End of school SEND report: Must try harder
It’s the end of the school year and children are arriving home up and down the land with their school reports in those scary sealed envelopes. But how have England’s …
Category: SEN Reforms
SEN Support: Poorer outcomes when needs aren’t thoroughly assessed
Last week I wrote about the problems facing parents of children in mainstream school whose special needs have been persistently overlooked. While the troubled roll-out of Education, Health & Care …
SEND 2017, the state of the special educational needs system revealed
The annual figures for special educational needs came out yesterday and I spent the day poring over them and making another nice infographic to go alongs with it. 2016 saw a 12% …
Your views invited to help set the agenda for Whole School SEND
Last month Barney and I participated in the Whole School SEND Summit, spreading our message in a roundtable at the conference about working with parents. More than 200 parents (many …
Special needs lawyer calls for election pledge to solve SEND disarray
A young lawyer specialising in special educational needs, who himself has SpLD, has warned the parties in the upcoming election urgent action is needed to fix the disarray in the current state …
Two-thirds of parents were happy with their 2015 EHCP experience…
Along with the slew of information released by the DfE last week came a very long, detailed survey of family experience of the Education, Health and Care Plan process in 2015. It …
Half a billion and counting: Tracking the SEND reforms spending
We’re now well over two years into the SEND reforms, and the reform journey so far has been long, winding, and very, very expensive – nearly £500m spent to date, …
How a parent held her council to account for its SEND failures
Today’s parent story is a classic case of a local authority’s disregard of the SEND reforms: poor communication and lack of cooperative working across services, resulting in a failure to …
£215 million cash boost for local areas to improve SEND facilities
The Department for Education has today announced £215 million funding for SEND. It’s to be split between almost every English council to both create more school places and to improve …
How satisfied are pupils, parents and teachers about SEND in schools?
At the end of last week, a couple of surveys were published by the Department for Education. One was a survey of pupils and their respective parents/carers at state schools …
Will more cash guide the battered ship of SEND reform to calmer seas?
Just a quick post after Matt’s epic blog yesterday on SEND Inspectors (we have been asked for a right of reply by Ofsted and are happy to do so, so …
The Scott Schools and Colleges SEND report: It’s really rather depressing
Lee Scott is a very nice man. Earlier this year, at the request of the then Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, he criss-crossed England speaking to schools, colleges, families and local …
SEND Inspections: Are they bringing accountability? Your views needed
As you know, we’ve been following the development of the SEND inspections developed jointly by Ofsted and CQC. Barney has even written a helpful guide for parents to help you …
SEND reforms a botch job? Another report shows families are being failed
The SEND reforms are failing to meet the needs of autistic children, according to a new report from the National Autistic Society. The report, written by Catriona Moore, says far …
More EHCP research: DfE sends “Experience” survey to families
From today many parents of children with special educational and young people who have Education, Health and Care Plans will be receiving letters from the Department for Education containing a …
Reporting on the EHCP process: Bren’s parent participatory research
For four weeks from late April to early May I conducted a research survey into how things were going with the SEND reforms – specifically, how EHCPs were going. The …
What parents told the government’s review into the SEND reforms
Last week, a group of eight parents, including me and Renata, went along to the Department of Education in London to pass on our experiences of the special educational needs …
CALL TO ACTION: Let’s work together to stop SEND Tribunal nightmares
Moving the Baker Small Twitter-storm along… Special Needs Jungle would like to use the momentum we have gathered to create a groundswell of SEND community support to: You’ve probably seen …
Share your experiences of the reforms for Nicky Morgan’s SEND review
In just over a week’s time, I’m taking a group of parents to the Department for Education to meet former MP, Lee Scott, who has been asked by the Education …
Edward Timpson and Jane Ellison: “Our reforms are boosting the life chances of children with SEND”
As parent carers we often measure our successes in the little victories we achieve on a day to day basis. They may not seem significant to some, but to us …
