9th October 2019 14:46
By Blue Tutors
A report into students receiving special educational needs has found that there are widespread breaches of children’s basic legal right to support. The local government ombudsman for England said that nine out of ten complaints were upheld in 2018-19 and this is after an increase in those complaints.
The ombudsman, Michael King, said that parents were having to fight the system to get the help they feel they deserve, and warns that the unprecedented level of reasonable complaints represents a system in crisis. The local government association stated that there has been an 11% rise in education, health and care (EHC) plans. However, the report does not focus on the absolute number of plans in place, rather the application for and provision of plans.
In some cases it was found that children had to wait 90 weeks for a plan to be put in place, and Mr King said he thinks that some local authorities are deliberately blocking and delaying making resources available to students in an attempt to preserve scarce resources. When the system was put in place two years ago, 80% of complaints were upheld, but it was argued that this was due to it taking time to get used to the new system. Two years later and this figure is 90%, which suggests a more systemic problem.
A spokesperson for the department of education said that more than 48,000 children were issued with an EHC plan in the last year, the majority of which were completed within 20 weeks. There has also been a commitment to make a further £700m available for plans such as these in 2020-21.
If it was the case that students and their parents were being told that the resources are not available to complete their EHC plans then that would be one thing, but the worry is that local authorities are delaying the application process and making it more difficult to cover up the lack of resources.