We Shouldn’t Increase Spending on Children With Special Educational Needs. We Should Cut It
Even our dear leader, founder of this excellent website, is wrong sometimes. In his latest Spectator column, Toby Young raises the redundancies that will inevitably hit SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) staff as a result of Labour’s education policies. Putting aside the overall idiocy of Labour’s education policies, Toby Young is incorrect in seeing a reduction in SEND staff and support as a bad thing.
I realise I am entering dangerous waters here, and usually bow down in admiration to Lord Young of Acton’s opinions, but here I beg to contradict him. After working around education and supporting children with SEND since 2020 I have come to the conclusion that the whole SEND set-up is a job creation scheme for middle-aged women. I would go further and suggest that the army of middle-aged women do little to improve the educational outcomes of the children involved, and even worse, give so-called SEND children the idea they are biologically incapacitated for life. The entire system needs a review [caveat none of this applies to any of the severe mental and physically disabled children who require specialised care and education – just the children who have been diagnosed with amorphous conditions whose only symptoms seem to be an inability to concentrate or being a bit socially awkward].
Two examples of my contention that the SEND apparatus is a job creation scheme: I was supporting a student at a higher education college on Tuesday and counted five SEND support staff in a room of 10 students in their Functional Skills English lesson – all of the support staff are middle-aged women. All of the students had gone through the education system from 5-16 and failed their English GCSE – any educational gains made would be marginal in the extreme. They will all leave soon to work in useful manual labour roles. Incidentally, all the children in the class are allowed to use their phones and wear earpods /headphones because they have various issues which means they are allowed to listen to music or white noise to help them concentrate. They play games on their phones or call their friends; the five middle-aged women only intervene if the students start picking up furniture to lob around.
The second: later in the week I attended an annual review for another student which was attended by five middle-aged women and two younger women. These were: his one-to-one support, his college wellbeing officer, the college’s SEND lead, another women from the college whose job was unclear, his social worker, a woman from an alternative education provision and a woman from the council. The student in question is an adult and would be better served, both for his own good and for the good of the nation’s finances, by leaving education and working or joining the armed forces. Here I agree with Scottish Tory leader (and Ed West) who suggests that children could leave school at 14 to do an apprenticeship – I would add an option for them to return to education for free at a later more productive stage of adulthood. (Interestingly, Michael Young, Toby’s father, made a similar argument.)
Two examples of my contention that the SEND apparatus does little to improve the educational outcomes of the children involved: Roger Gough, Children’s Services Spokesperson for the County Councils Network was quoted in a Telegraph article about the possibility of SEND spending bankrupting county councils saying: “Our research has shown that educational outcomes have not improved despite spend skyrocketing and children’s needs becoming more recognised.” This is an extraordinary statement that should have shocked and appalled all readers and anyone involved in education. I recently attended a primary school show and watched this play out before my eyes. Three SEND support staff were mixed in with the students handing out fidget toys to various children who had been diagnosed with a SEND condition. Similarly, there is a child in my son’s year five class who “does not like the scratch of pens on paper” because he has been diagnosed with SPD (sensory processing disorder) and has a middle-aged women sitting with him in lessons scribing for him. The rest of the class are outraged, because some of them would also like not to bother with writing. What purpose does this serve beyond giving employment to one of the approximately 282,900 fulltime teaching assistants in England (an increase of 28% since 2011-12)? Has there been a commensurate 28% improvement in educational outcomes? Is there are national scheme that evaluates the effectiveness of SEND staff and if not why not?
An example of the contention that diagnosing children with a baggy SEND label without the use of biomarkers or brain scans, only behaviour – often described by the parents – catastrophically limits the child’s perception of themselves: a girl I worked with on Monday told me: “I don’t socialise with other children because I’m autistic and won’t be able to cope.” Direct quote. She is 12, does not attend school, has no friends and also no perceptible signs of autism.
I have written in the Critic about how deeply embedded our ideas of SEND are, and how difficult it will be to unpick the industry. Yet even the New York Times is coming round to the idea of over-diagnosis and misplaced ‘treatments’. A wholesale review of SEND education is urgently required, both for the sake of the nation’s finances, but more importantly for the sake of the children who are burdened with the idea there is something (beyond the ordinary markers of childhood) wrong with them. What these struggling children actually need is a stable home, interests and hobbies beyond scrolling or gaming, a sense of purpose, lots of fresh air and friends. To enable this, all sorts of difficult answers are needed that will include: a massive reduction in the children’s use of screens, more support for parents to care for their own children when they are young, more youth clubs and better discipline in schools. More SEND support staff, myself included, are not required.
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.
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The public sector does job creation very well. I work in a different sector, but see the same thing. Work being repeated because those in power want the jobs.
Great honest article. As you said, putting aside the children/ students with severe disabilities etc, my son has spent the last 6 years studying a boy in his class from year 5 up to year 11. In Primary school the boy had a SEN companion who was there just to accompany him outside the class, when it ‘got too much’ and he started licking the desk, throwing a tantrum as he was bored etc. Basically behaving in a non acceptable way. On these occasions my son noted he was ‘rewarded’ for the anti social behaviour. Guess what the behaviour did not change the SEN lady did not improve the situation. Go forward several years to Secondary School, funds now not available for SEN lady and child has to start making do and grow up. Guess what? His behaviour has become more normal and socially acceptable as he now does not have anyone to excuse the non socially acceptable behaviours. My son has watched this closely and noted the inputs and outputs (I think he is a natural Psychologist). His observations match the authors and he would confirm less positive affirmation of non acceptable social behaviour earlier and reinforcing good behaviours… Read more »
If you make excuses for bad behaviour (oh, he’s neurodivergent, oh, she’s autistic) and offers rewards for it, of course there will be a number of children who will take advantage of their “special” status.
Another aspect of this is that, sadly, resources are always limited. If all these special kids received total support, it would bankrupt society and once they leave school, they would still have behavioral problems and spend the rest of their lives in need of support.
Another socialist idea that doesn’t work in practice.
A truly great article. Have they ever considered that the reason these kids can’t concentrate on their English GCSE is that THEY ARE LISTENING TO MUSIC?
As the mother of a genuine SEND child (now an adult) I couldn’t agree more. Through my grandchildren I have seen the explosion of ‘SEND’ in mainstream schools which is in itself a contradictory statement. The whole point of SEND was for children who, by the nature of their disabilities, were unable to attend mainstream schools.
Just because some children are badly behaved doesn’t mean they have a disability, what it does mean, in many cases, is the schools and teachers no longer hold any authority in the eyes of the children and no number of middle aged women will change that.
I had long debates back in the day with parents of SEN kids who I thought would have been better off in special schools, who thought that this was tantamount to shutting them away and forgetting about them. My experience was that they flourished in schools that were set up for their kind of needs and that “inclusion” was token and not real.
Reminds me of a card I sent my daughter, a primary school teacher. It had a woman in a white coat, with an out of control child in the background, telling the parents “I don’t think your child has a syndrome – they’re just really annoying”
Thanks for this interesting article which makes a lot of good points.
Certainly my daughter benefited from the tiny class sizes in her special needs primary school, to the extent that she thrived in mainstream secondary school and the “help” provided in secondary, which was shared with other kids with an SEN statement, was not needed.
From talking to other parents and kids, the SEN helpers in mainstream school were not that helpful – it seems like the whole approach needs to be rethought.
Maybe the author should be the teacher not the SEND support! It’s a powerful argument that reflects a massive shift in the culture. In our day, people didn’t want to be different. We wanted to fit in. Now identity politics is rewarding difference to the point of madness – disrupting basic biology for example!
However, the society is also witnessing an explosion of genuine neurological damage. Encouraging the former obscures the horror of the latter. It’s likely no coincidence either as it deflects attention for the neurotoxins being administered to our children. This is what Kennedy is focusing on in the USA. There are as many 1 in 31 children with autism now and at least a third of them are severely disabled. This is lifelong disability. We need attention on this end of the SEND situation – as argued in the autism tribune on Substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/theautismtribune?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1s85wn
100%
Trouble is, there are far, far too many parents who seem to get a sadistic kick out of diagnosing their children with every single fashionable condition going.
Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.
“And don’t worry, there are generous grants available…”
That syndrome reminds me of The Bridge (Swedish Danish TV series). Worth a look, very well done. The protagonist is meant to be on the autistic spectrum.
Perhaps. Or perhaps these diagnoses are simply excuses for bad parenting.
Commendable article which acknowledges the difference between genuine and tragic development problems and bad behaviour. There was a pivotal and influential book published in the 1980s called The Drama of Being a Child by Alice Miller which postulates the notion that discipline and correction can be damaging to a child’s sense of self and that fear of consequences has no place in child-rearing. I believe this extreme and dogmatic attitude is responsible for the anarchy now prevailing when all decisions seem to lie with the child concerned.
“County Councils Network”.
Yet another quango? Yet another bureaucracy to tell elected representatives what they must do. This has to stop. Funding for this must stop.
This kind of article makes the Daily Sceptic sub worth every penny. You would never get this kind of candour in the MSM. The scale of job creation in the public sector is enormous and bankrupting the country.
A lot of these children are simply badly behaved and given into by their parent/s, never diagnosed with anything…..
… and 90% of university staff too? (OK. Not 90%. Say 85?)
Agree! When I was at primary school in the 50s, we had one teacher for nearly 40 of us. No classroom assistants. Our parents disciplined us and endorsed the discipline from the school. No child in my class left illiterate. It was a state school in a poor area of a gritty northern rown. I remember we had one girl who today would be classed as on the autism spectrum but with good discipline she was fine.
I became a seconday teacher in the early 70s and couldn’t believe the change in mentality. Parents would complain if we tried to discipline the students. Teachers were being attacked by students. Later, excuses were made that students had ADHD, etc. From what I could see, they lacked boundaries of acceptable behaviour because these hadn’t been imposed at home and schools’ powers had been weakened. Years later I taught in S.E. Asia. What a difference! Parents valued education and supported schools’ actions.
Armies of social workers, psychiatrists, special needs specialists are, in the main, doing patch-up jobs, trying to fill the gaps left by poor parenting. This is where any government needs to concentrate its efforts – parental education and support!
As a secondary school girl said to me recently ‘if there’s not something wrong with you then there’s something wrong with you’.
Agreed. There’s far too much belief that ‘extra education’ has a beneficial effect on outcomes. The steady raising of the school leaving ages from 14 to 15 in 1947, to 16 in 1972 and to 18 for those without a job has had no detectable effect on workforce skills.