By Mark Smulian
9 March 2011
Government proposals to radically reform services for young people with special educational needs have been welcomed by children’s charities but have alarmed teaching unions.
A consultation paper, published today, proposes a single education, health and care plan for all eligible children by 2014, which would be reviewed until they were 25 years old. These would replace the present assessments of education needs.
Support and aspiration: a new approach to special educational needs anddisability proposes that the voluntary and community sector might co-ordinate these assessments across services.
Local authorities would each set out a ‘local offer’ of services available to support eligible children and their families.
By 2014 parents could have a personalised budget for their child, with trained support staff to ‘help them navigate the range of help available across heath, education and social care’, the paper says.
Parents could choose either a conventional or special school and the ‘bias towards inclusion’ – encouraging children with SEN into mainstream schools – would end.
Children’s minister Sarah Teather said: ‘We have heard time and time again that parents are frustrated with endless delays in getting the help their child needs, and by being caught in the middle when local services don’t work together. The new single assessment process and plan will tackle this issue.’
This stance drew support from the children’s charity Barnardo’s, whose chief executive Anne Marie Carrie said: ‘The holistic education, health and care plan could help banish the time, stress and money currently spent deciding whether children should be labelled “SEN”.’ But she questioned whether the financial resources would be available to make the new system effective.
The National Association for Special Educational Needs also welcomed what it described as ‘a clearer, less bureaucratic system’.
But Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said spending cuts would reduce support for vulnerable children, and ‘to suggest that the voluntary sector can step in to fill the gap is inappropriate’.
Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, warned against upheaval while ‘savage cuts are already being made to many of the specialist services teachers rely on to help them support children with special educational needs’.
Baroness Shireen Ritchie, chair of the Local Government Association children and young people board, complained that the government has cut funding for early years work by 25%.
‘If council support for SEN is to continue at its current level, which is something that all local authorities want to see, it must be sufficiently funded,’ she said.
