by Frances Ryan
Several decades on, disabled children in Britain were in many ways experiencing not only a safer society but also one that – on the face of it, at least – offers us a real education and the life chances that come with it. As a disabled child in the 1990s, I was able to flourish in education. A support worker, ramps, and lifts provided by my local authority in Lincolnshire enabled me to go to both a mainstream primary and secondary school and, along with my non-disabled sister, go on to be the first generation in my family to get a degree at university. Perhaps it’s because of this very progress for people like me that it feels particularly painful to see the current state of our education system for disabled children. Go to your local comprehensive in recent years and austerity is evident: teachers fundraising for paper and stationery, non-specialist teachers filling in to teach A level maths, school buildings leaking and crumbling around them,28 or even closing their doors on a Friday afternoon because they can’t afford to run a full school week.
But in the face of crippling budget pressures, it’s special-needs support for disabled children that is particularly under threat. Against a backdrop of austerity and large cuts in government funding of local authorities, head teachers and charities warned in 2018 that ‘children with the highest levels of need are paying the biggest price for the government’s real terms cuts to education.’29
Take specialist support for Deaf children. Teachers of the Deaf are in many ways the difference between a Deaf child being locked out of school or blossoming – be it through helping children’s communication skills, training other teachers, or even providing advice on hearing aids. Between 2014 and 2018, one in ten of these specialist teachers were cut, according to figures from the National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS), with local councils set to collectively cut support for Deaf children alone by a further £4 million by 2019.30
This is replicated across the board. While the number of disabled pupils has gone up, parents and teachers face a funding climate so squeezed that in 2018 the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) warned of ‘a national crisis’ affecting thousands of children with disabilities across the country, with the Local Government Association estimating a £1.6 billion funding shortfall for SEND pupils by 2020–21.31 You only have to look at the rise in parents forced to challenge cuts to their child’s support to get a picture of the scale of this; a Guardian investigation in 2018 found that the number of appeals heard by the special educational needs and disability tribunal nearly doubled between 2016 and 2018, with councils embarking on such unjustifiable cuts to support that families were successful in nine out of ten tribunal hearings.32 Children who were not even born at the time of the financial crash were suddenly finding themselves told to take the burden, losing anything from their transport to get to school, to speech and language therapy, to teaching assistants who provide one-to-one support.
Such severe cuts to specialist provision are resulting in a large increase in the number of disabled pupils in specialist schools after these children are left without the practical support that can help keep them in mainstream schools; the number of pupils with special educational needs attending maintained special schools increased from 38.2 per cent in 2010 to 44.2 per cent in 2018, with a further increase in the number attending independent special schools.33 This situation is so critical that, in 2017, the United Nations criticized the rising numbers of disabled children educated in segregated ‘special schools’ in the UK.34 Sixty years on from the apparent phasing out of segregated education for disabled people in Britain, parents were now facing a choice between placing their child in a segregated school or a local, mainstream school that’s too starved of funding to be able to adequately teach disabled pupils. For some disabled children, it means not going to school at all.
Nine-year-old Louis is taught in his front room. His disabilities are complex: among them autism, sensory processing disorder and dyspraxia. ‘His brain doesn’t get the information at the right time,’ his mum, Joanna, explains from their home in Surrey. Louis wears ear defenders as his sensory processing disorder means he’s acutely sensitive to sound – even the noise of a pen dragging on paper can hurt him – and he often spins to help his inner ear balance and to ‘focus his brain’. When Louis became of school age, he was enrolled at a mainstream primary school in the borough but there was no specialist support in place for his disabilities. To school staff members not trained to help special-needs pupils, it seemed like Louis was just a naughty child acting out. ‘They kept saying it was just bad parenting,’ Joanna, forty-two, tells me. ‘At one point the head teacher even said to me, “you’ve got to just train him, like a dog”.’
For over a year, Joanna struggled to get the school to recognize Louis’s disability and went as far as to bring in a child social worker to get a formal diagnosis. But it did no good. Just two weeks before his diagnoses appointment in 2015, Louis was excluded from the school at six years old – making him the youngest child in the borough to have been expelled.
It should come as little surprise that those vulnerable kids who are not given adequate health or academic support are often kicked out of school. Disabled children like Louis have long been victim of exclusions – pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are up to six times more likely to be excluded from school and account for almost half of all permanent exclusions.35 Class and race mean this burden is spread even more unevenly. In England, a black Caribbean boy on free school meals with SEND is 168 times more likely to be permanently excluded than a white British girl without SEND.36 All too predictably, austerity has only exacerbated this situation. The National Education Union (NEU) in 2018 warned that disabled children were increasingly at risk of being excluded from school simply because budget cuts meant they were not getting the help they needed. Their survey of 900 staff working in schools in England found that half of respondents’ schools had cut support for special educational needs and disabilities this year, and nearly a third had cut SEND posts.37
As demand for specialist support soars and cash-strapped councils threaten bankruptcy, this is likely to only increase in the coming years. Across the country, many local authorities are taking a variety of desperate methods to survive the crisis, from overspending and plunging deeper into the red, to even robbing other educational budgets – such as early years’ funding – to plug the special needs gap.38 Louis’s own home county of Surrey is on the precipice of deep cuts to support for disabled pupils, with the county council proposing to reduce its special-educational-needs budget by £20 million from 2018 to 2019.39
Schools are meant to receive additional funding to meet the needs of children with disabilities, but an NAHT survey in 2018 found that only 2 per cent of respondents reported that the top-up funding they were now receiving was enough to meet disabled children’s needs.40 There are around 1.2 million children recognized as having special educational needs, but the NAHT says that as many as a million of them appeared to have received no additional funding at all through their schools in 2018.41 Joanna feels that Louis’s school wanted him ‘out’ before he was officially diagnosed so that he did not ‘eat into their funding’. ‘If they had the funding for teaching assistants in mainstream schools, [children] wouldn’t be excluded,’ she says.
When funding is slashed, it sends a message about what disabled kids are worth. On top of exclusions, parents and campaigners tell me that some families with disabled children are now being discouraged from even applying to schools in the first place because head teachers know they will not be fully reimbursed for the cost, despite this being legally required. Others are being ‘encouraged’ to be home-schooled. The number of children with special needs being home-schooled in England, Wales and Northern Ireland jumped by 57 per cent between 2012 and 2017.42 Meanwhile, government figures show that more than 4,000 SEND children were without a school place in 2017 – more than double the number of the year before. Campaigners say the real figure is far higher as official data doesn’t include the m
any SEND pupils who don’t have either a special needs statement or an education health and care plan (legally binding documents guaranteeing their rights to additional support). As it is, just 253,000 of the country’s 1.2 million SEND pupils have care plans or special educational needs statements.43 According to the regulator, Ofsted, two thousand children with the greatest needs who do have care plans were still awaiting provision in 2018 – three times more than in 2010.44
It’s disabled kids who are being deprived of an education, but really this climate means we all lose something bigger. Attend a diverse school alongside disabled classmates and non-disabled children are more likely to grow up understanding disability and accepting difference. Siphon disabled children off to segregated schools or shut them away to be taught at home and it isn’t unusual for non-disabled children to never come across a disabled person.
As things stand, some disabled children are disappearing from the school system altogether. A scathing report by Ofsted, in 2018, into the education of children with special educational needs and disabilities, found almost 5,800 pupils with SEND left their school between years 10 and 11; some of them will have been removed from the school roll illegally, because they were perceived as a ‘risk to the league tables’ by potentially bringing down the school’s GCSE results. It amounts to erasing imperfect children, in which a target-driven culture mixed with cost cutting means special-needs pupils are either subtly discouraged to apply to a school or accepted only to be then excluded on tenuous grounds. Half of the 19,000 GCSE-aged pupils that dropped off school rolls between 2016 and 2017 never reappeared on another state-funded school roll.45 The result is thousands of disabled children in limbo, cut out of the education system entirely.
Louis is one of them. At the point he was excluded, he was too young to go to another suitable school in the borough. It meant that he was at home for a year without a school place. Instead, a tutor popped in for brief lessons – at first ‘just for play work’, and after Joanna intervened some English and maths lessons. Joanna herself worked at a special-needs school but without a school place for Louis she had to quit her job to care for him at home. The knock-on effect has been to push the family into money problems. ‘Things are hard financially,’ she says. ‘We just about get by but have no money spare. We live day to day,’ she says. This is far from uncommon: a survey of parents and carers by the charity Ambitious about Autism in 2018 found that 30 per cent had been forced to give up their job as a result of school exclusions, with a further fifth having to go part-time.46 This matters, not least because a low income is already inexorably linked with a family like Louis’. Being a special needs kid is both a cause and effect of poverty: research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) in 2016 shows pupils with a disability are more likely to experience poverty than others and are also less likely to leave school with outcomes that reduce the chances of living in poverty as adults.47
Louis was eventually offered a school place: an independent school for children with emotional and behavioural problems. It was wildly unsuitable – Louis has disabilities, not behavioural problems – and it cost the local authority over £70,000 a year, Joanna says. ‘I think they [the council] put him in there because it was the only school that would take him.’ If parents refuse a placement, it’s not unheard of for them to be forced through the courts to enrol their child in residential boarding homes – ‘Parents live in fear [of that]’, Joanna says – and she reluctantly accepted the offer out of anxiety that Louis would be schooled away from home otherwise.
In fact, Joanna says, ‘there were problems from day one.’ Because it was a school for ‘troubled’ children with emotional problems, not disabilities, Joanna says staff weren’t qualified to teach disabled pupils and had no understanding of Louis’s diagnoses. Louis is high-functioning autistic – ‘He’s smarter than me,’ Joanna says – but the school gave him remedial lessons. ‘Like one plus one equals two.’ Each afternoon, staff took the class out for an activity, like a ball pit. ‘Even though I explained to them it would be sensory overload for him [and] he’ll get distressed,’ Joanna says.
In the classroom, Louis had no consistency – his class went through seven teachers in the space of a year – and he was regularly punished for struggling to cope with his surroundings. The punishment consisted of being locked up in seclusion rooms for up to three hours – ‘It was a padded cell, basically,’ Joanna says – and Louis was restrained if he struggled. ‘Problem is, when you put a [disabled] child into that environment, they’re going to have a meltdown,’ Joanna explains. ‘And the minute you put your hands on a child with autism, they think they’re being attacked.’ A seven-year-old held down by five adults is not a fair fight and Louis was left with bruising over his body.
Louis’s mental health subsequently went downhill to the point where he told his mum he wanted to die and was regularly self-harming: hitting his head repeatedly and scratching his skin. Scared, Joanna went to her GP and was referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) but was told therapy was not available. Theresa May identified mental health provision as one of her ‘burning injustices’ that she pledged to tackle upon gaining power, but the service has seen deep cuts in recent years, none more so than for children.48 Research by the Association of Child Psychotherapists and other professional bodies in 2017 found that a third of NHS children’s mental health services ‘face cuts or closure’.49
Meanwhile the NHS watchdog reported that children with mental health problems were waiting up to eighteen months to be treated.50 An investigation by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) in 2018 found that referrals to children’s mental health services in England had increased by 26 per cent over the last five years, but nearly one in four of those were rejected. This meant that at least 55,000 children were not accepted for treatment in 2017–18 alone, including young people who had experienced abuse or, like Louis, showed evidence of self-harm.51 This is the inevitable result of more cuts: between 2010 and 2016, more than a fifth of local authorities had either frozen or reduced their CAMHS budgets every year; that’s £85 million gone in six years.52
Without the safety net of NHS mental health services, Joanna put her energies towards getting Louis out of a school where he did not feel safe. By March 2018, Joanna had successfully challenged the local authority to terminate Louis’s independent school placement. As a last resort, she requested a personal budget that allowed her to implement a home-schooling package. She was refused. Instead, Louis was just given another home tutor. He’s now back to two hours a day of lessons at home. It is an education in the smallest sense. Louis loves science but he only gets funding for maths and English lessons.
Even now, at nine years old, his treatment at the behavioural school means that Louis has to sleep in Joanna’s bed. He’s scared of being alone. It feels, she says, like the council ‘wrote him off at six’. It looks like Louis will be taught at home for the near future and Joanna doesn’t even know if he’ll get a secondary school placement. It means potentially years of not only Louis going without a proper education but also of the family going without a decent income now Joanna cannot get out to work. ‘We look at the positives like we have food and a roof over our heads,’ she says. ‘[We’re] luckier than some as my mother helps us out financially for birthdays and Christmas.’
Listening to Joanna, it is hard not to think that there will be some sort of school revolt – where parents see their children shunned and ignored and say enough is enough. In fact, that is just what has happened. Parents in Surrey have started a legal challenge over the county council’s planned cuts to the special-needs budget. The week we spoke, Joanna had hoped to go down to the court herself to show her support but ended up at the dentist when Louis needed a tooth out.
This sort of battle – busy parents taking on cash-strapped councils – is being replicated up and down the country, with parents anywhere from Bristol or North Yorkshire to the London borough of Hackney initiating legal action agai
nst multimillion-pound cuts to special-needs funding. It is a David-and-Goliath fight on paper – many of the parents are having to crowdfund online to even afford the legal fees – but it’s providing a shot of hope. In 2018, Bristol city council was forced to cancel planned cuts of £5 million to its SEND budget after a court ruled the council had acted illegally,53 while Hackney backed down on plans to change funding arrangements.54
In Surrey, Joanna is struggling to even get Louis an updated needs assessment; now nine, he hasn’t had one since he was six. A new report is vital if he has any hope of being given a mainstream school place ‘but that costs money too so they won’t do it.’ Joanna knows the cuts mean there are many parents in the borough whose children aren’t in the educational system – as she puts it, ‘You fight for the diagnosis thinking that will be it, that you’ll get support. You then find out there are no services’ – and is currently organizing a meeting at the nearby rugby club where parents can lobby the local MP.
What really frightens her, she says, is that Louis and other disabled children like him are going to be ‘these kids that’s left and left and left’. ‘I’ve seen it too many times at work,’ she says. ‘Sixteen and no qualifications. No apprenticeship because no one will take him because of his exclusion. Then into society with no services.’ Louis wants to be a doctor, she says. ‘He doesn’t stand a chance.’ Currently, after all, he doesn’t even have science lessons.