Re John Harris’s article (The culture wars are coming for children with special needs – Labour must tread carefully, 29 December), the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) problem does not lie in the legal framework, which from the 1981 Education Act on, through several iterations in law, has provided a legal entitlement for children with Send to receive the provision required to meet those needs.
The problem is that the body assessing children’s needs and responsible for specifying needs in contracts (ie education, health and care plans) – contracts that must also specify the kind and amount of provision required to meet those needs – is one and the same body that is going to have to pay for the provision.
From 1981 on, local education authorities (LEAs), constrained as they are by their budgets, have sought relief by ducking and weaving around their legal duties to provide for children. Hence the need for tribunals and the fact that the majority overturn LEA decisions.
Tinkering with or making sweeping changes to the legal framework will lead to a weakening in children’s entitlement and must be resisted by parents and professionals concerned with special educational needs. Instead we must press for:
1. The assessment and drawing up of EHCPs to be undertaken by local panels of relevant professionals (educational psychologists, speech therapists, specialist teachers, etc.) not LEA officers.
2. Parents to have the right to professional second opinions on the assessments and contents of EHCPs, which may prove a less litigious and stressful resolution to disagreements than tribunals.
3. Central government to fund all provision specified in EHCPs, thus effecting what is crucial – the separation of the power to assess from the duty to provide.
John Wright
Woodbridge, Suffolk
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