UK: SPECIAL ED, 'A broken system in desperate need of long-term renewal'
'No plausible reason' to believe there are more kids with autism
THE UK IN DENIAL
Anyone looking at my site, Loss of Brain Trust, https://www.lossofbraintrust.com/ can quickly see that it’s focused on stories from the UK, specifically England.
It isn’t that I’m ignoring news from other places, but rather, it’s because Google News has multiple UK stories each day in any search for “autism” or “special education.”
I can’t possibly post all the articles I find, especially if I expand things to Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
The nearly 10,000 stories on Loss of Brain Trust go back to January, 2017, and UK stories are the most prominent.
Something is really wrong.
It seems everywhere in the UK, government officials are struggling to provide for disabled children in local schools.
I have to remind myself that this is Great Britain, a prominent first world country and not a struggling nation in equatorial Africa.
Officials are failing special needs children en masse. They readily admit it. It’s common to read about counties and cities where these children don’t even have a place in a school, or where parents have to wait two to five years just to get a diagnosis to qualify for special education in school.
On a daily basis, stories announce NEW, MULTI-MILLION POUND SPECIAL SCHOOLS being built across the country and current schools expanding their special needs places.
There are phrases that seem trite after so many years, words like: ‘much needed,’ “increased demand,” ‘dramatic increase,’ ‘absolute crisis point,’ and “surge in autism.”
Never-ending
Stories also predict things will get worse in the years to come! We routinely learn that special education numbers will double or worse by 2030.
Of course the costs are enormous, and local councils forecast that they have growing special education deficits, and they’re facing potential bankruptcy.
Autism
It doesn’t take long to recognize the skyrocketing increase in AUTISM is behind this. It seems that the single most cited disability is ASD, along with its first cousin, social emotional disorders.
Two years ago, Schools Week announced the vast majority of kids with special needs in Britain have AUTISM, and it’s increasing in the YOUNGEST CHILDREN.
(SEND, Special Needs and Disabilities classification in the UK)
SEND isn’t on the precipice – it’s tipped over the edge
Over half of the children and young people in special schools have a primary or secondary need of autism. For children in early years specialist settings, the figure is 65 per cent….
There’s nothing wrong here
In the face of huge costs, endless waiting lists and non-stop increases, no one is asking WHY MORE AND MORE CHILDREN CAN’T LEARN/BEHAVE NORMALLY.
Incredibly, the two most common words I find in stories describing schools expanding or new special schools being built are ‘delighted’ and ‘excited.’ More autism is explained as neurodiversity, thanks to greater awareness.
When will it end?
Stories from England like to cite the outdated, official autism rate in the US of one in 36, one in 22 boys, but this is hardly accurate since Scotland puts their autism rate at one in 23 children, one in 15 boys and Northern Ireland is one in 20, one in 12 boys.
TWO RECENT STORIES SHOW THE STALEMATE
Press Association: Government must reform system for children with educational needs, say councils
The Government must urgently reform a failing system of support for children with special educational needs as spiralling costs have not led to better outcomes for pupils, councils have warned.
Authorities said they are facing a financial “cliff edge” driven by a sharp increase in demand for pupil support since the introduction of landmark special education needs reforms in 2014.
A major study, commissioned by the cross-party Local Government Association (LGA) and the County Councils Network (CCN), concluded that current arrangements are not working for pupils, families or authorities.
Councils are projected to spend £12 billion [$16B] on support by 2026, three times more than a decade ago, but will still face a £5 billion [$6.7B] “funding black hole” due to expected demand that year.
Sector leaders said it is becoming “increasingly clear” that special educational needs support represents an “existential threat to the financial sustainability of local government” and called on the new Government to set out plans to make schools more inclusive, as promised in the Labour manifesto.
More and more
However, many local systems struggled to adapt as the number of children with EHC plans more than doubled from 240,000 in 2015 to 575,973 in 2023-24.
A further 1.2 million children have been identified as requiring support below the level of a statutory support plan – an increase from 990,000 in 2015. . . .
These placements cost between £25,000 [$37,000] and £58,000 [$77,000] a year, compared to an annual cost of £8,200 [$10,900] in a mainstream school.
The report argues that reform should focus on ensuring more children have their needs met in mainstream education, but added such settings often lack the “capacity, resources and, in some cases, expertise” required.
Tim Oliver, CCN’s Conservative chairman, said: “As this landmark report shows, the case for reform is unquestionable.
“With a new government in place and elected on a ‘change’ platform, it is vital that reform happens over the next 18 months. . . .
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “This diagnosis is damning: educational outcomes for children with Send are flatlining after years when councils and parents have been pitted against each other. . . .
“We will restore parents’ trust that their child will get the support they need in mainstream school, if that is the right place for them. And that there will always be a place in special schools for children with the most complex needs.
“We have a broken system in desperate need of long-term renewal. I won’t make false promises, change won’t feel as quick as parents – or I – would like. . . .
Never cite the obvious
Over the past seven years I’ve read endless stories from the UK about how the system is failing special needs kids and how there needs to be reforms in special education. So they pile on billions more, hoping to finally solve the problem, but it never helps. THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE DISABLED STUDENTS, and that’s the real problem. Of course this is something no will admit—EVER!
On September 20th, Church Times in the UK, published this revealing piece:
Education: Why SEND is a battleground
The story highlighted all the kids with special needs that are regularly suspended from school because of behavior.
FIGURES released by the Department for Education in July show a record number of suspensions from school in England last year — up 36 per cent from the year before, which itself broke the previous record. Almost half of these cases were for persistent disruptive behaviour. . . .
A recent study by the Isos Partnership, commissioned by the County Councils Network and the Local Government Association, came to a bleak conclusion: “The SEND system is broken.”
The article was really about all the kids with autism in UK schools
Diagnosis of special educational needs was already becoming much more common. For example, a recent study has found that between 1998 and 2018 the number of people in Britain diagnosed with autism increased almost ninefold. Today, it is believed that one child in 36 is “on the spectrum”.
NO REAL INCREASE
Immediately the suggestion that there is MORE AUTISM was dismissed. It’s really the better diagnosing/greater awareness that’s increasing
The lead author of that study, Dr Ginny Russell, of Exeter University, has said that there is “no plausible reason” to believe that autism cases have multiplied. Rather, she suggests, “diagnoses have increased because of ever-wider assessment boundaries — boundaries that are still moving outwards.”
We can’t address the cause
Whatever the cause of that increase, Dr Brenner believes that neurodivergent children now find it harder to cope in school. “The environment has become more and more incompatible with their needs,” she says. . . .
THERE are about 1.7 million schoolchildren in England with identified special educational needs. The rapidly growing number who have EHCPs — up from 232,000 in 2014 to 434,354 last year — has imposed severe demands on local authorities’ resources. Many authorities seem reluctant to issue more. . . .
Indeed, since 2019, the Government has been allowing councils to keep expenditure on SEND off their balance sheets, because otherwise a number of them would have gone bankrupt. The County Council Network reports that the total accumulated deficit in England has now reached £3.2 billion [$4.3B], and is projected to rise to £5 billion [$6.7B] by 2026.
The rest of the article was a gloomy picture of the future.
“Sir Kevan predicted that an avalanche of emotional and social needs was going to descend on schools, and would overwhelm them if we don’t deal with them,” Mr Chalke reflects. “We didn’t deal with them, and now they have swamped us.
“We now have children in our schools who don’t have the command of language or vocabulary you would have expected before the pandemic. Some of them are still in nappies. Some can’t even walk properly.”
IS THERE hope for improvements under the new Government? In 2019, the Commons Select Committee concluded that “unless there is a systemic cultural shift on the part of all parties involved, additional funding will make little difference to the outcomes and experiences of children and young people with SEND.”
Sadly, the question of WHERE ALL THESE CHILDREN ARE COMING FROM was never addressed.
Share your thoughts.
The British state have been following the same bone-headed formula for nearly four decades - doesn’t matter how bad it gets they parrot the same nonsense. As I pointed out to the government’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies in January 2019 the rates they were trying to explain away c.1999 are a tiny fraction of those at that time or those today:
“I fear we also need to return to the old data. In the 1999 schools’ mental health survey the PDD rate among secondary school children born between 1984 and 1988 was 1 in 500 compared with 1 in 250 in primary school [23], but by the 2004 survey when virtually all children in school were of the MMR generation the figure had risen to virtually 1 in 100 across the board [24]. Already in that period some of us were exercised over claims that any of this was at all normal but now if we look at what was written at the time we are still looking at relatively modest figures. For instance, Gillberg and Wing wrote in relation to the rising trend in 1999 [25]:
““The early studies yielded prevalence rates of under 0.5 in 1000 children, whereas the later ones showed a mean rate of about 1 in 1000. There was a marked difference in prevalence rates between those studies that included some children born before 1970 (low rates) and those that included only children born in 1970 and after (high rates). This is probably due to the lower rates obtained by use of criteria strictly based on Kanner's description of his syndrome.”
“Even Eric Fombonne in the same year was talking comparatively small numbers [26]:
“Over 4 million subjects were surveyed; 1533 subjects with autism were identified. The methodological characteristics of each study are summarized, including case definition, case-finding procedures, participation rates and precision achieved. Across surveys, the median prevalence estimate was 5.2/10000. Half the surveys had 95% confidence intervals consistent with population estimates of 5.4-5.5/10000…Based on recent surveys, a minimum estimate of 18.7/10000 for all forms of pervasive developmental disorders was derived, which outlines the needs in special services for a large group of children.”
“This was one of the papers that the DHSC sent to reassure me when I first expressed concern about the situation in Haringey in 2000. But this is a whole order of magnitude different from the current situation, while attempts to locate the missing numbers (as opposed to the occasional case) in a population now over the age of 30 have signally failed. In 2013, in contrast to National Autistic Society projections, of 700,000 cases across the entire population the DWP knew of only 129,000 who were likely preponderantly minors [27]. Brugha’s figure for adults in 2009 was extravagantly extrapolated, based on flawed diagnostic methodology and the hypothesis that they had somehow missed nearly 3/4s of the cases before weighting, and was downgraded by National Statistics to the status of “experimental statistics” in 2016 [28], while his 2014 data was published in 2016 as only “experimental statistics” [29]. The “they must be there somewhere” line has been playing for two decades without the cases ever being found. But if they were there, they would be a massively dependent and expensive population and they would not have to be looked for.”
https://www.ageofautism.com/2019/01/confirmation-bias-and-the-united-kingdom-department-of-health.html
Are they just covering up, or did they mean to do it? You tell me.