The Department for Education published the long-awaited Green Paper entitled Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability today, 9 March.
CSIE applauds the recognition in the Green Paper that a change to the current system is long overdue, as well as the honest acknowledgement that “parents say that the system is bureaucratic, bewildering and adversarial and that it does not sufficiently reflect the needs of their child and their family life.” However, CSIE is gravely concerned at the proposals that are being put forward.
CSIE welcomes the commitment to parental choice, but is concerned that no clear plans for affording a real choice to all parents are being put forward. If the full spectrum of provision is to become available to all parents to choose from, the capacity of mainstream schools to respond to the full diversity of learners has to increase.
In the process of presenting a commitment to parental choice, the Green Paper repeatedly states that the government intends to “remove the bias towards inclusion”. Many parents have told us of the many obstacles they have encountered in seeking a mainstream place for the child, so it is hard to justify the claim that such a bias exists. Furthermore, to speak of inclusion as though it only refers to school placement for some children, overlooks significant changes of the last decade and the fact that inclusive education nowadays is widely understood to relate to every child’s experience in school. It is as relevant to disability equality as it is to gender and ethnicity equality. By implying that inclusion is not a priority for the government, significant damage may be done as this could be seen as undermining the work of CSIE and other organisations that strive to support inclusive school development for the benefit of all children.
Alarmingly, the Green Paper takes us further back in time and seeks to re-introduce aspects of the Education Act 1996 that were repealed by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001. The Green Paper states that parents will be able to express a preference for any state-funded school and have their preference met, unless it would not meet the needs of the child, be incompatible with the efficient education of other children, or be an inefficient use of resources. Two of these three provisos had been repealed by SENDA 2001; all three seem entirely out of place in 21st century schools. With a strong emphasis on personalised learning, there is no need for tailor-made provision to take place in separate settings. The efficient education of all children is a matter of school organisation and in other parts of the world systems have been developed so that all children are well educated in ordinary local schools. The 2007 Audit Commission report “out of authority placements for special educational needs” clearly states that without accounting for transport costs, which typically come out of a different budget and are not combined with other expenditure, it is not possible to make informed judgements about the most cost-effective placement for any particular child.
