Over-Labelling Children With ‘Special Needs’ has Failed a Generation

During the SEND spending debate a wide variety of MPs, celebrities, Times commentators and Mumsnet posters, will offer, like an animal sacrifice, the bodies of broken, neglected, state-abandoned children with ‘special educational needs and disabilities’ to an appalled public. The children will lie with sad eyes and frail limbs in the collective imagination as the physical manifestation of state callousness. Headlines will yell: ‘How the council failed my non-verbal, incontinent son’, or ‘How the Government abandoned my autistic, self-harming daughter to mainstream education’. There may well be a death: ‘How my SEND child killed themselves / was murdered by bullies after being forced into an inappropriate secondary school.’ With the public imagination bathed in the misery of such children and their struggling families, there is little possible chance of any meaningful SEND reform happening. A £1.4 billion taxi bill for SEND children, a local authority about to go bust, the Education Select Committee announcing SEND spending is ‘financially unsustainable’ all mean nothing when up against a tragic news story about a SEND child denied an education. There will be furious phone-ins on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show, MPs will weep in Parliament and Starmer will retreat. It will appear to be a classic triumph of ‘compassion’ over ‘cuts’.

And yet the opposite is true. Those who seek to re-imagine the SEND paradigm are motivated by the utmost compassion for the children involved, recognising that a large majority have been gravely harmed not helped. This argument will not land, however, if reform is framed in financial or rational terms alone. SEND reformers must lay at the feet of an emotive media children whose lives have been ruined by the state’s current SEND industrial complex. We must use emotion to demand reform, not for mere financial reasons, but for the sake of the currently one million-plus children broken by our current approach. Heart-breaking stories of young lives ruined by SEND labelling and support must be strenuously and emotionally made, and repeated until the message is understood: that a wholesale re-imagining of SEND provision is compassionate and the current status quo is cruel.

It’s a big ask.

However, it is worth remembering that of EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan) holders, only 3-4% have severe cognitive or physical disabilities – the rest – over 96% – have more moderate learning difficulties or social, emotional or mental health challenges including autism and ADHD – all diagnosed with broad observational criteria and no medical biomarkers. Naturally, it is imperative that the 3-4% of children with severe disabilities are humanely supported in specialised schools with specialised gold standard care and education facilities. What happens to the rest – the vast majority of the current 1.7 million children involved in the SEND complex – is a societal issue of enormous gravity. And one we have been getting wrong for a generation.

Despite SEND spending nearly doubling from £4 billion to £10.8 billion in 2023-24, outcomes have not improved. As of 2022-23, a mere 8% of Year 6 SEND pupils met expected standards in reading, writing and maths – no change since 2016-17 – and only 30 % attained five GCSEs A*-C by age 19, down from 37 % in 2014-15. Twenty percent of the school population is persistently absent and one in five children and young people have a suspected mental illness. These figures are too large to be easy to comprehend. Personal stories about this educational and emotional catastrophe are needed to help policymakers and the public understand why the current system is rotten and in need of replacing. Just as brave women like Keira Bell brought the brutality of the trans doctrine to life, so too must SEND survivors step forward and share their stories.

Let me introduce Jake (not his real name). He is 17. When he was younger, he “dicked around” (his words) and his Mum (his Dad left the family home) had him assessed in a private clinic where he was diagnosed with SPD – sensory processing disorder – and generally agreed to be ‘on the spectrum’. How this was interpreted by the staff at his primary school was an agreement that he didn’t have to wear school uniform (uncomfortable) nor sit on the carpet during circle time (too rough). He was also given what he called a ‘dog chew’ to wear round his neck and a wobbly cushion for his chair. Jake fully embraced his role as class moron, enjoyed not having to do certain things in lessons and decided to ‘tune out’. He failed his SATs, lockdown meant that years 7 and 8 were capsized. By year 9 he’d discovered videogames and was of the firm opinion that school was not for him. He was given a “learning support woman” who sat beside him in lessons and “did the writing for me”, and in spite of extra time in exams, failed all his GCSEs. After a Foundation Year at a further education college where he dislocated the shoulder of one of his teachers, Jake found himself being taught Functional Skills Maths and English by me. He is trying another FE college to do a foundation year in September but he’s entirely disinterested and prefers playing video games. He repeatedly tells me he’s “SEN” and there’s no point trying to teach him anything because he can’t learn.

What Jake says is completely logical. From a young age has been told by his mother and by medical and educational professionals that there is something wrong with him. Something wrong with his brain. Something that makes him abnormal. Plato tells us that we become what we contemplate: “The soul is like an eye: when turned toward what is bright and true, it sees clearly; when turned toward darkness, it is confused and weak.” Jake’s soul has been turned to incapacity and incompetence, all aided and abetted by the state and paid for by the taxpayer. Like the darkest of all nightmares, he has been made useless by those who were attempting to help. It is determinism of the most brutal kind. Beyond being entirely uneducated and lonely, there is no evidence, to me at least, that there is anything at all wrong with him. When the County Council Network states there is no evidence that in spite of massive increase in spending there is no commensurate improvement in education outcomes, think of Jake and weep.

And to those who say: he wasn’t given the appropriate help. Wrong. His help was the best available and is replicated up and down the land in thousands of schools. There are over 280,000 teaching assistants in England, up 30% since 2011, while nearly one fifth of a school’s budget is allocated to SEND spending. There has never been more specialised training for teachers and TAs to imbibe. And yet the whole construct constrains rather than liberates children like Jake, who are challenging, but made worse by the current SEND help offered.

Imagine how different things would have been if Jake had been encouraged to join in with lessons and been given intensive reading sessions until he was fluent. If his primary school had been one of those that ran the golden mile every morning, and he wasn’t given aids that marked him out as retarded. Instead of a woman writing for him, suppose he was given a man who taught him to chop logs, or train with weights or draw. Imagine that his Mum had been advised not to let him play video games that interfered with his sleep and stopped him socialising and working. Rather than suggesting they get their child tested, imagine if teachers, doctors and social workers helped parents focus on simple changes such as no screens at night, early bedtimes, exercise, socialising and consistent consequences.

There are thousands of Jakes: young people who have been disabled by the current SEND paradigm. The current system incentivises schools to label children SEND in order to get more funding in the form of a one-to-one teaching assistant who can then be deployed more widely in the classroom. It incentivises parents who are trying to do the best for their struggling children, heads who hope extra time in exams will boost grades, and politicians who pretend to care. It benefits private clinics who charge up to £1,300 for an autism or ADHD diagnosis and private educational companies offering Alternative Provision. That none of it actually improves educational outcomes should jolt all involved into questioning the whole foundation of it all.

A great dark lie has been bought into: that medical diagnostics rather than love and boundaries can solve the challenges of childhood. The current approach needs to be dismantled and a massive rethink across the board needs to occur. We have forgotten the words of John Locke, who said, “Children are not born with reason; it develops slowly as their bodies do”, as well as Plato’s advice to teach children gymnastics and music before philosophy. Simple, common sense messaging around education and child-rearing needs to be reasserted: sleep before screens, boundaries are protective not punitive, all children can learn with the right structure and expectations, everyone is intelligent at something.

Rather than diagnosing 20% of children as sub-par, it must be understood by parents, educators and medical professionals that all humans are flawed and frail; it is the work of a lifetime to master ourselves, find our strengths and purpose, help others and contribute to society. The days of telling hundreds of thousands of children their brains are broken and they can only navigate the classroom with an ‘anxiety break token’ or online therapy and medication must stop. A commission similar to the 1904 Fitzroy Report into ‘Physical Deterioration’ of young people must be undertaken and then rapid trials launched to work out what methods actually work to help anxious children engage, physically boisterous children to best harness their energy and the sad and lonely to find meaning and purpose.

For this to happen, though, angry polemics won’t work, nor will facts and figures. Instead, painful emotional testimonies like Jake’s need to be shared again and again, on talk shows, radio phone-ins, podcasts and double page spreads in the Daily Mail: ‘How my SEND diagnosis ruined my childhood.’ Only when the human costs are seen face to face will useful, honest conversations around SEND reform begin.

Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.