The Despicable Special Educational Needs Fraud
After working intensively with over 100 children with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities), I have finally met a child with actual special needs. He is a boy called David (not his real name) and is 18. He has microcephaly (a smaller head) and polymicrogyria (excessive small folds in the cortex). He has the mannerisms of a Down Syndrome child, laughs easily, has loving intentions, but lacks a full understanding of who he is and the world around him. He’s heavier than is healthy and has a wide-eyed trusting nature that puts him in danger. He cannot judge distance and has no stamina so spends most of his time in a wheelchair. While being able to read, he has little understanding of abstract concepts or emotions and seems to exist in a contented fog. I have been employed to teach him Functional Skills English and make him ready for independent living.
On his notes and EHCP (Education Health Care Plan), David has been recorded as autistic caused by his brain damage (thought to be caused during pregnancy). As an autist, it is deemed that David is capable of achieving various qualifications and living independently, largely because the majority of other children that are classed as autistic are capable of such. But this is because, from what I have seen professionally, the majority of children classed as autistic are not autistic. On meeting David, I have finally met a genuine Special Educational Needs student.
The incident has made me incandescent with rage, as it should the entire medical and political establishment.
I am employed by a council to provide extra support for children with special educational needs. All of the children I have worked with thus far, over 100, have been classified as having one or more of these conditions: ADHD, autism, ASD (autism spectrum disorder), ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), PDA (pathological demand avoidance), anxiety or depression. While all of the over 100 children I have worked with exhibit a variety of challenging behaviours and have very upsetting family situations, none of them have anything biologically or neurologically wrong with them. Not one. Until I met David last week.
As way of comparison with David, let me introduce Eoife (again, not her real name). Eoife is representative of the majority of female students I work with. Her father left when she was nine and her life capsized. Her mother had to move out of the family home and she and her three children lived in homeless accommodation for six months. Eoife didn’t enjoy school after that and has been in and out since Year 7. She developed anxiety. She is on the waiting list for a suspected autism and ADHD diagnosis. She takes sertraline and melatonin. The family now live in new-build social housing and her mum is on Universal Credit. Eoife is now in Year 10 and is being tutored at home by me. She has certainly had a rotten time but shows no other signs of having anything biologically or neurologically wrong with her. She refuses to do any school work because it makes her feel pressurised. Eoife is in no way unusual.
The same goes for the typical male SEND student I have. Monty for example. A 14 year-old boy who has been diagnosed with ADHD, autism and is prescribed methylphenidate, melatonin, sertraline and an anti-psychotic. He spends most nights gaming and is unsurprisingly tired and aggressive during the day. He struggled with school where he would fight. He refuses to work saying it makes him “overwhelmed” and “heightened”. He lives with his mum, a step dad who he hates and a younger brother who has also begun to miss school.
There are hundreds of thousands of children like this up and down the country. They are very, very troubling cases, but to classify them in the same category as boys like David is deeply and disgustingly wrong. As the recent Policy Exchange report put it:
The SEND, child disability and mental health systems are failing to distinguish between legitimate and exaggerated claims for support. 94% of Education Health and Care Plan assessments were successful in 2024, whilst the vast majority of assessments for Disability Living Allowance are conducted without the assessor ever meeting the child.
The black muddle we have got into regarding SEND is at the core of our national malaise for it involves lies and money. Lots of it. SEND is set to cost £11 billion this year and has apparently engulfed one in five children. The SEND lobby is enormous, powerful and made up largely of private medical health practitioners, angry mothers seeking an explanation for why their children are so unhappy, and cowardly politicians unable to speak truthfully about the society they and their predecessors have built.
In a better Britain, children like Eoife and Monty would not be burdened with bogus neurological conditions but would be treated by the state institutions they come across as children in need of stability, rich extra curricula offerings, part-time work and opportunities to socialise regularly with people their own age. Quite simply: belonging and a sense of purpose. What this would mean in practice are schools with immaculate discipline so the classrooms are calm and where free after-school clubs are offered every day, local businesses able to employ youngsters, and a string of youth clubs where young people can safely gather and have fun together.
As it happens, Eoife lives in new social housing and Monty in a privately owned home in the country. Brain damaged David on the other hands lives in filthy social housing with his two sisters and wide variety of pets. His mother is a broken woman. In a better Britain, David would be living in wonderful sheltered accommodation, cared for by loving assistants and given light work and endless pleasurable craft and sporting activities to enjoy. His room would be clean and family could visit whenever they wanted. This level of much-needed state support is of course impossible because £11 billion is being spent on those with bogus SEND needs.
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.
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I’ve been a teacher and tutor for 30 years. You are SO SO right. But, yes, people are making money from these ‘diagnoses’ and they give students (and their parents) reasons (and sometimes excuses) for behaviour caused by all sorts of things, and sometimes just by a personality variable! The children then get a ‘medical-sounding’ label and of course lots of special treatment. (Everybody likes that!) ‘Slow processors’ get 25% extra time in exams when, no they shouldn’t – being ‘a bit slow’ (eg in mental calculation) has always been completely normal, and they should not be given a time advantage to make up for it! It’s all crazy, barmy. Teenagers are diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ – for goodness’ sake, some people are ‘anxious sorts’ – it’s always been the case! I was a very anxious teenager, and to be diagnosed with ‘anxiety’ would have seemed, in the 70s, ridiculous, and it still is. One of the reasons this has happened is that people, particularly women, have a desperate need to be seen as ‘kind’ people. The devil (however defined) has a wonderful time playing on that. This racket has to stop.
A huge problem which could be eliminated overnight would be to employ proper doctors. Too many of these people are ignorant and lazy and too ready to see a solution in bottles of pills, after the correct diagnosis obviously. ADHD is a belter being largely just an opinion but boy does it open up the purse strings of DWP.
SEND – a self-perpetuating Scamdemic that could end up doing as much harm as the C1984 Scamdemic.
Another case of the mistake of thinking in terms of outcomes instead of systems.
The left typically have these good noble intentions. Like, giving extra help to children who need it. Who could argue against the nobility of that purpose?
But if you have a system where teachers (as a group) can make their own lives easier by labelling difficult kids in such a way that someone else gets to deal with them, or you get extra resources, of course it’s going to lead to more people being labelled that way. What else can happen if you incentivise people to find “special needs”? You’ll get more special needs. Guaranteed.
Most collectivist projects are like this. Terrible systems excused and justified by (supposedly) good intentions.
Addressing the bigger picture, we shouldn’t expect Big Pharma to treat patients, that’s the responsibility of doctors and associated staff. It’s important to understand this, as Big Pharma does what is expected of them: keep their customer happy, and that’s the NHS and Local Government Care Services.
What we have here are staff working within an inflexible system and while they entered their profession to help individuals, all they can do, if they want to keep their job, and survive, is to make the least worse choices available, and not complain.
Nothing of such just happens by accident.
By the way. Revolution happens one step at a time.
First you are influenced, secondly you change and thirdly you influence. It’s a knock-on effect.
We do not need a violent revolution to knock our world back on track. All we must do is assimilate verifiable facts, understand how matters come about and draw our own reasoned conclusions. When confident; express yourself clearly, communicate!
Do not allow your opinion to be formed by others. When sufficient of us start this process off we become an unstoppable force. Together we can change the world, individually it is a more daunting task.
Schooling is not the same as education, far from it. You school a horse to become, predictable, compliant and obedient. Nobody educates their livestock.
Good point about schooling not being the same as education. In the olden days everyone hated school and their teachers and that was considered normal. School leaving age was much lower and providing employment for young school leavers was acceptable.
What a sad and harrowing article.
Keep trying your best, Mary.
Have you raised these issues with your superiors?
Sadly these first hand accounts match my uninformed prejudices.
I have lomg believed that having children should be a licenced activity for people who have achieved minimum standards of competence in child rearing and demonstrated the ability to fund their offspring, with the subsequent help of the state where the children have real disabilities or the parents have genuine set-backs like involuntary loss of health or employment.
It would be preferable to ensure most of the population were competent in child rearing and, being self sufficient. It used to be so, so what has changed?
Being told that the Welfare State will look after you, from cradle to the grave, appears to be taken for granted by too many. In fact, it can develop into a competition for resources.
And, and for each generation, the dependency deepens, which enhances the job prospects of those employed in caring industries. For those that are genuinely in need, the resources deteriorate. This is because, when civilisation fails, it’s the survival of the fittest.
I’m with you on that – I am staggered when I see the hoops that would be foster carers or adopters have to jump through but anyone can have children without state intervention. Although the state will have to pick up the pieces if the wrong people have children.
Here in the UK, there are so many children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) that it is costing local authorities a fortune dealing with the problem.
The government and local authorities should provide “means tested” assistance to all those that need it with wealthy parents paying their way.
To alleviate future damage to children and the costs involved there should be a government investigation as to why there is a big increase of children with SEND.
Once the reasons or likely reasons have been discovered then something drastic should be done so that babies and children avoid the toxins that cause the health problems to protect them in the future.
Even if the harms are due to a genetic disposition to a particular toxin, then that toxin should obviously be avoided regardless of whether the toxin is in a vaccine or not.
Trump has raised the issues around Paracetamol, and further investigation is continuing.
But there is so much more to do.
Mary Gilleece is a woman with a big heart and a deeply perceptive mind – a rare combination. Thank you, Mary, for saying it how it is.
It is despicable and all the more so because pretty much every professional teacher either believes this nonsense, or goes along with it for an easy life. I was a school governor and once questioned the head as to why so many kids were being classed as SEN. She pulled me aside and spoke to me in confidence. “The school couldn’t survive without the extra funding provided for SEN pupils, be that direct funding or to pay for additional teaching hours, usually by temps to cover for illness. The second reason was even more disturbing, in that many parents dependant upon benefits would use the fact that their child was SEN as a bargaining chip to demand more benefits. And that demand to have their sullen and barely acknowledged child was classed as SEN. Often they’d already browbeaten their hapless GP into agreeing the child might have ADHD or some other over diagnosed nonsense. Once the child has that possible diagnosis, sometimes not even that, the next step is to consult a ‘specialist’ in the condition, a human pill mill who will be happy to bring another client into their burgeoning business with little thought as to the effect of… Read more »
From a chat with a teacher friend the other week: this is because there is an absurd binary in the UK education system. Teachers don’t create it: they work within it. Given class sizes and understaffing, a teacher hardly has time even to give a hand to a child who is just falling behind a bit – a child who has nothing wrong with them, but maybe finds the subject difficult, or is always slow at learning, or is a having a bad time right now. And the children – and teachers – are nailed to the ludicrous DfE demands. Even at primary level, getting through the requisite lesson plans makes doing a tour of all 50 US States in two weeks look leisurely. If a child can’t keep up with this, there’s only one way to get help for them: SEND. Either a child can keep up the DfE machine, which demands that schools, teachers and children all “succeed” according to an ever-ratcheting spreadsheet* – or they are “SEN”. Diagnosis? Who cares – make one up! Meanwhile, as the writer says, children with genuinely enormous needs go unlooked after. (*) One anecdote: schools in a nearby deprived area, which… Read more »
When everyone has “special needs” no-one can be identified as genuinely “special.”
SEND is just an extension of the left-wing policy that everyone must be equal and no-one must be blamed/held to account for their own (family’s) failings.
Thank you for this article. It is so good to hear voices from the trenches.
I would also add that you see very little evidence of the issues described in this excellent piece, from solid families with parents who are in a proper marriage. The stability of a strong marriage and two loving parents is the basis required by most children.
The financial benefits are attractive to many people so having a child with a ‘diagnosis’ is worthwhile to many families. The people who genuinely have a child with problems get lost in the morass. Also the definition of autism has widened to include many conditions that in the past were just part of the child and often transient or based on family circumstances. I believe in some cases self-referral allows financial assistance.
So many SEND kids just need good discipline in the home, where acceptable behaviour and strict boundaries are imposed. Children need that security.