Building an Inclusive Education Service
Labour should :-
· re-state its commitment to inclusion and work towards the position where mainstream schools become the default providers for children with disabilities and Special Needs. Labour Newham has a strong record in this regard. Inclusive practice should be celebrated and the capacity of all mainstream schools to meet wider diversity of need, should be built up.
· grant and delegate greater powers to local authorities over opening, closing and changing schools, admissions, exclusions and the care of vulnerable and SEND pupils.
· ring fence SEND funding.
· set up a new agency (see inspection and accountability) to enforce disability duties on all schools under the Equality Act and build in local accountability and monitoring of SEND provision.
· reduce class sizes and increase staff ratios to create more accessibility for neuro-diverse pupils as part of the general increase in school funding,
· reverse the position whereby only more affluent parents can access specialist services such as Educational Psychologists, because these specialists have opted out of the system. It must reverse cuts to specialist services and pay practitioners competitive rates.
· ensure that schools must have ready access to assessment and diagnosis with support provided before such diagnosis takes place.
· require teacher education and training for other educators embraces inclusion and the Equalities Act.
· initiate a national strategy to work towards ending permanent exclusion. This should emphasise the role of positive humane relationships, restorative justice, social understanding, communication, problem-solving and teamwork. Zero tolerance behaviour polices should be phased out.
· A mechanism for scrutinising and monitoring school fixed term exclusions should be set up in each local authority to ensure that behavioural and exclusion policies are not impacting disproportionately on specific groups of students (e.g. Black and/or Muslim young men). It should draw upon the model of the Newham Monitoring Project including representatives from all key disadvantaged and minority communities in the area. Additional funding should be made available to local authorities for this purpose.
· ensure that qualification framework allows the accreditation of everyone’s skills and achievements.