Parents of children with special needs face more pain after this review

There are times when government policymaking leads me to literally contemplate jamming a pair of scissors into my eye to relieve the sheer frustration at what I am reading.

We’re on the subject of SEND – special needs and disabilities – for those not immersed in the subject. You can easily spot parents who are. They are like me: they have bleeding eyes.

The government recently published its long awaited, and much delayed, SEND review, prompted in part by an increasing recognition that the current system is failing some of Britain’s most vulnerable children and cruelly putting their parents through a process akin to mental torture.

It’s limp, light on detail, full of meaningless broad brush statements. Some of the direction of travel is concerning, particularly when it comes to parental choice.

The most troubling aspect for me, however, is its emphasis on mediation as a panacea for a system that pitches parents into horribly unequal battles with local authorities.

For parents with children with special needs or disabilities, there are three steep fences to clear to obtain an Education Health and Social Care Plan (EHCP) for your child. Parents value these because they set out children’s needs, the provision they should receive, and the outcomes sought for them. They carry legal force, which is important.

To obtain one, parents first have to get their local authority to agree to a needs assessment. Next, it has to agree to issue a plan. Clear that fence and the two sides then have to agree what’s in the plan. A decision can be appealed at each stage. Mediation is always offered but parents can skip it. Lawyers tend to advise doing that and going direct to a tribunal.

Councils vastly outstrip parents in terms of resources. They have their own full-time staff. They can afford specialist lawyers, and more. Think of them as full-strength Man United sides facing the nearby Chorley’s sixth-tier non-league club.

Except for this: when it comes to special needs and disabilities, Chorley almost always ends up battered and bruised in the dressing room, but with a victory to ease the pain. Parents are successful in just under 96 per cent of the cases brought to appeals tribunals. Go Chorley!

The review may change this. One of its more concrete proposals is to make mediation mandatory before parents can access a tribunal.

The review breezily states that “mediation helps to maintain and improve relationships between providers, local authorities and families which is important for long-term collaborative working and supports better outcomes for children and young people”.

From my personal experience of mediation with a local authority, this statement is a pile of… well, you know.

My partner and I have sat through two of these sessions. At neither did the local authority have anything constructive to say or any apparent willingness to negotiate. In fact, the first descended into a display of histrionics on the part of the council’s representative when we criticised its behaviour and approach – I stress we didn’t criticise the representative just the council as a body.

The “mediator” barely said a word, although they had earlier expressed their delight at being able to take in London’s shopping opportunities prior to the main event.

During both our sessions, we firmly stated our case and made it clear we weren’t going away. They ended with the authority saying, OK, send us some more information and we might think about looking again. The information was submitted only for the authority to move the goalposts some more. The mediation was very obviously a delaying tactic. It delivered no value to us. It certainly didn’t improve any relationships.

To the contrary, a longstanding local authority strategy is to stonewall in the hope that parents get so fed up they walk off the pitch.

The report says it will set out “national standards [which] will set clear expectations of how different parties should engage in mediation, including timescales for mediation to take place and ensuring that local authority decision-makers attend meetings”.

Fine in principle. In practice, not so much. A major problem with the current system is that local authorities routinely ignore the existing national standards in law when it comes to special needs provision. Combined with under investment, it is why we’re here. This is largely ignored in the review.

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Far from solving the problem, and mending the badly frayed relationships between parents, local authorities and care providers, mandatory mediation will only exacerbate it.

As a parent caught up in the special needs jungle – with apologies to the excellent organisation of that name – I half wonder if this isn’t the intent. Local authorities act the way they do to avoid spending money. Is this the game Nadhim Zahawi and his junior minister Will Quince are playing, or are they really as out of touch about the way the system works as they seem to be?

Pass me the scissors. I’ve still got one semi-healthy eye to jab them into.