With SEND funding being squeezed from every direction, there is a greater need for objectivity than ever before.
There has been some noise in the news recently about the way we provide for children with special educational needs.
First, there was a story in The Guardian about a school in Gloucestershire which has announced it will be cutting its intake of children with EHCPs (Education, Health and Care Plans) because it couldn’t otherwise ‘preserve the quality’ of its SEN provision.
Then, The Times took a slightly more controversial angle and asserted that ‘fee-paying children get more special needs help’.
The article notes that over the past decade, the number of state secondary school pupils with special educational needs has fallen by nearly 40% but, in private schools, the number diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia has increased by over 30%.
I know the definition of SEND is not limited to dyslexia and dyspraxia but it still doesn’t look like a normal distribution, does it?
The suggestion, of course, is that private schools are simply better at ‘gaming the system’.
It’s not impossible.
When ‘value added’ figures first featured in league tables, there were stories of very illustrious schools conducting all their baseline testing late on a Friday afternoon after double games as a way of massaging their figures.
Apocryphal stories, I’m sure.
And underlying the suggestion of ‘gaming’ lies the oddly persistent scepticism about dyslexia being a ‘real thing’, as if you can fake it in a test if you just play dumb enough.
You don’t have to look too deep into the comments sections of these articles to find that suggestion bubbling angrily to the surface.
It goes without saying that serious political issues to do with funding lie at the root of all this. (I won’t be addressing them directly here.)
But, even if you don’t think education is being used as a political weapon itself, at least you’d agree it’s being caught in the crossfire.
More pertinently, children are being caught in the crossfire.
Their chances of enjoying a successful and positive school career are being damaged by our inability or unwillingness to target resources effectively and fairly.
We won’t achieve that until we have an objective, impartial, non-political way of screening all young children for reading problems so that we have completely reliable data on which to base our funding decisions.
The technology exists to do that quickly and easily.
We’re just not using it yet.
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