The first tranche of Suffolk’s  review of its special educational provision – the consultation  -finished last Sunday. I responded jointly as councillor and as parent as the form allowed.

We were told that the review was  focusing on the following three types of current specialist educational provision:
1) Specialist Support Centres (SSCs) (I am in favour, indeed I would like Suffolk to establish another one in the north west of the county); 2) Residential provision in Moderate Learning Disability (MLD) Special Schools (I felt this  needed  discussion with parents as best placed to define wants) and
3) Alternative Provision (AP). Alternative Provision was used in the consultation as a catch-all for  ‘any provision that provides education that is not a mainstream school or academy’. It includes all provision for young people with specialist health issues, for example autism, and epilepsy which is  often provided out of county at great expense (and now to age 25 because of recent legislation). AP was also used to include  PRUs (Pupil Referral Units): facilities offering a part time or full time education for pupils who exhibit challenging behaviour. Typically pupils spend 2 terms in a PRU before being reintegrated back into school.

We were told

Currently the county council is experiencing considerable pressures with the number of learners with additional needs (236 currently) needing to be educated in non – Suffolk settings, with learners requiring access to Social, Emotional and Mental Health (SEMH) and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) provision accounting for 151 of the 236 learners

However, in the consultation, despite these remarks on the cost of out-of-county placements in general the AP question  focused entirely on PRUs (see below)!

Now, as regards PRUs, I would not throw the baby away with the bathwater and would definitely ensure that  excellent provision in Suffolk is not lost in any rationalisation we undertake, and I was happy to respond saying as much.

HOWEVER, I concentrated most of my response on the hidden question  of what Suffolk is doing, or rather not doing, for students – like my own child – who was fortunate enough eventually to be sent out of Suffolk because Suffolk SEND education so completely failed to provide an education for them (despite costly but unstructured, unquantified and unthought-out  ‘interventions’ ).

This is not because of my personal interest but because of my understanding of the cost involved on the one hand, and the reasons for the cost on the  other.

SEND covers a hugely wide range of conditions; individual schools  seem to provide pretty much what education they choose to these (clearly second-class) pupils and SCC, the statutory authority for education and social care, often has to pick up the costly pieces of their cherry-picking failure. Why should this be the case?

Looking at this SEND consultation it seems that there may be a tendency to view the cost of premises and salaries as where cost-savings and rationalisation could be made.  I therefore urged SCC to look at the often inappropriate delivery of SEND education itself.

For a start , why should (as ever) the needs of young people with social and behavioural problems be asked to conflict with those with health issues and cognitive deficits?

As  example, my own child with a physical disability  was educated away from her peers  in a unit along with those with anger issues and other behavioural problems. Why?  You tell me.  Seemingly for the same reason as her current education establishment  (a specialist college outside Suffolk dedicated to her medical  condition)  is conflated with PRUs  in the reply box for this consultation.

(And even then, PRUs who educate short-term those who can be reintegrated into mainstream school are given the whole of Box 3 in a 3 box consultation document supposedly dealing globally with educational provision for Special Educational Needs and Disability. The disabled once again become second-rate citizens?  You couldn’t make it up). It is neither fair or reasonable to either group.

So, redressing the balance and talking specifically about educating specifically disabled young people – Suffolk’s  continuing failure  in  the field of SEND teaching and  curriculum delivery is expensive and an essential part of our problem. It is an area that this consultation document seemed reluctant to address.

Let us not beat about the bush – I’ve heard stories of parents who treat SEND provision as if it were ‘childcare’ but I would contend that there is a lot of Suffolk SEND provision that is arguably little better than childcare: with ‘educators’  seeing little responsibility for the future of their students; setting challenges that do not challenge and awarding gold stars and pats on the head instead of a  robust and rigorously constructed syllabus looking realistically towards their future after education.

SEND education – if it is NOT to be childcare – should be looking at the longterm future of the pupil. If it is to be effective and cost-effective , it should explore possibilities of independence, expect  the possibility of paid employment, work for realistic integration with employers’ needs , not be dismissive and patronising of pupils’ potential,  skills, capacities. ( Here, the  education, employment and discrimination sections of this blog post (click for link) although epilepsy-specific, have universal relevence.   Suffolk produced a strategy document 2015-18  last October. But non-specific optimism  is no good without teeth and this was toothless. Just like Suffolk’s current  Inclusion and Equalities strategy which completely excludes having to contemplate the situation of all the disabled people in Suffolk  and their inability to find work because they have not received adequate or even appropriate training or education  (see link). Disabled people and their problems seem remarkably invisible to the policymakers of Suffolk).

Yet not educating, or mis-educating these young people  is at the short- and long-term expense of the taxpayer as well as the young person.  And failure to address the need  of provision in-county has greater ramifications now we have a statutory duty to provide to age 25. We have an absolute need to question and query and qualitatively analyse the outcome  of what is taught to young people with disabilities in the same way as we assess and monitor mainstream provision.

Will Suffolk now improve the SEND offer so that disabled young people can expect the same quality and monitoring of  education  as their able-bodied peers get by right?  Not, you might say, a very big ask.  And a damn sight cheaper ask then sending them out of county, like nineteenth century black sheep to the colonies.

We wait for the next stage of the consultation to see whether these issues have been taken on board.