Assessing SEND – politicalbetting.com
Assessing SEND – politicalbetting.com
In this case, what has led me to pick up my pen is the revelation of a new SEND policy from our beloved government. The details are currently a little sketchy as the white paper was badly written by somebody who was obviously fresh from one of Susan Acland-Hood’s famous works meetings. However, it seems to be clear that the government intends to do at least some of the following:
2
Comments
Thanks for the header, Y.
https://x.com/lbc/status/2039210662296006869?s=61
The government claims otherwise because it doesn't want to spend the money.
Again, therefore, we come back to, should we not rather be asking why there's so damn much SEND about and why it's so expensive, and whether the fault is in the actual system?
Edit - which is actually not far off what the review says, once the government spin has been stripped out. They say schools are increasingly becoming intolerably stressful environments, and the preferred way (indeed the only way, in many cases) of treating that has been a medical diagnosis.
Would it not be more sensible to treat the cause rather than suppress the symptom?
'The PM was asked if the UK was heading towards rejoining the EU single market, which enables goods, service and people to move freely between member states, with countries applying many common rules and standards.
"I do think that we should strengthen our cooperation on defence, security, energy, emissions and the economy," he replied.
"I'm ambitious that we can do more in relation to the single market, because I think that's hugely in our economic interests."
However, he said Labour's election manifesto commitment that there would be no return to the single market, the customs union'
What was the impact of the previous "under-diagnosis", and how do the two compare?
It's a fairly close analogy to "false positives" in screening programmes - what is the balance.
The T has a smart meter first installed in 2017, which has gone pop. The Gas Engineers hate them because there is more gubbins inside (including to switch the reply off remotely) and they last about 1/3 to 1/5 as long as a traditional meter - 5-10 years vs 25 to 35 years, and my gas engineer now has a policy of not dealing with supply companies on behalf of clients due to many occasions of hanging around for ours waiting for them whilst all the other jobs for that day become angry with her.
It was interesting was that T tried to equivocate, and could have tried to fiddle with the gas if not read the riot act. Fortunately it is only heating and hot water which use gas, so one of my loan fan heaters was offered.
The Gas Supplier is a separate co to the Gas Distributor (has been the case since it was all redone). The Gas Supplier (who send bills and run the account) refused to discuss anything 'without the spoken consent of the account holder". I could just have lied and impersonated but if that blows back it is serious. "I can't make a note of this call on the account, because without the account holders consent I cannot access it."
The Gas Distributor, on being told the words from the Gas Engineer ('no gas coming through, unable to complete safety check, supply closed off, tenant has no gas, Gas Engineer suspects the regulator valve in the meter has died'), they had an engineer there in half an hour who capped it off properly rather than just closing it at the meter as the gas Engineer had done.
But it is the supplier who replaces the meter, and we need them to respond before T can have his gas supply back.
I hate gas; the downside if something goes really wrong is just too serious.
That is the sort of situation where self-managing landlords 200 miles away come a cropper, and you need a full service lettings agent. That is what has happened with one of these illegal Residential Homes for children that came out this week; one of the owners lives in Spain or somewhere and he relied on "not present" as his excuse for children being abused in his business by criminals employed to work there.
I like it how you can see the time when Trump's speech occured
https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mii3iq2lhk27
It's not a panacea. It wouldn't deal with hunger, or disillusionment, or gang culture on its own. But it would be a considerable step forward in dealing with issues around SEND and allow more space to at least try and get to grips with these others.
Worse are the parallel failings in health. A literal postcode lottery in diagnosis where the difference in reaction time from one street to the next across a boundary can be measured in years.
There is a political narrative that "all these extra SEND kids must be faking it / parents on the take / it's just woke". Or - radically - it was always there, we can now actively do something to help, and we have broken a whole generation of kids with lockdown.
We either get this right, now, or that generation will grow up and not be the thriving educated productive adults the older generation making these decisions will need to pay their pensions...
There's just a chance somebody may see a sane Truth Social post from Trump if his minders get his phone.
In a better world pupils would get individualised support tailored to their particular needs and abilities whether they had a formal diagnosis or not. I suspect too that this would be self funding in the long term as they would become more productive adults.
Instead we have institutionalised a medical model of neurodiversity and created a bureaucratic industry of forms and certificates.
I think in many cases these limit rather than help pupils. So we get "I cannot do that because of my ADHD" rather than "because of my ADHD I need a quiet place to study without distraction".
A lot of growing up is about learning self control and how to tolerate boredom in the interest of delayed gratification. These are steps to be embraced as part of preparation for adult life. Education should not be fun, at least not all the time.
We have as a Nation have to have very serious questions about the definition of SEND, the causes for the rise in more moderate conditions and to ensure those who VERY clearly need help and support get it, but that (as is increasingly the case across welfare) those who see it as a cash cow or easy life, cannot piggy back at great cost to the detriment of those most in need.
Personally, I think that Bridget Phillipsone with her background, is doing an excellent job overall and far better than some Education Secretaries. I would actually question IF this very topic though sits more within the NHS / Health remit rather than Education. I do understand that some conversations were had about that.
The big missing for me is PARENTING!
Parenting Skills are not taught in Schools. Parenting Skills didn't used to be needed to be taught in Schools as Parents would teach their children having been taught by their parents and grand-parents were always on hand to support their children and their grandchildren.
If society (not any political party or affilaition to any political party) is happy to allow 4 and 5 year olds to have to be to be blunt, shit and piss in a toilet as opposed to a nappy, what chance have we got. This issue is a fundamental part of parenting and also nusery education and Phillipsons valiant efforts to recreate a version of Sure Start (the criminal destruction of which by Cameron and Osborne in 2010 was a heinous act) is to be warmly applaued but parenting begins at home, and it is time to actually teach those skills to ALL as a curriculum subject at 13 or 14 onwards. One of many real life skills like ( home budgeting, basic home economics skills) that are far more relevant than Latin, Greek, some obscure language of some sciences.
If children can be assesed at 3 or 4 at the latest, as opposed to 5 and 6, we may better understand the issues , better channel the resources, better reduce the waste and cost and better help those who really need the most support, the most support.
The cross Party support for a significant reduction in screen time - especially for under 5-6 year old may also see a linked improvement. If they are shitting in a nappy at 4 or 5, they should surely be taught those skills before being taught how to log on!
There is one word in "parenting" that seems to have been completely lost.
NO
NO
NO
Too often the opt out is to allow kids to do what they want because it's easier than saying NO - back to parenting skills or the lack of them.
I 100% respect the knowledge of the author and the article but we have to go right back to basics I believe TOUGH LOVE as a way to identify real problems early and not allow bad parenting to lead to some who are on SEND and shouldn't be or needn't be to be pigeonholed before they ever start proper main stream education.
One I often argue wrt disability is that we have still not moved on sufficiently from "Medical Model" to "Social Model" which became the basis of our laws etc from the 1980s.
The shift is philosophical, in viewing disabled people as "part of us" not "them, to whom we do things and they had better be grateful".
Members of wider society often cannot look the idea that a disabled person is "someone like me" or "I may become one at a moment's notice" in the eye, and are terrified. It's like the comprehension difficulties we can sometimes see with notions such as wheelchair users having sex lives.
“How to open the Strait of Hormuz”
https://x.com/_a_khalifa/status/2039430195434938576
Warning! Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
My thought, as always, is that we should try an experiment of running a school in the manner suggested.
We have a number that are failing to the point of collapse. So, it will be difficult to make things worse for the pupils. Restructure as suggested and observe the result.
On thing though. I strongly object to describing the DfE as “incompetent and frequently drunken idiots.”
As an incompetent and frequently drunken idiot, I protest. I’ve never advocated or done anything similar to the things they do.
Vance is using to the "white churches of Virginia (or New England)" cultural symbol of the American Myth to appeal to the Evangelicalism for which he expressed scorn for when he became a Roman Catholic; he called Evangelicalism "unsatisfying", and he was right if it is the unthinking Born Again template, limited to the agenda moulded by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority fifty years ago, made up of a projected personal morality, "but never mind the wars or the wealth".
There's also an underlying cultural appeal to the pre-Civil War architecture, embodying a romanticised past.
JDV needs both the White Evangelical and Integralist Roman Catholic wings to keep his goose flying.
Anecdatum... Before retiring, my wife had classes of around 33.
For a couple of years, something between 10 and 15% of her time was spent dealing with one (large and frequently violent) child with severe problems.
They were, obviously, not the only child in the class with complex needs.
The local authority PRU was rarely available as it was always oversubscribed. One year, they funded an internal PRU for the school, which worked pretty well, and then they withdrew funding.
I'm working with eight children right now who have refused to go back into school since lockdown (now five years in the past). All of them were doing appallingly badly in school and all of them in home schooling are now doing extremely well despite a variety of complex needs. As in, couldn't read or write before lockdown and now we're considering which unis they should go to.
So my question - I'm quite happy to work with these children and take the somewhat north of forty grand a year their LEAs are paying me, but wouldn't it be better to sort out the school environments so they could reintegrate and that money be shared among maybe 15 children rather than just spent on eight?
It would be fun to study the flows of such beliefs between left and right.
Since at least Blunkett, we have created a system that gets as many young people as possible a good package of GCSE grades as possible for the lowest cost possible. Governments gave been upfront about the first half of that, and budgets have dictated the second half.
It seems pretty likely that some of what we're seeing is the obvious distress of square pegs being hammered into round holes.
One thing we keep overlooking is that modern comprehensives are essentially designed to be grammar schools in terms of style and content. The problem is that grammar schools were designed, quite deliberately and often rather ineptly, for a very small cohort - no more than a third of children at most, originally much less. Most children with what we would now realise is a SEND condition wouldn't get in, either because they would struggle to read and write or because they couldn't concentrate for long enough to learn.
This has been seriously exacerbated by Gove's reforms, which essentially rested on the belief that making everyone pass very hard exams makes them cleverer. No, it doesn't. It just makes things much more complicated for everyone.
I see absolutely no sign Phillipson understands this. In fact in some ways her background is probably a hindrance, because her experience is just as narrow and dogmatically focussed as Gove's but from a different angle.
It really doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
I get that there's a reluctance to use children as guinea pigs in experiments, but we're effectively doing that anyway, except running only one single, rather deeply flawed mass experiment.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-stanford-undergraduates-claim-disabled-sw99r3k8c
I suspect there’s a lot of truth to the claims of both left and right on the subject, but the bottom line is that half the class can’t all be “Special”.
Good morning, everyone.
£5K a head, per year, for the difference between university and functional illiteracy sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
For a start, they have a good chance of being net tax payers.
Which would help fund £5k a head…
If they have 6 teachers like me (I think that's the average for GCSE bearing in mind several of us teach more than one subject) then it's about £30,000 a year per pupil. Plus admin.
If we had smaller class sizes paid for at £15,000 per year per pupil we might still get the desirable outcome at half the cost.
And better outcomes for everyone else too.
I have huge problems with academies as run. Many are doing amazing things to fragment the system, extract big operating costs for themselves and driving up procurement costs for all the things that all academies need but are now being bought separately.
See my example above. One child taking 10% of your time in a class of 30+ is a huge burden. In a class half that size it almost disappears.
https://road.cc/news/bp-encourages-drivers-to-save-100-on-soaring-fuel-prices-by-cycling-to-petrol-stations-instead
(Google news just popped it up for me as a genuine news item
We will muddle through.
Reducing the class size in a few schools to 15 is very unlikely to ruin the pupils education. So why not experiment?
It's just emotional support pets on flights all over again. Genuinely useful for some people with psych problems, exploited as a loophole by morons, then banned.
Some people have genuine handicaps, whether learning problems or psychological disorders, and struggle with particular aspects of examinations and so forth. So allowances are made. But widespread diagnosis (and, incidentally, the drive to pathologise every quirk of human behaviour was something that was well-known even when I was studying Psych at university over two decades ago) means that, just coincidentally, these allowances are not being made accessible to a huge number of people.
Provide a benefit to a condition and there's an incentive for people to be diagnosed. Which makes things even worse for people who actually have serious problems, as they may now be lumped in with duplicitous shirkers.
A white collar professional who designs 'gas systems' would be a Chartered Engineer.
Which they don't want to do because they want to advance their careers by showing how they save money.
It would require a brave politician, and...
Anecdote: back in the 90s, when I was a postgrad in Cambridge, a friend of mine was a pastoral tutor at one of the colleges, and was sent on some training on autism. We concluded that the checklist she was given applied to basically everyone we knew, even the relatively normal ones.
I know of one that is very successful in turning things around - £40k. Very small class sizes is their thing.
Home Economics
Parenting Skills
Home Financing
Behaviour and respect
Clearly need to be now taught at at school as parenting skills as parenting skills handed down generation to generation is clearly not happening.
When my son was at primary school severe autism was something alien to the local authority bean counters. It does seem now that any child who says they feel sad or are naughty are labelled with ASD or ADHD.
There wasn't enough to go around when no one "had" autism. It must be impossible now everyone has.
There would have been upheaval and big cost, but in the context of the corrupt costbof so much Johnson did, which will come to light fully in the years ahead, would have been a price worth paying.
One of my family was a regional bod at Ofsted, retired at 60, and now travels Europe on her inflation-proofed pension to see Italian opera. The Ofsted modus, she told me, was to support teachers rather than criticise. Was this an indication that it's the system to blame rather than the individuals? Teachers seem to be under an enormous amount of scrutiny which is only increasing.
Instead they were all hurriedly brushed under the carpet and any issues arising were labelled as the result of lockdown rather than a symptom of years of mismanagement.
The most enduring central legacy of lockdown was Oak National Academy, which the DfE took over from the group that pioneered it to provide 'high quality bespoke lessons' for every school (that couldn't get teachers, although that part was left unsaid). The lessons are dreadful. I took some information sheets off them the other week for an reading comprehension exercise and I had to run them through an AI model to simplify the language for an average 14 year old - it looked nothing like the original. And the PowerPoint resources were a pain to adapt to a different colour background because of their fancy formatting (I didn't bother, just writing my own - it was quicker).
This speaks to me as a very minor example of a wider problem - the government has no idea of what things are actually like and is very anxious not to know because they don't want to admit how badly they've screwed up. It's much easier to blame over diagnosis of SEND than say, well if we've got all this SEND maybe there's something wrong with what we're doing.
This is particularly important for betting. In some ways I'm more interested in the views of PBers who don't live in Scotland on the Scottish elections; people like me are frankly in too deep to give a considered view even if we can provide the detail.
My personal anecdote on SEND is that I spent most of my standard grades being severely disrupted by those who needed it, and on my grad scheme the smartest person sitting the qualifications got 2x the time because his private school had obtained a diagnosis that I could and should have got too.
The biggest issue for people like my son is debilitating social function. The inability to communicate effectively and the inability to socialise to the point of making friends. People don't like my son because he is socially awkward, they don't like me because I am an awkward c***. Other issues might stem from the social awkwardness like learning problems and in some cases behavioural issues, perhaps out of frustration.
I am glad I am just a c*** and not autistic. It is a lot easier to negotiate one's way through life.
There are a total of about 8500 GCSE entries in Latin for all schools, each year. That includes private.
Out of 5.8 million GCSE entries (approx)
So around 0.14% of GCSE entries.
It’s of course good that there’s less stigma now but it seems to have gone too far the other way .
Maybe the NHS should prescribe “ Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning “ by Viktor Frankl as many seem to be suffering from existential neurosis .
It’s not a surprise that we can correlate the huge increase in mental health problems with the similar increase in social media and the internet in general.
In a desperate attempt to put people in boxes , and people seeking others to reinforce their view that they have a mental health problem .
It feeds itself and as a nation we’re in danger of talking ourselves into a mental health crisis .
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
Extreme wealth isn't recycled into the economy as efficiently as normal wealth, it massively drives up asset inflation and is a key driver of media and political manipulation. It should be taxed as a social harm just as we do with tobacco, alcohol and gambling, not from a moral viewpoint, but a practical one.
When I started at university I wasn’t the gobby and cocky bastard I am today.
I struggled to maintain eye contact with females when I started at university (I went to an all boys school and I was raised in a devout Muslim household) but most of my closest friends are female since uni.
I worry if I was born 40 years later if I would have been misdiagnosed.
My wife was astonished when she had a balance on her credit card and was charged interest as she thought she'd 'done the right thing' by making the specified minimum payments and didn't get why she was,as she saw it, being fined. She has a first class degree and PhD.
We could do with teaching people then basics of loans, inflation, mortgages etc and basic family finances.
Cooking and basic home maintenance, for sure.
Parenting we could probably cover too, but it's a lot less one size fits all. My mother in law's solution to all problems is a star chart - it has solved precisely no problems (first child it came into potty training, he soon learned to game the system with tactical wees; second child it did nothing to avert panic attack style pre-swimming-lesson meltdowns). In both cases, the real solutions differed and varied between the children. There probably are some basics though, but maybe could be covered as an extension of ante-natal classes - nearer to the time, more relevant, more remembered.
It is right though, that a lot of this should really come from parents, but where that's not happening, it probably makes sense to fill the gap.
https://x.com/ryansaavedra/status/2039088025746264367
Only 2 minutes, and gives a good insight into how the Americans are working. And he’s a lot more articulate and considered than Trump!
Moreover, treating extreme success as a bad thing leads to less investment in new businesses and markets. When 90% of private VC investments fail, those that succeed have to really succeed.
We agree that money in politics is a huge problem, especially in the US where there are more lobbyists that congress members, those members spend half their time looking for more donors, and a handful of Elon Musks and George Soroses have a disproportionate effect on the discourse. UK is better at regulating direct political donations, but indirect lobbying and funding NGOs is the same. It’s difficult to change it without restrictions on freedom of speech, so the best answer is sunlight and publishing as much financial information as possible.
What he did have, according to those acquaintances he and I have in common, was an astonishing gift of the gab. It meant he could interview amazingly well and schmooze those in power even though he was no good. And, of course, meant he was brilliant at interviews.
Which I would say was well supported by the evidence of his media work.
Parenting i cant really offer any thought on as i've not had any offspring
And pretty tendentious stuff.
The conclusion (smaller class sizes) seems an obvious one and something that our reduced birth rates could help to gradually introduce.
If small class sizes are worth paying for the children of the wealthy in private schools, it's worth asking if it would also deliver a positive return on investment for the country and society as a whole.
1 Iran rebrands it the Gulf of Trump
2. Iran puts in place a series of tariffs for transport of vessels through the Gulf of Trump
3. Iran gives Trump personally 20% of those tariffs.
4. America guarantees safe transport throught the Gulf of Trump.
5. Iran with nukes? Meh - who cares?