S11 Ep6: How can we fix the special needs system in England’s schools? with Alice Reeves

Yeah.

So, um, I think there are sort of two categories that-- of, of driver apart from the, the funding situation.

One of those is increasing recognition of neurodiverse conditions such as autism and ADHD, which really the evidence shows is previous under-diagnosis.

So in the past, for example, we weren't very good at recognizing autism in girls because all of the medical research had focused on boys, and it can present very differently in girls, and they tend to be better at masking their discomfort and their needs.

So some of this is to do with clinical understanding advancing, and so people getting diagnoses who would have in the past probably just struggled at school and maybe not had great outcomes, not great exam results, maybe found it difficult to make friends, but wouldn't have been noticed as having a SEND and given any support sort of to deal with that.

So that's the first category.

And then the second category is, I think, you know, types of need that have genuinely been just rising for different reasons.

So s- one of them is quite positive, actually.

Advances in neonatal care have meant that babies who are born very prematurely or with complex health conditions are surviving into childhood who previously wouldn't have, and that's bringing needs into the system and often into the special school system.

Others are Sort of more concerning really.

We know there's been a mental health crisis, particularly amongst adolescents.

The latest figures from NHS England show that the proportion of young people with a probable mental disorder went up from about one in eight in twenty seventeen to about one in five in twenty twenty-three.

And obviously, there's been lots of debate about that, around the causes of that, the role played by social media and other factors.

And then people working with young children have also reported that they're seeing, um, declining levels of school readiness, children's development being delayed, coming into school with speech and language difficulties, sometimes problems with emotional regulation and that kind of thing.

COVID obviously played a part in that and in the mental health crisis, and there are other factors like defunding of Sure Start, which gave vital support to young children to help identify special needs early and stop them from escalating.

And also, the cost of living crisis probably plays a part because it affects parenting practices.

It may mean parents are less engaged with talking to their children because they're working very hard and very stretched.

So that's a whole category of needs-

Right.

That have been on the rise-

Right.

As well.

Right.

The other thing I would say is I think it's really important to remember that SEND is an extremely broad category.

People tend to sort of know people who have SEND and focus on the types of SEND that they have, but it covers everything from learning difficulties, social communication difficulties, speech and language, social, emotional, and mental health, as well as the neurodiverse conditions, and it also covers sensory difficulties, so anything associated with hearing and vision and physical disabilities.