Did the local authority ever really understood my sons’ learning needs
All parents have the right to expect results from their local authority (LA). After all, our taxes pay for them. Beyond that, because my sons are statemented, the LA is, as far as I’m concerned, ultimately responsible for ensuring that the boys reach their potential.
A lot of additional money is allocated to supporting my two boys’ learning. They have a named officer watching over them who is, I would like to think, holding headteachers to account for the boys’ education.
So, what precisely has the LA done to ensure that the schools for which it is responsible are actually delivering what my boys’ statements intended during the years that they struggled through the system? The answer, unfortunately, is “not a lot”.
Mrs Embers and I met the named officer at the boys’ first annual review. Since then, she or somebody else from the SEN team has apparently been in the background but, as far as we can see, without any pretence of engagement either with us or our children, or any direct role with their schools. At review meetings, the LA representatives always seem a little disinterested. They don’t say much, they contribute little to discussion and spend most of the time glancing at their watches and ruffling papers. Headteachers and SENCOs conspicuously ignore them and they keep their heads down when, for example, we probe the Head about the school’s actual allocation of teaching assistant hours, compared to what the statements say it should be. They fidget when we question the grades recorded in the boys’ reports and when we produce evidence of the boys’ constant bewilderment. In the latter years at primary school, when we voiced growing concerns about readiness for transfer, the named officer became suddenly as one with her teaching colleagues: united in firm disapproval of any suggestion that the boys be held back.
It quickly became clear to us that annual reviews were little more than box-ticking exercises and that the first uninspiring meeting had set the pattern for almost every review that followed. Despite sending copies of our written “parents’ views” direct to the SEN office prior to each year’s meeting, the LA never acknowledged them. And there was scant reaction from anybody when the reports were tabled in school, other than the Headteacher tutting when we dared mention in-school practices that were plainly far too complicated for mere parents to comprehend, and outraged trumpeting from assorted SENCOs when we said anything they considered critical of their own performance.
At secondary school, the Headteacher turned up just once, grudgingly, and then only to question whether, in hindsight, we should have sent our boys to a special school. He must have overlooked the advice that he gave publically prior to the boys’ transfer about the eminent suitability of his school. At that meeting and at every meeting since, I’ve looked around the table and asked myself how the money spent on the gathered and associated education professionals might have been better used to improve our boys’ day-to-day learning.
The LA presented itself in a rather more sinister light when it came to what, for us, was the inevitable special educational needs and disability tribunal (SENDIST). We’d tried everything to get the school to do what we believed was in our sons’ best interests. All the other agencies agreed with us: health, social services and even the LA’s own educational psychologists. However, we were told forcefully that the LA had a policy which prohibited what we were asking for, that headteachers throughout the county agreed “unreservedly” with the policy and that we would never win if we took it to tribunal. So we did the spadework. We submitted our case and, from then on, the LA opposed us belligerently, finally manoeuvring us into an end-of-term hearing and behaving throughout the process in a manner far from being in any child’s best interests.
The tribunal convened in a dank function room in a rundown hotel (which has since had a glossy refurb as a wedding venue). While backed stoically by a pair of “nodding head” headteachers and accompanied by a groaning trolley piled high with important-looking folders, the LA spokesman presented the LA’s opposition far from convincingly. Its immovable “policy” suddenly became a “guideline” and its much-quoted statistics were embarrassingly at odds with the ones we’d obtained from the same source through Freedom of Information.
The Tribunal Chairman, a no-nonsense lawyer, allowed us to have our say and it was the first time, we thought, that anyone in the system had genuinely listened to our anxieties, understood what was worrying us and properly considered every option. She and the panel’s two other members had clearly read the multitude of papers submitted for the hearing (I weighed our copies of the files afterwards and together they came to over 14lbs). The members were sympathetic, they clearly knew what they were talking about and they used the term “parental preference” several times when examining the LA’s reasons for not supporting our request.
Three weeks later, we received the Tribunal’s ruling in our favour.
The period leading up to the SENDIST hearing and awaiting its decision was one of the most stressful in our SEN journey. It demanded resources of time, knowledge, contacts and stamina that are unrealistic to expect from any parent. We also felt that the LA treated us abysmally and we complained afterwards, receiving the usual placatory flannel which we didn’t pursue. Life’s too short and too traumatic for most parents in our position and at that stage our boys were substantially behind and still reliant on anything the LA provided.
The boys are moving towards the end of statutory education. Academically, they’ve just about reached the stage when they can probably absorb one or two elements of either the Year 5 or Year 7 curriculum, but still only with proper differentiation and one-to-one support. But their “bodies” are too old for that and they won’t get the chance again. While it would be totally wrong for us to blame “education” for what led to our sons’ initial difficulties, the education system is, without doubt, responsible for them failing to reach their potential.
In our experience, the LA doesn’t hold schools liable for properly fulfilling statement requirements and it pays little more than lip service to demanding and monitoring standards of SEN provision. If anything focuses the schools’ attention on what’s going wrong it is Ofsted, but Ofsted’s white chargers arrived at the school gate far too late to help our boys.
Looking back, there’s been no partnership either established or encouraged between us, the LA and the boys’ schools and it is perhaps telling that most of those who held key roles in our educational journey have moved on to pastures new, some into different professions.
What chance now for our sons post-16? What chance for them in employment and training? What chance for the rising numbers of children with SEN oozing out of poor primary schools into poorer secondary schools? Is there hope from David Cameron, the special needs parent, and the adopted Michael Gove’s Coalition? Like our seedy SENDIST Hotel, will SEN really see a programme of major and much needed refurbishment that the Government now promises?
