Divergent Learning Diaries

I was stunned, but not surprised by an article published by the BBC this morning (‘Restrained and scared: The 100K schools failing vulnerable children’ Clegg and Adnitt,  BBC August 2024) detailing a horrific account of an AuDHD Scottish girl who sued her 250K (!) a year Independent school in order to prevent them from using restraint on her.  This account was subsidised by that of a parent, of AuDHD girls, who described the impact  that the (100K a year) Independent Special school she eventually got them into left them with significant emotional trauma following the repeated use of physical restraint.  Both shocking stories on their own, are heightened by the fact that the parent had seen her daughters rejected by approximately 40 schools prior to finding a place in this school in the South-East of England.  A place where she hoped her daughters would at last have the opportunity to thrive.

The article stoked up my latent rage around the proliferation of Independent Special Schools that have appeared in the last decade or so.  I’m sure there are some good ones around but I have serious concerns that the presence of so many is exacerbating the messed up cycle of provision in the UK that is leaving so many of our vulnerable children without access to the support they need.

Here’s my reasoning.  These schools are businesses.  The success of a business is measured by profit margins and healthy returns for investors.  Customer experience probably appears somewhere on a  list of objectives but you can guarantee it won’t be priority no. 1. It is therefore not surprising that there are an increasing number of concerns being reported about the lack of a child-centred approach as well as adequate specialist knowledge and experience in such institutions.  After all, the rigorous process scrutiny that the state sector faces around quality and appropriateness of its education offer is almost optional for the Independent sector.

As a family, we have had our own brush with a few of these establishments none of which were particularly satisfactory.  One very well regarded setting close to us, a school that prides itself on offering bespoke curricular for cognitively able autistic children took Joni through a three day selection process before she joined secondary school only to offer her a space which they wouldn’t guarantee to keep available as we were awaiting tribunal in order to get the local authority to fund said provision.  Once they realised there might be a wait for the funding they dropped her like a stone.  Another newer but promising looking setting invited us in when we were looking at alternatives for Patti once we realised she couldn’t cope with the challenges of mainstream (or was it the fact that her school no longer felt able to tolerate her meltdowns).  A meeting was set up for us by her SENCO and we met the headteacher who said he’d be delighted to meet with Patti and asked us more about her difficulties.  After we talked him through her recent challenges he stated that his school couldn’t accommodate students who exhibited dysregulated behaviours.  Really?  At that price? Their school preferred to work with students who were of the more quiet and nervous disposition.  Great.  So only ‘nice’ and ‘quiet’ autistic children then.

These settings often look impressive and to desperate parents looking for a safe environment that will nurture their child and offer them a peer group, they can pose as a tantalising alternative to the intense and crushingly overwhelming environment in our large mainstream schools.  

However,  it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s the money they are after and that too many of these establishments are not committed to meeting our children where they are and in providing the care they need.  This is before we address the fact that in most cases the local authority response to parents who choose these schools  is pretty much always an instant ‘no’ followed by a protracted court and tribunal process.  By the time parents access what they are hoping will be these life-changing provisions they are burnt out, or broke from legal expenses themselves.  No wonder so many are chucking the towel in and home-educating or unschooling.  The system as it is kind of needs them to.  Maybe pushing parents into desperation is part of the plan?  Shame it means so many adults have been forced to unpack the lives they have built for themselves and their families in order to ensure the emotional wellbeing of their child and educate them themselves.

The SEND system in the UK  is irrevocably broken,  so much so that no one seems to know where to start to be able to fix it.  

Too many Independent SEND Schools are businesses setting out to capitalise profits to the detriment of some of the most desperate families in our society. It is abhorrent. It’s capitalism at its manipulative worst; masquerading as a white knight on a horse that will offer hope to children for whose experience of learning to that point has felt hopeless.  These schools can rationally be accused of sucking money out of the sector, away from the hands of local authorities and families and nicely into the Swiss bank accounts of their super rich owners.  Something must be done in the current administration to reverse the flow of SEND money out of the education sector.

The scandal here is that these provisions: promising reflexology at lunchtimes, Japanese GCSE (if that’s what you fancy), Manga courses and daily speech and language input, could and should be available for anyone who needs it.  But unfortunately the universal offer of education in the UK is ridiculously narrow and straight-jacketed. It lacks ambition and creativity.  It’s a living anachronism.

There are plenty of creative thinkers in our workforce: teachers, educational psychologists and other education professionals who are already committed to the promise of state education working in the sector right now, who would love to engage in a process of unpicking the mess we are in.  If only someone could take the lead.  If only someone with influence in the current administration could do something to shock the system into planning for change. 

Some schools and trusts have tried to take the matter into their own hands.  At our own school we set up our own alternative provision a number of years ago frustrated by the lack of local options for students who were not accessing the curriculum or did not thrive in our mainstream school. It’s  not a special needs provision, but of course at least half of the current cohort are ND student and 40% either have or are awaiting an ASC diagnosis.  Wonderfully, the first cohort sat their KS4 assessments this summer with those sitting GCSEs walking away with nothing less than a grade 5.  While this has been on a relatively small scale in our case,  Multi Academy Trusts are using their resource pools to work with local authorities to set up special school provisions as part of their trusts offering more affordable options.  An article in Schools Week (‘Meet the trusts pioneering state-run private special schools’, Booth, May 24) highlights one such venture being led by The Beckfield Trust and Discovery Schools Trust in the Midlands which is deliberately intended to disrupt the ‘for-profit sector’.  Some local authorities, constrained by the rules of safety valve have already realised that pitching up provisions in their existing schools, often in the form of Additional Resourced Provisions (ARPs) that maintain their links with mainstream, are much more cost efficient ways to offer suitable alternative environments  to children enabling school leaders (who do possess the requisite expertise by the way) to offer solutions to families that are local.  This has the added plus of cutting back on transport costs to SEND schools that are all too often shipping the most vulnerable children hours away from their families in order to get them to access the right provision.

Local small provisions and ARPs look like being an affordable solution in the future, once we break the cycle that is sucking resources to opportunists away from the sector and away from our children.  And for those children where Education Other Than At School (EOTAS) is the best solution – and there are thousands of these children in the UK – a series of state approved and regulated agencies could evolve from the current crop of providers based on evidence of impact. 

The question is this.  Who at the DfE is going to push the envelope before the whole house of cards comes crashing down?

Thanks for reading

Louise