We fought hard for years to get an EHCP for our daughter. This is a comprehensive document that highlights her learning difficulties – ASD, anxiety, and OCD – and details the specialist support that she needs while at school.
It has taken a lot of time, effort and money to get the authorities to acknowledge her challenges. For us, as parents, it has often felt like a never-ending battle.
This week, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said this support could be withdrawn when our daughter moves to secondary school.
Our daughter is in Year 2 and, according to the SEND reforms, any child currently in that year group or younger risks losing their EHCP – a legal right to specific support – in the transition from primary to secondary.
The impact on our child’s mental health and wellbeing of having this support taken away would be disastrous. She simply would not cope.
If a child is supported enough to thrive, then they will achieve
What will she have to go through to prove that she continues to need specialist support currently offered in her EHCP?
What will she have to show to move through the ‘tiers’ of Individual Support Plans (ISPs)? How big a crisis will she have to be in before she can access the next level of support?
Will the staff administering and drafting the ISP have the expertise to identify her challenges, and then to meet her needs? Who will ensure the plan being delivered? What accountability processes will be in place?
We have no answers or assurances to any of these questions.
Her younger sister, who is three and a half, is undiagnosed but has suspected ASD, too. Is there any point in even applying for the EHCP we already know she will need?
It feels as though support is being withdrawn to see how children will cope, and families are being left to limp along trying to negotiate this new, unknown landscape, which will, in any case, take years to bed in.
Years in which time will not stand still for us or our children.
The knock-on effects of these battles on family life are known only to those who have been through them. It is a soul-destroying process.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education named its White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, but it has these words the wrong way round. If a child is supported enough to thrive, then they will achieve.
We are left wondering how schools, and teachers, will cope with this influx of SEND children, many of whom, like our daughter, will have complex needs? Where are all of these specialists going to come from?
It is a never-ending battle we will have to continue to fight
There is already a shortage of speech and language specialists, occupational therapists and educational psychologists. The announcement recently of funding for an additional two hundred educational psychologists over the next year equates to one for every 125 schools.
Who will monitor that they will be deployed where they are most needed?
And what of these new “inclusion bases” in mainstream schools?
Will they be the well thought-out sensory havens they need to be for children to regulate, as well as to have their small group work, in a quiet space?
Or will they be makeshift sheds, put up hastily next to the bins because there is nowhere else for them to go? What will this inclusion look like in reality?
So, yes, this is a never-ending battle – and it looks like one that we will continue to need to fight.
