Bristol Send Crisis Is An Age Old Story In The City
Bristol Send Crisis: Send in the City – It’s Not All About The Cuts
Last week, media around the country ‘broke’ the story concerning a group of mums who took Bristol City Council to court over a £5m cut to the Special Education Needs and Disabilities (Send) budget – and won. But what parents in the city know is that this isn’t a breaking story.
It’s been a long slow burn over some years that only received national attention – with the exception of the BBC’s Jayne McCubbin – because the underdog won.
Facebook disability support pages, national parenting forums, teaching unions, Twitter accounts have told Send disability tales of crisis for some years.
Whilst education budgets have been slashed and disability services axed – Bristol parents are particularly mourning the loss of the Bristol Autism Team. They are no longer accessible without an EHCP which are incredibly hard to get in Bristol.
For us though, it has been the tireless peer support from other parents that has given children the chance to access education. From a personal point of view, it has been organisations such as Bristol Autism Support, Bristol Parent Carers, Supportive Parents, EHCP South West and the now no longer funded EHCP support service at Kids South West. These are the people, parents and groups at the coal face of Send in Bristol and are where we all go to get much needed help, advice and support when everything goes wrong.
As a parent myself, I applied for an EHC Needs assessment for one of my own children in 2016. Bristol City Council unfairly rejected it, but, what they didn’t actually do was write to me and tell me. It wasn’t until some months later that the school SendCo casually mentioned the rejection that I even found out. The date to appeal had passed and though I could probably have pushed it to tribunal, as a single parent working full time, it was near impossible to access the people who could help me do this.
Ultimately, I took my child out of the South Bristol junior school he was at. The school was fast building up a reputation locally for being the worse for Send support in the area. It was a school where I’d had meetings with the head teacher because other children in his class were trying to get him to look at Google images of ‘rape’ on iPads during sketching sessions. The use of the C word was prevalent. Playground violence was pretty brutal. Bad behaviour at the school was out of control and children were getting really hurt.
The school’s attitude to inclusion – as the SendCo reminded me to my face – was that everyone was treated exactly the same because that was fair. It didn’t matter the social circumstances, the disability, everyone was treated ‘equally’.
It didn’t seem very equal during this particular conversation. I had been explaining that my son’s homework wasn’t done because we were homeless, literally homeless. There was no where for him to do it, nothing for him to sit at, no light for him to use in the dark, no bed, no cooker, no hot water. But that didn’t make any difference because we were all equal. Thankfully, the Equality Act 2010 begs to differ, working from a point of equity rather than equality.
Although the SendCo in fairness did try to keep all staff aware of my son’s needs during the day, he was repeatedly threatened by the deputy head for using an OT recommended adaptation for his disability. And he was also given a detention for trying to stop another child from using his disability seating aid as a football. I printed out the Equality Act 2010, with relevant paragraphs highlighted and told my child to keep it in his bag should the deputy head object to disability aids again.
My child was one of three children with Aspergers in three consecutive years at the school with the same teachers. All three of the parents felt their child was being ‘forced’ out of the school due to their disability. It’s a common occurrence and other people with disabled children at schools in the area had similar reports.
Forcing a child with Send out of a school is done by wilful withdraw of any form of equity, empathy and even basic free adjustments. Free adjustments could include not putting a child with autism in the middle of a queue, placing them at front or the end instead of ‘setting them up to fail’ as another one of my friends puts it.
Giving detentions for stimming, becoming stressed or trying to remove themselves from situations their autism couldn’t cope was common place with one child.
It is tantamount to winding a disabled child up by using their disability against them so they can be permanently excluded.
It is the same result if the parents decide to change schools, or leave school education for education at home. Winding up a disabled child or putting them through situations so stressful fully knowing they cannot cope with it is a shocking thing to do, yet parents have little come-back on schools who do this. And schools continually get away with it. There is no viable way to hold them to accountability.
Schools often bleat about having no money to support children with Send. It’s true they don’t. But Send support doesn’t have to be expensive. It could be a visual timetable, some PECs cards photocopied. Basic Makaton can be learned from CBeebies. Letting a dysgraphic child use a handwriting pen instead of a pencil. A table set to the side as a work station. It could be letting a child go to the front of the queue, or the back. Not sitting a sound and touch sensitive child next to the one who rocks and hums. None of these simple starters costs any money.
Children with autism don’t always respond well to changes or surprises. Cancelling the school’s autism support group but not actually telling the autistic children until they arrive near the end of the afternoon is not best practice. A free way of avoiding all the children ‘kicking off’ would have been to warn them in advance. That doesn’t cost a penny either.
And, while we’re at it. Children who do rock on their chairs are more likely doing so as a sensory processing behaviour or calming and organising mechanism rather than being naughty. Even children without a diagnosis can benefit from some movement to help them concentrate.
And, one thing that does make me really annoyed is stopping children with conditions such as autism, AD/HD, dyslexia or sensory processing disorder from having a break time. Keeping children in because of some arbitrary rule they have broken, probably connected to their disability, neither helps them modify their behaviour or does teaching staff any favours for the rest of the day.
Being on friendly terms with one of the other parents at my son’s previous school, I shared her concerns about safety, about the fact that her child’s funded 1-1 was removed to cover Sats, leaving him with nothing until she became ‘difficult’. I was worried about the amount of self harm children with disabilities in the school were doing. I put my own child’s school refusal down to his difficulties and saw them as something that naturally went with autism and education.
I really shouldn’t have done. The fact that my child was climbing out of windows to run away should have caused louder alarm bells. That the head teacher and teaching assistant was having to spend twenty minutes wrestling him on the dining hall floor to keep him in the building, or the fact that after I had dropped him at breakfast club he was following me straight out should have warned me this was a bigger problem than just autism.
I had previously been a parent governor at the school but resigned because I felt that not enough was being done to address bullying. Looking back now, I realise I should have moved my child out of the school for his own safety and not waited for the final moment he was stabbed in the head with a pencil during a PE lesson that wasn’t being supervised.
The three photographs below were from three separate incidents. The photograph in the swimming pool was when my child began to smash his head repeatedly into the building’s window because the noise was too loud for a person with sound sensory processing difficulties to cope.
If your child has a mountain of reports from professionals, including OT regarding sound and noise, and an in-depth IEP, this kind of incident is easily avoided. I’d had to cut back on work because of receiving too many calls from school to deal with problems and it made me unreliable. This gave me a chance to come along to the school’s swimming gala.
I was horrified to watch my child sat alone smashing his head over and over again on the window. He couldn’t cope with the noise. It was hot, incredibly loud and very overwhelming. It was everything a child with Aspergers should not have been subjected to without some basic adjustments – even a reminder that he would need his ear defenders. Send children are included on any school trip risk assessment. This just shouldn’t have happened. According to his account later, an adult had even told him off for not joining in the shouting and cheering.
I hunted down the head teacher and insisted he intervened and did something about it.
Having decided after this and the stabbing incident that it was time to change schools, did the head teacher learn anything from this? No, he simply said he would authorise absence instead. I suppose that’s easier than actually putting any Send support in though. Strange how head teachers are allowed to authorise absence for children with Send when it suits them.
It may well be possible to identify the school from what I’ve written here, so it’s worth saying that there were two teaching assistants who worked with my child whilst he was at the school who were wonderful.
I often feel that teaching assistants are the unsung heroes of education in schools. Their role includes everything from running interventions, mending shoes, teaching, having an in-depth knowledge of varying disabilities, battling with photocopiers whilst breaking up fights, catching flying chairs and offering a listening ear to some quite difficult situations children deal with. The hardest thing of all is getting displays symmetrical.
Bristol City Council’s response to the High Court Judicial Review was disappointment.
“We are disappointed by the court’s decision and will carefully consider the detail of the judgement and what implications it has before making a decision about what to do next,” Councillor Craig Cheney, Deputy Mayor with responsibility for Finance said.
“We truly appreciate how sensitive this issue is, and know it is difficult to contemplate changing budgets without causing concern. We want to stand united with local families and schools in highlighting the national funding shortage for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and work together with them on a way forward. It always was and remains our intention to work closely with everyone affected wherever required, considering carefully the details of how we might reduce spending and deliver SEND services within the grant given by Government.”
Bristol City Council say that they ‘do not get enough money from Government’ causing ‘large pressure’ on their Send budget. They also say that there is an ‘increasing demand and complexity’ of children in the city.
But what we have noticed at Chopsy Bristol, from our own personal experience of Send in the City, is that it is not all about the money. It is about the attitude. It is about allowing children with disabilities to have access to education. That is a basic right and so often being denied.
After removing my child from the disaster of a school in South Bristol, I put him in a tiny school in another part of the city. It is school so small it is under subscribed yet still has a single form entry. I’m not going to lie, I was thrilled with its private school sized classes and has been a huge benefit to my dyslexic daughter.
It’s fair to say we had a few Send related ups and downs during the last 18 months of my son’s primary school education. I don’t think head teachers and me will ever quite see eye-to-eye. I feel this actually stems from my belief that jobs should be done properly and as I once told him, slap dash is just not good enough.
But, what made all the difference was the attitude of his Year 6 class teacher. In what is arguably the most stressful year of primary school, we managed to get through Sats completely unscathed. Not once did the school lose him, not once did he climb out of a window. There was never any undignified wrestling on the playground floor by school staff to keep him in the building. He didn’t self harm in class, try to put his head through a window or come home after being stabbed. He wasn’t repeatedly bullied, made to look at porn or called the C word.
He did manage to go to every class assembly, take part in every PE lesson and take on one of the largest parts in the school’s Year 6 Shakespeare play. His class teacher was an absolute hero to help him achieve all of this. Sadly, despite making a huge amount of progress in one academic year, despite being a smart child and through no fault of his school, he still lags behind due to the huge amount of damage inflicted on his education and self confidence by his previous infant and junior school.
I’ve never written anything so publicly about my child’s difficulties accessing education before. I think it’s his right to have anonymity with such things and I have glazed over many of the Send issues because of this.
But what I also think is really important is that the Send crisis in Bristol that has been highlighted by the media in the last two weeks is only the tip of the iceberg. The damage it has caused children in Bristol will follow them through their education for years to come.
Whilst the crisis continues, there are teachers and support staff in the quagmire who do make sure that children with disabilities are supported. They are wonderful and probably don’t get enough credit for what they do. We only hear the horror stories.
I’ve submitted a request to Bristol City Council this week for an EHC Assessment of Need for my younger daughter. This time, I won’t let it go so easily.
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