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Education : Scandal of secret school exclusions
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Posted by sylvia on Monday, March 27, 2006 (11:13:42)
The Guardian
By Amelia Hill
Confidential letter reveals that local education authorities are deliberately breaking the law to avoid paying for special needs children
Up to 20,000 of the most vulnerable children are being excluded from school every day. The reason? Local education authorities are trying to save money, it is claimed.
The Observer has seen a confidential letter by Ian Coates, head of the special educational needs and disability division at the Department for Education and Skills, admitting that authorities are guilty of deliberate breaches of the law. After hearing of the letter, John Wright, of the Independent Panel For Special Educational Needs (Ipsea), said: 'It is very expensive for LEAs to provide special needs children with the support they need to take part in mainstream schooling, so they try to get out of supplying it in a variety of ways.
'When these children don't get the classroom support they need, their behaviour can become too disruptive and the children end up being sent home,' said Wright, who helped more than 3,000 parents to complain against special needs decisions by local authorities last year.
If a council considers a child to have special educational needs that cannot be met by their school, it has a legal obligation to assess that pupil and give them a Statement of Educational Need. This must define the type and frequency of help to be provided.
The Observer, however, has uncovered a number of loopholes. The most common is for the authority to produce statements that do not specify the care each child should receive from their school.
This is a tactic Coates admits in his letter is common: 'In some cases, authorities ... leave provision open to the school to determine ... without specifying the [specific] provision [necessary] to meet children's individual needs.'
Other councils introduce blanket definitions of special needs categories, such as one authority now being investigated for refusing to use the term 'dyslexic' for pupils unless their reading, writing and spelling are all five years below their chronological age.
Some are refusing to assess children at all. According to Chris Gravell, from the independent charity the Advisory Centre for Education, 36,200 children among its members were refused statements in 1998, against 26,000 in 2004.
Coates writes in the leaked letter, sent to all chief education officers and directors of children's services in England and Wales two weeks ago: 'Having a policy that assessments will not be undertaken for particular groups of children or certain types of needs, in our view constitutes a blanket policy that prevents the consideration of children's needs individually and on their merits.'
The Observer has discovered that children with statements of special educational need are nine times more likely to be excluded than those without. Pupils as young as five are regularly sent home for up to 45 days at a time.
The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee is investigating provision for children with special needs in schools, focusing on whether they should be taught in mainstream or in special schools.
But it has so far failed to address the scandal of exclusions affecting tens of thousands of children a year, a number that Ipsea says has exploded in the last five years and is continuing to increase.
Recent figures show two thirds of permanent exclusions involve children with special needs. Information gathered by Ipsea reveals that, while exclusions of pupils without special needs have fallen by 579 in the past year, exclusions of those with special needs have risen by 334, or 6 per cent.
There has been a sharp rise in parents' appeals against LEA decisions; from 30 per cent of all appeals in 1997-98 to over 40 per cent in 2002-03.
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Education : Special-needs education: Does mainstream inclusion work?
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (12:20:09)
The Independent
By Hilary Wilce
Labour wants children with learning difficulties to attend mainstream schools. But critics say that the policy of inclusion isn't working.
David Cameron has a disabled son, and speaks up about it. Tony Blair was angrily confronted recently by Maria Hutchins, the mother of an autistic child. Baroness Warnock has been beating her breast about getting the policy wrong on special-needs education. Never have the needs of children with physical and learning difficulties been so much in the political spotlight.
All parties made a commitment to improving services to such children in their general election manifestos; the Conservatives have set up a commission on special educational needs; and the Commons education select committee is sinking under record piles of paperwork as it conducts a wide-ranging enquiry into the future of special-needs education.
But whether anything productive will come of it all remains doubtful. Observers say that problems with the current system are deeply entrenched, and they fear that more will be thrown up by the Government's plan to establish independent secondary schools that will be able to select their own pupils.
Meanwhile, "special needs" remains a vast umbrella, under which huddle all kinds of children, from the primary-school pupil with a mild hearing problem, to profoundly autistic adolescents and children with complex physical disabilities. "Special needs is just an administrative category," says Alan Dyson, professor of education at Manchester University, who has a specialist interest in the area. "The only thing these kids have in common is that they've been labelled special needs."
The groups fighting for their interests are equally disparate. Parents of children with difficulties are desperate for their own particular child to be safe and happy in school. Every disability group fights its own corner, while broader lobby groups tend to adopt strongly ideological positions about how society should treat difference.
This shows most strongly in the arguments about inclusion. Labour is committed to a policy of including as many children as possible in mainstream schools, and 93 special schools have closed down since l997. This is broadly in line with policies embraced throughout the Western world. But many of those children have been inadequately provided for, and as a result the pendulum has swung back towards demands for more special-school provision.
Last summer, Baroness Warnock, whose report in 1978 started the bandwagon for inclusion, said the policy had backfired, leaving "a disastrous legacy", and the Conservatives have called on the select committee to look into "the bias against allowing parents to choose special schools".
But Richard Reiser, the director of Disability Equality in Education, is dismissive of the way the select committee's enquiry has been launched in response to the Warnock U-turn. "This isn't even an issue any more. The question is not whether to include children, but how to do it effectively. You need inclusions, not placements, and for that you need more resources, more training and a mandatory code of admissions.
"Disadvantaged children should be given priority above all others. That would be the way to change the skew we have now. And there should be a limit on the use of special schools in any area. Some areas use them 10 times more than others," Reiser says.
Sir Bob Balchin, chair of the Tory enquiry into special education, disagrees. "The ideology of inclusion ought to be consigned to history. We need to look at the whole thing in a more pragmatic light. Some people gain enormously from having their needs met in a specialised environment." A forthcoming report from the enquiry team, he says, is likely to suggest a moratorium on the closure of special-school places. "Although that is not to say that every special school is sacrosanct. We need to put the individual before doctrine."
For Brian Lamb, who chairs the Special Educational Needs Consortium, the issue is how to make the best use of all resources. "We basically back the Government's presumption towards the mainstream. It is the direction everything has been moving in.
"What we want to see is more resources going into special education and a closer inter-relationship between special schools and mainstream schools, with more use of specialist expertise, and maybe regional specialist resources." Inclusion, done properly, is expensive, Lamb agrees, "But special schools are expensive, too. The more we can get the two worlds together, the better."
Peter Farrell, professor of special needs at Manchester University, sees the Government jumping in response to a strong parents' lobby that says inclusion doesn't work. "But there have been a lot of myths about how special schools are very special, with more one-to-one and so on, with not a lot of evidence that that is the case. What there is evidence of is that if children with special needs mix with others, it helps to make people in society more accepting of difference."
A second thorny issue is whether to reform the way children's special needs are identified and supported. Everyone agrees that the system of statementing, and the appeal system that backs it up, are bureaucratic, time-consuming and geographically inequitable. Both systems tend to favour articulate parents who know their rights.
There are also deep concerns that some local authorities are making statements deliberately vague, in order to evade having to pay for specialist provision.
The Conservatives want to replace statements with a simplified profile system, which will assign a child one of 12 levels of additional provision, and allow parents to take that money to whichever school they deem right for their child. "We need to look again at the whole process," says Sir Bob Balchin. "At the moment it is far too adversarial. In our view, it ought to be taken out of the hands of local education authorities who are both the assessors and providers."
But many lobby groups see the system as important for protecting a child's rights and want to reform it, not scrap it. The Advisory Centre on Education, which advises 6,000 parents a year about their rights, told the select committee: "Problems with the system arise from maladministration of the system rather than the system itself, which we believe was ahead of its time."
"The select committee is wrestling with a whole lot of deep-seated issues," says Alan Dyson, pointing out that the system of providing for children with special needs has remained fundamentally unchanged since the mid-1970s. "The Government's main priority since then has been not to turn over too many stones. There aren't any votes in reforming special education, after all. But what we have now is an education system with different structures, targets, curriculum, everything. We have to fundamentally rethink what we mean by special education, and I would hope the committee would come out at the end and say that fiddling with the system is no longer an adequate response.
"In an ideal world, special education would not be a distinct system at all, but just part of an education system that gives due consideration to all sorts of kids, with all sorts of difficulties, in all sorts of schools."
But this looks unlikely to come about. "The Education Bill is talking about more schools getting more autonomy," Dyson says. "The local authorities will be left with the responsibility for special needs provision, but they will have no power and no resources. It is, potentially, an absolutely unmanageable system."
The best of both worlds?
Peter Gordon runs Hazel Court school, a special school in Eastbourne for children with severe learning difficulties - 70 per cent of pupils are autistic - on the same site as a mainstream school. He also runs a further education unit for 16- to 19-year-olds alongside a local FE college.
He believes his students get the best of both worlds. "We've got specialised staff and superb facilities here. We've got a hydrotherapy pool and a soft play area, but we've also got access to two dining halls, an assembly hall, sports facilities and the library in the mainstream school.
"Half our children go to some lessons in the mainstream school, and loads of their youngsters come over to us every day to help with classes. They look at what our children achieve, and learn to have respect for them. This is quite a deprived part of Eastbourne, but we've never had one incident of bullying. We share the same uniform and we join in on school trips.
"There is a strong argument for having children with moderate difficulties in mainstream schools, but the curriculum needs to be totally different for children with severe difficulties. I've seen children stuck in a classroom, isolated, where staff have no support and can't call in a psychologist or language therapist. It's heart-breaking. You do need specialised provision, but co-location is definitely the best way to do it."
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Education : An autistic boy's fight against exclusion
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (12:12:42)
The Independent
By Hilary Wilce
William Speed's school has excluded him for his difficult behaviour. But his parents say the autistic teenager needs to stay put. It's a case that tests the rights of Britain's special needs children.
William Speed is a large, 15-year-old, severely autistic boy who lashes out when troubled. Both his school and his parents agree that his behaviour is difficult and needs careful handling, but that is all they agree on. After years of dispute, the school has turfed William out, and his parents are taking it to court.
The school says William now needs to go to a residential special school. As a day special school it does not have the resources to cope with him. But his parents believe that moving him from home will make his behaviour deteriorate further. They want him to return to the school he has attended since he was four, and to be given the resources and support to which he is entitled - but which, they say, have not been forthcoming for years.
"For example," says his father, Mark Speed, a solicitor, "he's never had the intensive speech and language therapy he should have had. He needs as much as he can possibly get. There are 12 weeks in a term, but he has only had about five weeks of it in a typical term. Of course, there are problems with resources, but either a child has a legal right to provision or not."
He is now pursuing a judicial review of the school's action, seeking an order that his son be reinstated immediately, and is also pursuing a negligence claim against the head and the governing body which includes claims under the European Convention on Human Rights.
This is a complicated, lengthy, acrimonious and individual saga, but many parents of children with special needs will recognise its basic elements because, while the current system of special-needs provision gives strong legal rights to children who have a statement of special educational need (the "passport" to getting tailored help and resources), these very often don't translate into practical support.
Thousands of parents struggle either to get their child such a statement, to get that statement amended when necessary, or to get local authorities to cough up the help that the statement entitles their child to. And for disadvantaged parents especially, the maze of forms, assessments and tribunal hearings that they have to fight through to secure their children's rights can be overwhelming.
Roger Inman, chief executive of the Independent Panel for Special Education Advice, a charity that provides advice and advocacy to up to 4,000 families a year, says that there are a number of aspects of the Speed case that will ring bells with other parents.
Research shows that exclusions from special schools, for example, are as frequent as from mainstream schools, and there are widespread concerns about local authorities that "frustrate the system" by not delivering special education resources.
In William's case, life at Whitefield Schools and Centre in Waltham Forest, east London, which is the country's largest special school, went more or less smoothly through the primary school years, but then went downhill as he transferred to secondary.
In autumn 2001 he was permanently excluded from school because of his disruptive behaviour but reinstated when his parents lodged an appeal. After that, he was educated in isolation and - so his parents allege - without such things as the swimming sessions and music therapy to which he was entitled and which, they say, he needs to calm him and improve his behaviour.
In 2002 they fought successfully to get his statement amended by appealing to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, and then continued to protest about what they saw as continuing problems with his education. By 2004 the school was recommending residential education for William, saying that it did not have the resources to cope with him. Then, last summer, it wrote to the Speeds saying it was no longer able to meet William's educational needs.
Since then, his mother, Ann, has had him at home full-time - not easy when she has two other children with medical problems, has had cancer, and is recently separated - but resists the pressure to send him to a school far away.
"It would devastate him, me and the rest of the family. Here he lives on a normal street, he lives with people who love him and whom he can trust.
"He's not being treated like a human being. People want to shove him away in a dark corner in the country and forget him. I believe they're behaving in an illegal and immoral way to suit their own purposes."
Mark Speed believes that their relentless fight for William's rights, along with the legal help he has given to other parents at Whitefield, has served to entrench the situation. "They just want us off their backs. I know the school has had children at least as bad as William, if not worse.
"When they excluded him, he was clashing with another lad, but it was that other lad who broke a teacher's nose, not William."
Both he and his wife also feel the school seems keen to get rid of disruptive pupils as they get older and more difficult to handle. "I believe that the school isn't acting in the best interests of its pupils," says Mark Speed. "I believe it's let William down badly, and let the family down, too. So many kids like him get passed from pillar to post."
Neither the education authority nor the school was willing to comment on the case because of legal proceedings. Neils Chapman, head of the school, said: "The school has always acted in the child's best interest and in accordance with all the relevant regulations and guidance."
Meanwhile, Roger Inman points out that proposed changes to the education system set out in the Government's White Paper are likely to make life even more difficult for special-needs pupils. The changes will encourage the privatisation of schools and give them greater powers to set their own admissions policies.
"At present, the local education authority determines provision as well as pays for it. Now the White Paper says that they are no longer going to be the purseholders. But they will still be tasked with the special education needs role," says Inman. So how effectively, he wonders, are authorities going to be able to place children in schools, when schools, in turn, will be free to turn away any children they don't want?
"It is quite unclear what will happen to children like that. There are the most enormous concerns."
Special needs: facts and figures
Fifteen per cent of children in England, about 1.25 million, have special educational needs (SEN), which means they have a "significantly greater degree of difficulty in learning than the majority of their age in local mainstream schools" and need "additional or different" help. Just under 3 per cent of those, about 243,000, have "statements" of severe special needs.
About 93,000 pupils are educated in special schools, and about one in 10 of these children is autistic. Two thirds of special-school pupils are boys, and a third come from the kind of disadvantaged background that means they are eligible for free school meals - twice as many as in mainstream schools.
About 300 pupils a year are permanently excluded from special schools, roughly the same proportion as are expelled from mainstream schools, although pupils with special needs are about nine times more likely to be excluded from school.
Government policy is to include as many SEN pupils as possible in mainstream schools and 66 per cent of pupils now being given statements stay in such schools. But schools say they lack money and resources to deal with them, and pressure on exam results means many are reluctant to take statemented pupils.
Parents are finding it harder to get children statemented, especially in some areas - provision for special needs varies widely. The Government aims to improve SEN services by encouraging mainstream and special schools to work more closely together, and by fostering partnerships between education, health, social services and voluntary organisations.
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Education : NGO pushes for inclusion of special children in regular schools
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (11:51:19)
PIA.gov.ph
By Mai B. Gevera
After a study that shows that out of 2.4 million disabled children worldwide only 79,000 are able to go to school, the Parents Mobilization Group (PMAG) is all set to push for Inclusion Intellectual or the inclusion of special children in regular schools.
This was bared by the PMAG Inclusion International Representative Jan Vorstman during the 3rd Parents Mobilization Action Group General Assembly held in this city.
Vorstman discussed how the issue of human rights is being centered as the main concern of the group since the very common problem encountered by special children is discrimination.
"Normal people usually condemn these special children. This is the very reason that we need to fight for their rights," he said.
PMAG Philippines, a joint venture program of Inclusion International and Philippine Association for the Retarded (PAR), is helping special children and their families achieve fair and equal treatment from normal individuals.
One of the undertakings of PMAG in pushing for such goal is the preparation of regular schools for the entry of special children. The group is also strengthening the quality of education of Special Education (SPED) schools to help these children and their parents adjust and cope with the possible changes they may encounter in joining the regular schools.
A concrete step being undertaken of PMAG is empowering parents to advocate and enable their children with special needs, including those with intellectual disabilities to gain equality of opportunity and inclusion in society.
"Parents are very important in the lives of these special children, but most of the time, they don't get what they deserve," Vorstman said.
He explained that 95 per cent of special children worldwide don't see teachers in their lives. They simply rely on the care of their parents. This, according to him, inspired PMAG to value the role of parents in managing children with special needs.
"This organization has helped so many parents who don't have the sufficient information and knowledge on how to bring up these kind of children."
Members of PMAG share whatever learning they have to others and most especially new parent-members.
Members also benefit from the free trainings PMAG gives to its members like seminar on speech therapy and biophysics, teaching strategy, classroom management, occupational therapy, multiple intelligence, health and safety, and behavior management.
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Education : Voucher plan revived, with focus on autistic students
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (09:20:46)
Indy Star
By Staci Hupp
Republican lawmakers have revived a stalled push to create school vouchers that would give students public money to transfer to private schools. But this time, they'll target only one small group: autistic children.
The plan is a natural fit because the number of autistic students has multiplied to about 5,500 statewide while public schools often lack the expertise to teach them effectively, according to supporters who are at work on a bill for the legislative session.
"There's a moral imperative of assisting these families in the way that they believe is best and, second, it has the added benefit of being a very fiscally sound program," said House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, one of four Republican lawmakers who met this week with a legislator from Ohio, where school voucher programs have mushroomed. "I'm certain if we do this, some schools will choose to concentrate in this, which will bring the cost to educate students down for the state."
Voucher advocates say some private schools, hospitals and therapists are better equipped to meet the special needs of children with autism, a developmental brain disorder that affects a person's ability to communicate and interact with others.
The plan's financial details haven't been worked out. Lawmakers estimate it costs up to $40,000 a year to teach one child with a severe form of autism.
Public school administrators and other critics think the autism plan is just a tactic voucher supporters will use to gain some momentum for broader voucher offerings less than a year after more sweeping legislation failed.
"At a time when they can't properly fund education . . . now is not the time you start trying to figure out how to take money away from those institutions the state has the largest responsibility towards," said John Ellis, director of the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents.
Republicans backed a school voucher bill this year that would have given parents the tax money to transfer their children from a failing public school into a private or public school of their choice. They argued vouchers give children access to a better education and give public schools the competition they need to improve.
Bosma acknowledged a voucher program could start with autistic children and expand later.
"We have to walk before we begin to run in the school choice arena," he said. "I think this is the next step, to look at those who could be served better and more efficiently."
Eighteen school voucher programs have sprouted in 11 states, although 36 states have looked at proposals. Florida, Ohio and Utah have voucher programs specifically for autistic or disabled children.
Ohio's voucher program, the nation's second largest, includes up to $20,000 a year for each autistic student.
About 300 of the state's 5,400 eligible children took advantage of the vouchers this year, said Rep. Jon Peterson, a Republican from Delaware, Ohio.
Peterson said the voucher program pays only for services flagged on an autistic child's federally required individualized education plan.
Ohio's voucher plan stemmed in part from state findings that public school services for autistic children were uneven at a time when the population was on the rise. Recent epidemiology studies have shown that autism spectrum disorders are 10 times more prevalent than they were just 10 years ago. Autism is the second most common developmental disability, next to mental retardation. Autism disorders occur in as many as one in every 166 births.
Many colleges and universities traditionally haven't trained teachers to work with autistic children.
"Some school districts are providing superlative services, others are failing miserably," Peterson said. "This is where school choice should work. It provides parents with an option."
Whether voucher programs fix the problems is unclear. Researchers have only just begun to tackle the question.
Indiana has at least three private schools for autistic children. But most autistic children go to public schools.
For autistic children, a state grant adds about $8,500 per year on top of regular education costs. But many schools lack the trained people and established programs to teach them, said Susan Pieples, who heads the Autism Society of Indiana.
Pieples, Carmel, said her 18-year-old autistic son struggled in public school.
"There are teachers who want to do a good job and simply don't have the resources," she said. "It makes so much more sense to do something like a voucher program where kids can go to special schools -- the kids who need it. Some must be taught one-on-one."
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