This week, something profound happened in my career – I didn’t receive online abuse

It didn’t take long after The Independent published my piece on the government’s appalling Schools Bill for the supportive tweets to follow.

This doesn’t often happen. Strongly-worded opinion pieces are more likely to elicit the opposite response. And we men have it easy. The bile and venom female journalists have to confront is frankly shameful.

But while support, even praise, is nice to have, it does raise a question: why? Why did I get so much of it on this particular issue?

I have a theory. I actually often get a positive, sometimes even visceral, reaction when I write on disability and/or special educational needs. There is a lot of crossover between the two. The favoured acronym when discussing the latter is actually SEND: special educational needs and disabilities.

Both suffer from the same problem: they are starved for coverage. When they do move the needle, it’s most often with stories found under the heading of “human interest” So with disability, it’s when the BBC’s Frank Gardner gets stuck on a plane and people say isn’t that terrible? Or perhaps a Paralympian will be treated appallingly on public transport.

With SEND, the story of Sammy Alban-Stanley, who died after falling from a cliff in Kent, provides a good example. His young sisters were interviewed last week in an attempt to highlight the appalling lack of support offered to families. Prior to the tragedy, Sammy’s mother, Patricia Alban-Stanley, had begged for support from Kent County Council. She didn’t get it.

The government has acknowledged that the system isn’t working and has launched a SEND review. Less often covered is the fact that those of us in the trade who have read the review have little confidence that it will help parents like Sammy’s.

The review, that dreadful Schools Bill – they merit more attention. The plight of disabled people demands more discussion, and not just through the lens of human interest.

We in the media need to do better. If the moral imperative doesn’t do it, the reaction to my piece should. There is a market for coverage of these issues. They affect a lot of people.

One way to start, of course, would be to hire more disabled people with direct experience of them, which is ultimately what got me started with writing about them. We are a vanishingly rare breed in the nation’s newsrooms.

Yours,

James Moore

Chief business commentator and columnist