Every Disabled Child Matters Too.

Last week, Ofsted released into the wild “A Statement is Not Enough”, a new report addressing whether the needs of SEN pupils are being met. It transpires that, in their view, they’re not.


The report has found that there are many children who have been diagnosed as having a special educational need that they do not have, as many as 25%. It states that teachers are failing to teach everyone in their classes. It is also stated that some of the more “behaviourally challenged” pupils are being labelled as having SENs when the reality is that the teaching staff cannot or will not, amend their teaching to include everyone within their classroom.

Let’s start by considering the furore that was caused by Panorama’s report that only 18 teachers have been struck off in 40 years whilst there were at least 17,000 struggling teachers, it would appear that there is some weight behind the results. If there are so many incompetent teachers being hidden within the system, it appears plausible that children are labelled as challenging by staff who simply cannot meet the needs.

If you look further, a different story appears. Over the years, the number of statements issued for children in schools has dropped dramatically. Many parents do not know, for instance, that if their child has a disability but not a statement, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (as amended by Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001), demands that their child must still be catered for as if they do have a statement. The school must make reasonable provisions to include a disabled child within a mainstream environment, regardless of whether they have the vital statement or not.

The School Action and School Action Plus schemes were introduced in January 2002, to assist with Labour’s movement towards providing inclusive (or mainstream) education for those with special educational needs. Whilst applauded at the time, the problem is the swing towards accusations of statements being applied too widely. Ofsted’s report states that “as many as half of all pupils identified for School Action would not be identified as having special educational needs if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all, with individual goals for improvement.” (most likely believed to be encompassed by the Individual Education Plan).

The suggestion is that, as children with a statement, or those without who are covered by the School Action Plus plan receive funding to assist their education (pro rata for primary schools based on two or more pupils being covered by it, and per child for secondary schools), educational establishments are wrongly labelling children as having special educational needs to access additional monies. The very real danger is that, as a knee jerk reaction to this, funding will be scaled back even further, making statements harder to put into place, and reducing the support children with disabilities receive.

What seems to have been ignored by the mainstream press is Ofsted’s assertion that provision for disabled children’s education is weak. What concerns me, as the parent of two autistic children within mainstream schooling environments, neither of whom have a statement and yet whom we struggle to get one for the elder of the two whose behaviour is profoundly autistic is; what happens when the money runs out?