Children with special needs are being failed. Parents have a right to be furious

Branding desperate parents caught in the grip of a failing system ‘angry’ and ‘difficult’ is about as unhelpful as it gets

Parliament’s education committee is currently conducting an enquiry into persistent absence and the lack of support for disadvantaged pupils (Getty Images)

The week in parent blaming started off badly.

A now-deleted Tweet aimed at school special educational needs co-ordinators (SENCOs), teachers whose job it is to look after children with special educational needs and disabilities, urged them to join its so-called “inclusion expert” for a session on “how to deal with the hardest, angriest parents”.

The response was swift and furious. Branding desperate parents caught in the grip of a failing system in that way is about as unhelpful as it gets.

Parents have been treated disgracefully for too long. Parliament’s education committee is currently conducting an enquiry into persistent absence and the lack of support for disadvantaged pupils. This includes a system of fines for non-attendance which causes unnecessary stress even when it isn’t being used (just the knowledge that it is there is enough to bring parents out in hives).

Here’s a piece of written evidence submitted to the committee by one school, which we are told it is a 261-pupil primary: “In my opinion the majority of our absence is due to low parental resilience and wrapping children up in cotton wool,” says the author.

The chair, Robin Walker, a former school standards minister, referenced the Local Government Association, which has become one of the most destructive organisations in the world of special needs education. It wants fewer children in special schools, bemoaning the cost to its members and maintaining that they might do better in mainstream schools.

The problem is that many kids do not do better in mainstream schools, a point made by Square Peg director Ellie Costello, who has written a book Square Pegs aimed at helping educators. Parents know and feel all this deeply – yet they’re castigated for speaking out.

“Parents are either (portrayed as) pointy elbowed and entitled, or feckless and lazy. We really need to grapple with this because parents are hearing this. They are aware of it,” warned Costello who correctly pointed out that most parents are doing their best, often in very difficult circumstances.

The reason that they are so often blamed, branded, and can become “angry” and “hard” is because they are so often let down by the very people who are supposed to assist them.

That doesn’t just include bad SENCOs, bad heads, bad local authorities, although they are often the first to set the ball rolling in a process that too often leads to a dizzying spiral of decline for SEND children. It also includes Childhood & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), providers of occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and so on.

I understand that a chronic lack of funding is an issue for all these organisations, but there is also a powerful institutional inertia.

CAMHS, for example, frequently traps families in an endless cycle of assessments and waiting lists. To actually get it to provide treatment you need to be in the middle of a full-blown, potentially dangerous crisis – and even that may not be enough.

“Parent-blaming is when a professional or organisation involved in the care of children, place blame on parents in an attempt to distract from their shortcomings or alleviate their responsibility,” concludes a recent post on Special Needs Jungle, a parent-centred forum on special needs resources, which perfectly sums it up.

Yet at the hearing, Costello was subjected to MPs banging on about kids “crying wolf” about mental health diagnoses and parents not “instilling resilience”. It appears our parliamentarians are far from immune to parent-blaming themselves.

“This really has to stop. We will, and are, pushing back,” Costello told me. And thank goodness for that, because this is nothing less than a human rights issue. The treatment of SEND children and their parents is shameful. It ought to be a stain on the nation’s conscience. It ought to bother the members of that education committee.

That said, I think Costello is right. I am starting to detect a mounting anger among parents. There is, meanwhile, an election coming up – one in which angry parents will make themselves heard at the ballot box. Perhaps the “honourable” members should have a care.