Every 5th Student has Special Need

The primary school was in Surrey, the head teacher recalls, but its catchment area was far removed from the affluent image enjoyed by much of the county. Among the four-year-olds joining the reception class, she had several who had not been toilet-trained. She put it down to inadequate parenting and sent them home until they had learnt to use a lavatory. “I’m not a social worker,” she told their families. They, however, kicked up a fuss, so she turned to the local education authority for support. Their suggestion was that she place the children on the special educational needs (SEN) register.

This long-serving head – who has subsequently moved to another school and prefers to remain anonymous – understands why the Government announced in the Queen’s Speech that they were undertaking the “biggest overhaul of SEN provision in 30 years”. Her experience goes to the heart of concerns that have grown up around the £5 billion annual budget the Department for Education spends on SEN – a budget that is currently growing at a rate that outstrips inflation, officials say.

Many experts fear that funds earmarked to help children with learning difficulties are being redirected to cope with a new tide of social deprivation that is washing up in the classroom. Children from troubled homes, who turn up at schools with behavioural problems, are being routinely put on the SEN register alongside those with more specific learning difficulties, such as dyslexia and dyspraxia.

It is a picture apparently borne out by official figures, which show that affluent Richmond upon Thames in west London has 11.8 per cent of primary pupils on the SEN register. In Liverpool, with its higher levels of unemployment and poverty, that figure is 22.6 per cent. So are SEN, and the vast resources that accompany it, being used as an excuse for poor parenting?

The current SEN system was established in 1981, after a report by Mary Warnock, with the aim of including in mainstream schools children with learning difficulties who had been previously educated in separate establishments. Three decades on, there are more than one in five schoolchildren in England on the SEN register – more than half of all pupils in 100 schools.

Original source here.