SENDing out an SOS

Looking tearful, mum looked me in the eye. ‘So are you telling me you need to withdraw the support you’re giving?’

I hesitate. ‘Not withdrawing, just reducing.’

‘But why? He’s doing so well?’

What do I say now? He is doing so well. Transformed, in fact. Progress everywhere you look – socially, academically, with his particular needs. He is one of our biggest success stories.

But inclusion comes at a massive cost. A mental one, but a real one too. Our budget is absolutely blown. We have a massive deficit, we have leaked money in the past 18 months, and now have the Local Authority pressing us for plans on how we are going to pay it back. When we looked through line by line, one thing stood out as a major overspend.

Support staff.

We aren’t being frivolous or extravagant; we are spending the bare minimum to get by. Unfortunately, we are hitting an absolute wall because of our spend on SEN.

We are immensely proud of the SEN support we give our children. We have a reputation locally for helping children no other school has managed to help; for listening; for being supportive and not judgemental; and, most of all, for not giving up when it gets tricky. As of now, however, our hands are tied. There is just no money left.

Where has it all gone? Well, the needs we are seeing in mainstream schools are reaching higher and higher levels of complexity, while the money to support them is getting less and less in real terms. ARPs (additional resource provision) are full, PRUs (pupil referral units) are full, special schools are full. My wife works in special ed, so I see that side of the picture too. As needs – educational and medical – become more complex for these schools, their own profit per pupil is now in an ARP. And those that were in an ARP? In mainstream.

We have a number of children with an EHCP, and we fund their first 13 hours, then get top-up for the rest based on their plan (I know the argument that this should be done by the LA – they say they do through notional SEN funding, I don’t need a debate about that). Our notional SEN budget is 10% of our school budget. It doesn’t cover the costs of supporting all of the pupils we have on our SEN register, or even all our EHCP pupils. A full-time LSA costs about £25,000. The top-up funding we receive totals around £9,000. So already, every EHCP child costs the school £16,000.

That isn’t the issue in our overspend. Ours is the spending we are having to do on the children without an EHCP, who desperately need one. We give them full-time 1:1 support because that is what they need. They couldn’t access education without it, and it would harm the education of the other children in each class if we didn’t give it. But we have to do this completely unfunded, and currently we are doing this for 11 children. That’s £275,000, with no return. Our deficit is completely made up of this overspend. 

We have applied for EHCPs for 8 of these children. The others have not been with us long enough to show the plan-do-review needed. All 8 have been given a ‘yes to assess’. Brilliant – the funding will start coming in soon?

Wrong.

After the yes to assess, the statutory, legal requirement is for the local authority to produce a draft plan within 10 weeks. For our pupils, this is coming in at around 54 weeks in my authority. So we are being expected to foot the bill for the 1:1 support in the meantime. And when EHCPs are given, the payments are not backdated. At last check, over 1,000 pupils in my Local Authority were waiting for a report from an Educational Psychologist. They currently have 10 vacancies for this role. It is no wonder the system is slowing down. Getting hold of an EHC Coordinator is a nightmare – they have too many cases, and no real answers apart from ‘wait a bit longer’. There is no comeback for the LA – no financial penalty, no further support for the schools – just the threat that Ofsted might comment on it when they come. Not really a deterrent when your LA is already rated as inadequate though, is it?

Back to the conversation with the mum:

‘But what about the EHCP?’ she says hopefully.

‘That will be at least a year, and we just can’t afford to give the full-time support anymore. I’m sorry.’

‘What about a private EP report? How much is one of those?’

I shake my head. ‘Around £750. But it won’t help – the LA won’t accept them.’

So we hit on another problem. That is a lot of money, and even those who can afford it find it makes no difference anyway. Everything is broken. Speech and Language barely see anyone face to face; even non-verbal children who have it specified on their EHC get a total of 15 hours’ support a year. Occupational health is the same. PRU support is becoming more and more chargeable and less and less accessible due to their demand as well.

These are the most vulnerable pupils in our schools, and they are trapped in a system that is falling apart around their ears. Children that, with the right support – as I myself have seen – can thrive, will be failed. Children will be excluded and schools will find ways of not accepting them – citing that they can’t meet need.

And as we sit in our SLT meetings we try and find every way to extract as much support as we can from a dwindling budget because we know it is the right thing to do. Supporting every child is why we are in education – not just the ones who manage to access it just fine. Parents should not be crying in my office over it, should not be complaining to MPs, should not be seeking legal advice to bring cases to tribunal to get any sort of progress or movement towards the outcomes their children deserve.

The thing is, this is just scratching at the ones who need 1:1 support. What about all the others on our SEN register? Early help! Early help is the key! I hear this time and time again. I am sure it is – but if there is no way of offering this, then we end up exactly where we are now. So many schools no longer have general teaching assistants – they are all working as 1:1s. So who delivers the other key interventions? Day readers? Phonics? Pre- and post-teaching? The other absolute myriad of support we can identify children as needing. These children can be real heartbreakers, as you know – they only need a little push, a little bit of time, a little bit of attention, but there just isn’t the capacity to put it in.

There is a SEN crisis. It’s due to money, it’s due to governmental systems, it’s due to the level of need. Two of those things can change, and they need to, rapidly. I am an educationalist. I want to support all children, whatever their need. I want to help them thrive. That might not be in our setting in the long term, but it is my job to help them flourish until they find the right specialist setting. It’s my job to give those ones that need it that little nudge, and I just don’t have the tools to do it anymore.

As with everything in education, the success of SEN provision is the dedication of the people who work in it, who give up their own time, money, worry and anxiety about it all to help the children that need it most. It saddens me when pupils come to us on their 4th school in two years because the provision hasn’t been right. We know how to get it right, we just don’t have the capacity to do it as much as we want to.

So what needs to happen? More money, a fresh look at accountability, and more support at every single level for those that are trying to support these pupils. A SENDCo has an impossible job – trying to assess pupils, give support, complete paperwork, meet with parents, attend meetings. They are truly unsung heroes of a school, working in a system that sets most people up for failure.

It makes me sad, and it makes me demoralised.

‘Thank you though,’ she says, ‘you’ve made a massive difference. He can read, he stays in class, he tells me about his day.’

I nod back. ‘It is what we are here for – we’ll keep working together to do whatever we can.’

That’s what keeps me going – knowing we make a difference to children that need it. I just wish we could do more. These children need support to reach the best outcomes, the outcomes that deserve. We can only work in the structures we’ve got and increasingly they aren’t fit for purpose.