Even our dear leader, founder of this excellent website, is wrong sometimes. In his latest Spectator column, Toby Young raises the redundancies that will inevitably hit SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) staff as a result of Labour’s education policies. Putting aside the overall idiocy of Labour’s education policies, Toby Young is incorrect in seeing a reduction in SEND staff and support as a bad thing.
I realise I am entering dangerous waters here, and usually bow down in admiration to Lord Young of Acton’s opinions, but here I beg to contradict him. After working around education and supporting children with SEND since 2020 I have come to the conclusion that the whole SEND set-up is a job creation scheme for middle-aged women. I would go further and suggest that the army of middle-aged women do little to improve the educational outcomes of the children involved, and even worse, give so-called SEND children the idea they are biologically incapacitated for life. The entire system needs a review [caveat none of this applies to any of the severe mental and physically disabled children who require specialised care and education – just the children who have been diagnosed with amorphous conditions whose only symptoms seem to be an inability to concentrate or being a bit socially awkward].
Two examples of my contention that the SEND apparatus is a job creation scheme: I was supporting a student at a higher education college on Tuesday and counted five SEND support staff in a room of 10 students in their Functional Skills English lesson – all of the support staff are middle-aged women. All of the students had gone through the education system from 5-16 and failed their English GCSE – any educational gains made would be marginal in the extreme. They will all leave soon to work in useful manual labour roles. Incidentally, all the children in the class are allowed to use their phones and wear earpods /headphones because they have various issues which means they are allowed to listen to music or white noise to help them concentrate. They play games on their phones or call their friends; the five middle-aged women only intervene if the students start picking up furniture to lob around.
The second: later in the week I attended an annual review for another student which was attended by five middle-aged women and two younger women. These were: his one-to-one support, his college wellbeing officer, the college’s SEND lead, another women from the college whose job was unclear, his social worker, a woman from an alternative education provision and a woman from the council. The student in question is an adult and would be better served, both for his own good and for the good of the nation’s finances, by leaving education and working or joining the armed forces. Here I agree with Scottish Tory leader (and Ed West) who suggests that children could leave school at 14 to do an apprenticeship – I would add an option for them to return to education for free at a later more productive stage of adulthood. (Interestingly, Michael Young, Toby’s father, made a similar argument.)
Two examples of my contention that the SEND apparatus does little to improve the educational outcomes of the children involved: Roger Gough, Children’s Services Spokesperson for the County Councils Network was quoted in a Telegraph article about the possibility of SEND spending bankrupting county councils saying: “Our research has shown that educational outcomes have not improved despite spend skyrocketing and children’s needs becoming more recognised.” This is an extraordinary statement that should have shocked and appalled all readers and anyone involved in education. I recently attended a primary school show and watched this play out before my eyes. Three SEND support staff were mixed in with the students handing out fidget toys to various children who had been diagnosed with a SEND condition. Similarly, there is a child in my son’s year five class who “does not like the scratch of pens on paper” because he has been diagnosed with SPD (sensory processing disorder) and has a middle-aged women sitting with him in lessons scribing for him. The rest of the class are outraged, because some of them would also like not to bother with writing. What purpose does this serve beyond giving employment to one of the approximately 282,900 fulltime teaching assistants in England (an increase of 28% since 2011-12)? Has there been a commensurate 28% improvement in educational outcomes? Is there are national scheme that evaluates the effectiveness of SEND staff and if not why not?
An example of the contention that diagnosing children with a baggy SEND label without the use of biomarkers or brain scans, only behaviour – often described by the parents – catastrophically limits the child’s perception of themselves: a girl I worked with on Monday told me: “I don’t socialise with other children because I’m autistic and won’t be able to cope.” Direct quote. She is 12, does not attend school, has no friends and also no perceptible signs of autism.
I have written in the Critic about how deeply embedded our ideas of SEND are, and how difficult it will be to unpick the industry. Yet even the New York Times is coming round to the idea of over-diagnosis and misplaced ‘treatments’. A wholesale review of SEND education is urgently required, both for the sake of the nation’s finances, but more importantly for the sake of the children who are burdened with the idea there is something (beyond the ordinary markers of childhood) wrong with them. What these struggling children actually need is a stable home, interests and hobbies beyond scrolling or gaming, a sense of purpose, lots of fresh air and friends. To enable this, all sorts of difficult answers are needed that will include: a massive reduction in the children’s use of screens, more support for parents to care for their own children when they are young, more youth clubs and better discipline in schools. More SEND support staff, myself included, are not required.
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym
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