The End of The Great Disabling

It is rare that a report by Policy Exchange reduces people to tears, but I felt a wave of deep emotional relief coming over me yesterday after I spent two hours reading every line. I cannot commend the authors Zachary Marsh and Jean André Prager highly enough for: ‘Out of Control: Addressing the Rise in Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Disorders amongst Children and Young People‘. I hope the detailed and humane study marks the beginning of the end of what I have come to understand as ‘The Great Disabling’.

I work within the SEND paradigm and believe it to cause more harm than help. A well-meaning if misdirected conglomerate of medical professionals, private companies, educationalists, academics and statutory instruments have produced a situation whereby children are labelled with conditions they don’t have and, at vast cost to the taxpayer and in the darkest of all ironies, given ‘support’ that doesn’t work and instead hinders their ability to succeed educationally, emotionally and financially.

The stakes are high as the report sets out in chilling detail:

One in five children in the UK are now identified as having Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND), with the number of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) for those with the most severe needs increasing by 83% from 2015-16 to 2023-24. The number of 11 to 15 year-olds receiving Disability Living Allowance (DLA), in which the ‘main condition’ determining eligibility was a learning difficulty, such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), increased by 70% between 2018 and 2024. … There are now almost one million under-25s not in work, further education or training (NEETs), with a link between those with psychiatric or neurodevelopmental disorders and NEET status.

The solutions offered – from health and social care, education to welfare – are radical but vitally necessary and should be taken seriously by anyone who cares about children.

• Making EHCPs non-statutory documents
• Establishing a new National Institute for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Support (NISENDS) to formulate NICE-style guidance for schools on how to identify and support SEND needs effectively
• EHCPs stopping at 18
• PIP payments being phased towards a start at 18
• The application process and assessment for the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) should be reformed

Though serious, these reforms – that must be adopted by whoever wishes to form the next government – would actually be the easy bit. What will require a herculean effort on the part of SEND reformers is disentangling the parents from what they think is a beneficial system.

After reading the report, I had a coffee with a friend. I mentioned my interest in the subject and she said: “OMG, my sister’s daughter’s needs weren’t met at school and she ended up head-banging – it’s a new thing on TikTok apparently – I can’t believe you want to encourage that sort of thing.” And in that one bleak sentence she reminded me how the SEND paradigm has mushroomed across the public space: compassionate cowardice. A clear-eyed report is all very well, but how are parents to be convinced there is nothing wrong with their child that a lot of love, reading, sleeping, good nutrition, exercise, screen-free time and socialisation won’t solve?

Who is brave enough to tell Andrea Jenkyns or similar that her ADHD son won’t be helped by having fidget toys, medication or a teaching assistant? What maniac would dare suggest to such a ferocious mother that any problems her son does have are either part of the normal bumps of childhood or insufficient parental care? Only when Zachary Marsh or Jean André Prager can successfully convey their cogent arguments in person to a team of SENCOS, or a group of SEND mothers, will the argument be won.

This is how the Headteacher of an East London Primary put it to me:

In my experience of 20 years of teaching, parents of socially-induced SEND children fall into two camps: anxious middle-class mothers and non-professional single mothers. Unfortunately, for reasons of over-extended working lives or lack of paternal or wider family support, parenting for both camps has become a lot harder than they anticipated. Having a SEND child removes all sense of responsibility from the parent in having to deal with the ordinary issues of childhood: sleeping, nutrition, exercise, going to school, learning to concentrate and interacting well with other children. Currently, in being erroneously told there is something biologically wrong with them, the child him- or herself has taken the flak and the state has taken on the burden of sorting it out. If the SEND crutch is removed, to whom will these parents turn to blame for their unruly or unhappy children?

The authors recognised as much, writing to my mind the most important paragraph in the entire report:

Overall, we have under-weighted the significance of the ‘wider determinants’ of behaviour or poor mental health – both in terms of the nature of care provided and our overall public policy response: the vital role of a supportive family life and of the role of parenting; of the importance of sleep; of regular physical exercise; of securing good employment or undertaking further education or training and of minimising excessive screen time.

Once the findings of ‘Out of Control’ have been absorbed and enacted by the next government, I hope Zachary Marsh and Jean André Prager will turn their excellent minds to answering the above even harder societal question.

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