26th August 2022 • My Family Our Needs
Kate Chate, a Family Consultant at Dimensions UK, shares her thoughts on the Government’s SEND review and highlights the report’s gaps surrounding transition.
Earlier this year, the Department for Education published a green paper on the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system. Titled “Right support, right place, right time”, the paper outlined increased commitment to identifying children’s needs more quickly and effectively. Backed by £70m in funding, the proposed policies looked to establish a single national system that sets clear standards for the provision of care for children and young people with SEND.
While the review made some practical suggestions on how to improve resource allocation, there are some fundamental challenges that it failed to recognise. Crucially, it failed to address a real opportunity to help young people and their families prepare for adulthood, avoiding what can at present be a sharp cliff edge. Partnerships with educators and local authorities, can help create the foundation needed for a good transition into further education, work and adulthood.
The review also lacked top-down effort to include children and young adults with SEND into mainstream schools. Not being a part of your immediate community from the start creates limits and further challenges down the line. Without a network within the community (being known, understood and supported by your friends and neighbours) it might bring higher care costs in the future, such as the current adult social care focus on supporting people to become part of their community.
Support for Families
At present, children and their families are not prepared adequately for a transition into adulthood.
Families often face a paradoxical information gap and flood when it comes to planning for their children. Adult social care options are not always obvious given the multitude of social care arrangements, causing the information gap families experience. Paradoxically, to plug that gap, there also exists an overkill of information that is often incohesive, making families unaware of the resources available.
Transition planning remains an under designed and underbudgeted area of need despite being crucial to families and adult social care services. Families are often unsupported when they become aware that transition planning should ideally begin at age 13 and are uninformed on how to expertly navigate the system when their child leaves education.
More local authority support to families must be provided especially in the areas of housing and further education, with these services extending beyond the age limit of 18 so that the transition to adulthood is a progression, not a cliff’s edge.
Further Education
Further education for young people with SEND remains a woefully underdeveloped sector. Education for must be viewed beyond the lens of paper qualifications but instead an opportunity to learn skills.
Beyond primary and secondary education, educators, employers and the Government should come together to ensure that people can access and participate in furthering their education through apprenticeships, vocational courses or trainee schemes. This will deliver excellent provisions from early years to adulthood.
Given their immediate family members are usually untrained in helping young adults develop their vocational or social skills, being able to participate in further education – without needing maths and English GCSE’s – will be beneficial to all involved.
Allowing young adults with SEND the opportunity to further their education through gaining real world experiences will support their work-readiness – a vital part to a smooth transition into adulthood.
Mainstream and SEND Education
The SEND review addresses many concerns families face when it comes to education. Special education streams have been created to accommodate SEND needs, seemingly alleviating many initial worries families had when it came education. A strategy to segregate education on the surface presents two benefits: firstly, it has provided cost savings to local governments as schools can be operated more efficiently. SEND individuals are also provided with a space to learn in a suitably adapted environment.
However, while not including children with differing needs in mainstream schools might solve immediate funding and manpower issues, it is creating a bigger problem down the line.
Segregating students has inadvertently created a culture of exclusion where children graduating from institutionalised education may find barriers to engaging with their community.
While there is a monetary disincentive for inclusion, this exclusion presents increased social care costs in the long run as people would not have the natural networks they would have forged in a mainstream school.
Looking Forward
The SEND review has addressed many concerns. However big challenges still exist for the long term. Fundamental flaws reveal that more needs to be done to support the individual and their families in the transition to adulthood.
Some of the £70m in funding must be allocated to creating an education system where all children can be successfully educated in their local schools. Teachers need training on how to support the needs of every student. Parents also need to be involved, as partners, to ensure all stakeholders are involved.
Children with SEND should have person centred, inclusive options to further their education. This will not only help with their chances of employment, but will ensure they become as independent as they can possibly be – with the natural supports of their communities – ensuring quality of life and good health outcomes.
Ignoring these challenges now, will only create further costs and pressures down the line.
Dimensions have designed free resources to help provide you with more information about the learning disability, autism and social care sectors. They cover a range of topics including transition services, personalisation and understanding the sector.
Visit https://dimensions-uk.org/families/information-advice/