Local Authorities and Government need to stop blaming parents for their failings
The reality is that LA's don't do enough
For parents of disabled children up and down England, it will come as no surprise that they are the victims of the blame game, yet again, played by local authorities. Paranting gets debunking.
Approaching the Christmas holidays, an “anonymous source” decided to say that ‘middle-class parents’ were the reason that councils were going to go bankrupt. You know, for advocating for their disabled children’s rights.
What a lovely festive gift.
There was a report proceeding this in November, by the County Council Network (CCN) that moaned about the rising cost of providing transport for disabled children and the rapid rise in EHCP since the 2014 regulations came into place. As it stands there are just over half a million (517,049) EHCPs in England, which has risen by 115% since 2014 (the same year as the Children and Families Act and SEND Regulations were introduced).
Some of you reading this might go, “Oh that's quite a lot of EHCPs in England.” And you would be right… but there are a hella more disabled children.
There are 9.1 million children in the English school system. According to Scope, disabled children make up 11% of the population in the UK.
This means that there should be up to 11% of children in the school system (just over 1 million) with an EHCP.
But there isn’t. It’s about 5%.
Is it hard to get an EHCP?
And make no mistake this isn't purely because of lack of resources in a council SEND department. It’s a battle to get a) an EHCP needs assessment, b) an EHCP and c) an EHCP that is fit for purpose.
The reality is the legal threshold should make getting an EHCP, at least a needs assessment, less of a battle. But that's only if LA's abide by the law… which they often don’t.
According to the Disability Children's Partnership, of the 11,000+ SEND tribunals registered by councils in 2021/22, 96% were won by parents carers and young people. This cost the public purse £59.8 million, which could have instead paid for SEN unit placements for 9,960 disabled children.
Don’t forget about the cases where the LA conceded beforehand - nearly 3,500 of them.
How much do councils spend on school transport?
Going back to that report released by the CCN. In it, they moaned about the rising cost of providing transport to disabled children to attend school which costs them £720 million. But that's providing transport to 85,000 children.
That's not exactly half a million pupils, isn’t it?
What is increasingly frustrating about councils moaning about the price of supporting disabled children to access their education is this. They're not even paying for every single disabled child in their population.
EHCPs are around half the level they should be and councils are paying for 85,000 pupils to get there, not half a million.
Who’s really to blame?
And it's the parent’s fault that councils are going bankrupt?
The reality is that the national government and local governments do not budget enough money to cater for the whole population of disabled children.
Local government will probably blame the national government for this and the national government will probably blame LAs. Or what seems to work better is that they both blame the parents.
So maybe a New Year's resolution for our governments, both national and local, is to look inward instead of projecting their guilt outwards.
And use a calculator.