My daughter is just finishing Infant school and has been brilliantly supported by a fantastic team of teachers and teaching assistants. The children in her class with SEN have had a fantastic designated TA and the class has had one for the mornings. My son is about to start the same school and while he will have a teacher and assistant in reception, due to cuts in Yr 1 and 2 they are now moving to have 2 assistants over 3 classes. I worry about the impact this will have on the support children get. I also worry that the previously well resourced nurture groups and extra support groups that my daughter and her friends have benefited from will no longer be funded. I know that one of the specialist reading support TAs who previously worked with children in small groups, will now be in reception as that is where full time roles are. This seems a waste of her training and a loss to children who need help.
Stressed at School
For half an afternoon a week, I used to volunteer at daughter’s infant school. Whilst, I know that my daughter’s infant school is/was an “outstanding school” with dedicated, brilliant, hard-working teachers, I was nonetheless shocked to enter the classrooms and see how chaotic a room of 30 five-year olds was. Spending time, week after week in the classroom, I came to the realisation that there were simply too many children in that classroom. Thirty, five-year-old children in one classroom struggled to sit still for the time enough time required for the teacher to talk. Teaching was regularly interrupted, understandably by children needing water, the toilet or simply wanting to share their thoughts about the subject being discussed. Many of the children seemed bored by the lengthy times spent having to sit on the carpet or at their desk, being talked at and their attention clearly waivered. With such large classrooms the learning seemed often to occur by rote with little time for questions or exploration of the subject. It seemed to me the ‘real learning’ for most of the children occurred when teaching support staff, who took small groups out of the classroom in groups of 4 and 5 to concentrate on a specific area usually reading or maths. I myself, helped children with their reading and maths in small groups of up four which worked well. The environment was intense, noisy and physically cramped and I often came home feeling slightly overwhelmed, thinking it was a miracle, that the children learnt anything.
I was therefore horrified to hear that in my daughters very well-respected junior school, the class size would now be 32 in an even smaller classroom. When I investigated further, I found that class sizes of 32 are standard across the city. As parents we have come to accept this as a norm but from my experience, it is clear to me that this it is not a healthy environment for children or their learning or for the teachers.
My daughter is now 8 and (like many I’m sure) she continues to be a very lively, boisterous thing. At home she never stops moving and/or singing. She ‘gets’ what needs to happen at school so complies, but when I pick her up from school, I can see that it has been a struggle to sit still, to hold it together, to stop talking, to concentrate and to try and learn. Being at school for her clearly requires lots of effort and it means when we get home she can often be quite emotional with lots of mixed up feelings. I can see she finds school stressful and I am certain it doesn’t have to be this way.
I consider our family lucky. Her teachers are brilliant, the school is one of the best locally and very highly regarded. I still have lots of contact with the school and I can see everyone at school she encounters tries their hardest to to do their best by her. However, there is no getting away from the fact, I feel that her class is too big with too many children with different, competing and at times complex needs. The fact that 2/3 of schools locally have had to reduce school support staff really worries me. I know that, it is these staff that have historically supported teachers to ensure learning can happen for all the children. The fact that my daughter learns anything is a testament to the hard work of her teachers and the support staff. If our school were to lose any more support staff, I am certain my daughter’s learning would grind to a complete halt.
Finally, I wish school could be more of a joyous experience for my daughter. I wish it could be an experience filled with a sense of wonder, pleasure and discovery, rather than an experience she simply must endure. It makes me sad for her and for the children of her time and I worry that collectively as parents we are allowing the government of the day to fail them.
EHCP MADNESS!
My youngest boy was diagnosed with Autism in Feb of this year. He is average in attainment but struggles massively with understanding social situations and regulating behaviour and emotions appropriately. This creates a massive barrier to learning for him and puts him at a significant disadvantage to his peers. Since his diagnosis, I have been fighting to get him an EHCP so he can get the extra help he needs to be successful and happy at school. It’s been an absolute nightmare and the result is that I am now going to tribunal to get my son the support he needs. School and the LA have not been able to support me whatsoever because of these cuts and it’s just disgusting. My little boy deserves an equal opportunity to an education just like any other neuro typical child – he is a bright special boy and could just be an AMAZING adult, just like so many autistic people. We are currently putting further and unnecessary obstacles in his path due to the austerity that this government is inflicting on our society’s most vulnerable people. I refuse to sit back and watch my little boy’s mental health and well being, as well as his future, deplete in this way. I will NOT have it and will NOT rest until my boy is supported appropriately….quite possibly at the risk of my own sanity as the stress of this fight is just so overwhelming for parents, carers and all the families of SEN children. It’s not right, just or acceptable and this current government should be ashamed of this disgraceful, discriminatory behaviour.
Hidden scandal of the erosion of SEND services
What follows is a personal story, but I am writing it is an illustration of what is happening in SEND services across the land. Last September I retired after 32 years of being a teacher, mostly in Local Authority SEND support services and special facilities. I took early retirement at 55 because I couldn’t tolerate the stress of working twice the number of contracted hours that I was supposed to work, due to absurd workload, and the stress of feeling that I was failing vulnerable children and their families.
This workload increase, and reduced provision for children, was caused by covering the work of other people whose posts had been “deleted” in response to government cuts (the loss of the Revenue Support Grant and the real terms diminution of the High Needs Block which LAs receive to pay for SEND services, special schools and EHCPs).
To make it worse, most LAs SEND support services have been marketised: schools have to pay for them – but from nothing! With schools having ever reducing budgets they stop purchasing LA services, then more cuts are made to services, and teachers workloads increase, and the services to children and parents decline; and then the remaining services are deemed to be of little help by schools and parents, because they don’t have enough staff to do a good job any more.
This is happening across the land – SEND services evaporating everywhere – and on the whole only the parents of children effected and the teachers in those services really know the size of the cuts and the size of workload the remaining teachers face.
School Counselling Cuts
My eldest boy struggles with anxiety. In year 1 he was referred for school
counselling to help him manage his anxiety and emotions. The waiting list was 6 weeks but he was allocated a slot & received 6 sessions of art therapy with a
brilliant school counsellor who came into the school once a week & spent the day seeing children. She helped him greatly & showed him ways to deal with his anxiety.
Fast-forward several years. He’s now in Year 4 & despite having his ups & downs has progressed well through school, still loving his art & using it as a form of relaxation. However around October last year something changed & his anxiety became so bad he developed insomnia. We tried everything we could think of to help him (meeting with his teachers, relaxation techniques etc.) but to no avail. It was a tough time for us all. I enquired with the school as to whether he could be referred for more school counselling. The response was that the waiting list was very long & he wouldn’t be considered high need enough. I later found out that the reason for this was because they’d had to cut the school counselling hours by half to help make up the funding shortfall.
Fortunately we were able to pay for him to have private art therapy sessions.
Other families though are not in a position to be able to do this. It is therefore a
greater tragedy that a child struggling with their social emotional well being,
either at school or home, is limited in the support they receive due to a funding
shortfall, especially as an expanding body of evidence highlights that people do better in life when mental health problems and related disorders are tackled early.