SEN funding and its effect on Children with special educational needs
Being a mum of 4 children (including triplets), who all have an EHCP and as Head of SEN at Class People, I thought it was important to highlight the lack of budgets granted for children with Special Educational needs.
The current situation is making headline news at the moment and rightly so. Why should children with disabilities or children who need extra support in class be at a disadvantage because the school can?t afford to pay for extra staffing? Teachers are already stretched in the classroom, especially when that class may consist of a variety of children working at different levels and abilities and who do not have the resource of a class TA to support the learning. After speaking to a few teachers, they feel like they are failing their students because they are unable to plan and deliver lessons to suit all abilities, due to the lack of resources. Therefore someone always misses out and it seems to always be the pupils who have additional needs.
There are mainstream schools, who apply for EHCP?s for certain children they believe need the extra resource and in order to enable that child to get the best out of their education, they have to fund the resource out of their normal school budget, whist the EHCP goes through. Speaking from experience, this is a very long winded process and can take up 20 weeks before a decision is made. I also had the unfortunate experience of having funding declined initially for my daughter when she was 3 years old even though she had already been diagnosed with Global Developmental Delay. As a family we strongly believed she needed to be in a specialist setting in order for her to have any chance of developing her skills to the best of her ability. We eventually appealed and won and now she has been in a specialist setting full time for the past 4 years and would not be the person she is today, had she stayed in a mainstream nursery / school with no additional support.
After, visiting a specialist school in the South West and speaking to the Principle, he expressed his concern about lack of funding given to specialist settings. Just that day, the Local Authority had asked him to accept 4 new students with PLD with immediate effect. His argument was he needed funding to be granted for extra learning support workers before he accepted the pupils, as they hadn?t been assessed. He didn?t want to put students into a classroom, not knowing their background or if they had any ?triggers? without an extra, he had to really fight and put a case forward before the Local Authority agreed.
Schools, whether they are mainstream or specialist settings, should not have to fight for funding to be given to provide extra learning resource to children with disabilities or Special Education Needs. All children regardless of ability should have the opportunity to learn within their personal parameters. These children didn?t ask to have additional needs, so why should we have to ask to have extra resources put in place to help then have the same opportunities as their peers, it should be standard practice. According to the DFE 14% of children have special needs or disabilities and due to the lack of funding, families have to fight to get the help they are entitled to.