SEND help?

On 24th February, Sheffield Council was informed that the education regulator Ofsted and the health and social care regulator CQC were about to jointly inspect the local provision for children with special educational needs (SEND). “We have yet to receive the report,” reads a report that officers presented to councillors last week, “but will update you as and when we receive it.” 

According to insiders in the know — like a duck gliding calmly on the surface but paddling frantically below water — this simple sentence belies the true drama behind the scenes. “All hell broke loose” within the council, one source alleges, after it became clear that the local provision was going to be “hammered” in the incoming report. “It hasn’t been released yet but we know it was damning,” they claim. More than one member of staff has gone on long-term sick leave and there is reportedly talk of moving the entire SEND department from education to social care in an effort to shake things up.

The inherent bind, I’m told, of working in the council’s department for special educational needs (SEND) is that you can never, ever win. “Sometimes you hack off schools by placing a child there when the school has said they can’t accommodate them,” a former employee tells me. “But, equally, sometimes you hack off parents by not placing them there.” Another former employee claims that, in the decade she spent working at the council, she saw seven heads of SEND come and go. “It’s such a high-pressure job,” she says, “having that much responsibility just takes its toll.” Among more junior employees, the rate at which people are signed off work due to stress is shockingly high. “I think I went off long-term three times because of work stress,” says a former employee.

Like everyone I speak to, they’ve already heard the rumours that the impending report on the city’s SEND provision is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. What frustrates them is the feeling that it didn’t need to be this way. While they acknowledge that working in SEND sometimes feels like a thankless and impossible task — an uphill battle against financial constraints, profiteering private providers and a decisive shift in how both teachers and parents think — they also all insist that things were starting to get better in Sheffield, slowly but surely, until something shifted two years ago, although people have a number of theories as to why. 

Since then, external consultants have been brought in on three separate occasions to improve the way the department works and, the former staff allege, had little tangible impact. “They came in and spoke to us all and then nothing came of it,” one claims. “We would never see them again.”

One former employee is keen to make clear that she still believes “deep down, despite everything” that her managers “care about the families and children of this city,” but alleges the working environment did not feel particularly caring or compassionate. “If you strayed from the party line in the way you were thinking and working, that was not ok,” she claims — a criticism also made by other former staff — adding that “there was not a healthy environment in which management could be challenged”. Another says she hopes the impending report acts as a much-need wake up call for the council. “Maybe they need a shake-up so they consider taking on experienced members of staff, rather than friends, family and people they know from school.” 

A spokesperson for Sheffield Council said it could not discuss the report until it was in the public domain, but was keen to stress that the report doesn’t just focus on their activities. Supporting children with special needs is a job shared across a network that includes NHS bodies like Sheffield Children’s Hospital and peer groups like the Parent Carer Forum. The spokesperson added that this network works closely to make Sheffield a place where children “feel they belong in education close to home” and “are valued and visible in their local community,” whether they have special needs or not. “However, we recognise there is still a lot of progress to be made. As a partnership, we are working at pace to make further improvement in this area.” Regarding the concerns of former staff, they added that the council would not comment on “individual cases, personnel matters or anonymous allegations”. 

Until that vital progress is made, however, the situation for both local children and the council is far from ideal. Last year, councillors heard that 900 families are now homeschooling their children — in many cases not out of preference. One 56-year-old father says his 14-year-old autistic son has not attended his mainstream school since last December, after he began struggling so profoundly that he started to self-harm. “The council went to 11 schools in Sheffield to find out if any of them could meet his needs and they’ve all come back saying they can’t,” he claims. Until the council arranges something else, his son is “sort of stuck in no man’s land”. 

What frustrates him most is that he believes he knows exactly what kind of support would work best for his son — at-home tutors — and is aware that the council has a contract with a tutoring company who could provide this. “The mechanism is there,” he says, “but they don’t seem to be wanting to do it.” He reckons he knows why. “I don’t think they’re looking at it from the kid’s point of view,” he says bitterly, “I think they’re looking at the balance sheet.” 

A former council employee admits there has been a move within the council to reduce the number of people receiving “education other than at setting” (EOTAS) packages, like the tutors this father describes, since they can be extremely expensive. “That’s not to say that’s not right obviously,” she adds, “you have to manage the budget.” 

As things stand now, the budget is looking extremely unmanageable. This financial year, Sheffield Council is predicting a deficit of £11.8 million in its ring-fenced pot of funding for special needs education. Far more worryingly, “for the first time” the council predicts that the Dedicated Schools Grant it receives from the government to support local schools and nurseries will simply not be enough. According to a report from February this year, this is largely “due to the sustained rise in demand for SEND support, EHCPs, and exclusions.”

In such a climate, it seems inevitable to parents that the council would try to pinch pennies wherever it can, even if their child suffers as a result. (Proposed changes to how the council helps special needs children get to school, for example, sparked outrage and alarm earlier this year.) A parent advocate speaks scornfully of the council’s drive “to shoehorn most children into a mainstream school because it’s a cheaper option,” which she alleges has left some local children “trying to die by suicide”. She also claims that, in a meeting with a former high-ranking member of the council’s SEND staff, she was told that “only the most vegetative children” should attend special schools — a claim the council chose not to respond to.

Though this alleged remark was poorly worded, it does somewhat describe the view of some council staff on the “philosophical question” of how to best educate special needs children. “I would argue that, unless the needs are very high, you should stay in mainstream school,” a recent staff member says. “As a society, we need to move towards being more inclusive and I do think we are moving backwards to be honest.”

Only a few decades ago, an educational psychologist claims, this approach would have been hugely popular with parents. “Twenty or thirty years ago, there was a whole movement about children’s right to be educated in their local mainstream school,” she says (and, as the mother of a very disabled son, she was a part of that push). “Now, people talk about children’s right to go to more specialist provision. But we can’t send every child with special needs to a specialist school and I personally don’t think we should.”

She believes parents’ views have changed so dramatically because mainstream schools have changed. “There’s considerable pressure on schools to be sort of zero tolerance and inflexible,” she says. “There has been something of a shift, particularly in secondary schools, towards things like silent corridors and the idea that students must conform in particular ways.” In Sheffield, the most stark example would be Mercia School — sometimes described as the strictest school in Britain — and the other schools that make up the Mercia Learning Trust.

The Tribune has reported before on the city’s “Marmite school,” which some parents deride as an “exam factory”, while others insist it has been wonderful for their children. More recently, parents of other Mercia schools have expressed alarm that these connected institutions, once far more conventional in their approach, have started to resemble mini-Mercias. (On Monday this week, around 300 parents and children protested outside Newfield School, outraged at plans to cut back on arts subjects next academic year in order to free up more time for core subjects like Maths and English.) 

According to 31-year-old mum Charlotte Glaves, a similar shift has taken place at the trust’s Woodlands Primary School, abruptly changing it from a place where her eight-year-old autistic daughter was “thriving” into a school she is no longer happy to attend. “Shoes are a big issue for my daughter and [the former headteacher] said shoes don’t matter inside,” she says. However, when a new headteacher took over last September, he brought with him a newfound emphasis on proper behaviour. “At the back of the assembly hall, there’s now a board that says things like ‘I must make eye contact with adults when they speak to me’,” she alleges, something her daughter finds very challenging. “Like a switch overnight,” a number of challenging behaviours that her daughter hadn’t engaged in for over a year, such as making herself sick on purpose, began to re-emerge. “I remember being at school 20 years ago and there was a massive difference,” Charlotte remarks. “It was not as structured or regimented. The level of expectation on these children now is mad.” 

But in the opinion of the educational psychologist, the fact that more and more children are attending specialist schools is not purely down to an ideological shift. The overall reduction in funding for mainstream schools means they can't afford to accommodate special needs without securing extra money from the council, something they can only do by getting each individual child an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) — the legal document that outlines the support a child with special needs must receive. “So people have to go for that option, which means multiple, multiple, multiple individual plans in every school, which is not really feasible for them to implement,” she says. “It also means the local authority has to carry out multiple assessments and every assessment is extremely expensive and complicated.” As a result, up and down the country, “SEND education is spiraling out of control”. 

So what can be done? If I’d asked her five years ago, she says sadly, she might have had an answer on how to fix the problems in special needs education — now she’s not so sure. “But someone needs to look more creatively at the whole special needs system.” As reported in the Guardian earlier this year, ministers are contemplating radical reform, although one of the proposed changes — getting rid of EHCPs — has only served to alarm parents who view it as the only way to secure help for their child. 

Other former Sheffield staff, however, insist the national context is only part of the picture. After all, only two years ago, things seemed to be getting better, slowly but surely. Following the last damning Ofsted/CQC inspection in 2018, one tells me, there was a flurry of changes within the department that did start to turn things around. “You could see the difference,” she claims. The regulators, who reinspected Sheffield’s SEND provision in 2022, saw it too, noting that “sufficient progress” had been made on six of the seven areas of weakness they had previously identified. (The only area where there was still a lot of work to go, the report noted, was how children with special needs were transitioned to services for older children and adults once they turned 16 and 18 respectively.)

Now, to the evident frustration of a number of people familiar with the matter, standards seem to be slipping once more. “At the end of the day, if there’s a problem with the culture then you don’t retain staff,” one says, when asked what she believes the problem might be. “That means there’s never enough staff because, by the time you train someone new, another three people have left.” Another says she hopes the impending report will be a much-needed shot in the arm. “Last time, when we had the damning report, it made the council open their eyes,” she says. “It made the council realise things were not going right, which is not a bad thing.”

Get in touch at victoria@sheffieldtribune.co.uk if you know more about SEND provision in Sheffield.