Without sounding condescending. For those who have no idea what SEND stands for, it stands for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. It refers to children and young people who have a learning difficulty or a disability that needs special educational aid to learn and progress.
This term encompasses a wide range of needs, including difficulties with communication, cognition, social and emotional skills, and physical or sensory impairments, and signifies the requirement for extra help and provisions within the education setting.
Jamie Oliver is urging parents, educators, and anybody else involved in a child’s education and the SEND system to literally stand up for kids with special needs.
He has now partnered with the British Dyslexia Association and several well-known individuals, such as Kelly Hoppen, Anna Maxwell Martin, and Davina McCall. They will start the UK’s first-ever voice petition together.
Jamie wants every parent’s voice to be heard, and he said, ‘An education system that only works for some kids and not everyone is broken.’
But it encompasses all types of unique needs, not only dyslexia, but the picture is bleak because there is a clear picture of the poor state of support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
Financially, the SEND system is at breaking point, and the number of children and young people with Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) has increased from 240,183 in 2015 to 575,973 in 2023/24, an expansion of 140 per cent over 10 years.
Almost a third of parents (30%) have had to use the legal system to get their children the right provision, and over half of children (58%) have had to take time out of school because their needs were not being met.
Of these children 36% spent between a month and a year out of school, while 7% had spent more than a year out of school.
This is not new to me. My son is Autistic, and I spent years trying to get him into a school with Specific Learning Needs, but my council would not pay for it.
Now, I’m not a stupid person, but I was made to feel inadequate as a mother. In the end, I employed a solicitor to fight my son’s corner. They even at one point believed that it would be a good idea to take my son into care because it would be more affordable than educating him in the place that I wanted him to go to.
I was told that I had inadequate parenting skills, taking into account that I already had three older children. It’s an extremely long story that I would love to go into, but it would take far too long.
Once I got myself a solicitor, we went from you can’t have anything to which school would you like.
I wasn’t going away. All I kept saying to them was that my son deserved to go to a school for special needs because he deserved an education like any other child did.
Numerous parents go through what I went through. Sitting up at night crying, and just completely drained all the time, but I was determined to fight the fight, whatever it took.
I watched the programme with Kellie Bright last night. To be fair, it was extremely good, and it brought tears to my eyes because it made me remember what I had to go through. Sadly, it didn’t cover everything that families have to go through.
I was made to look stupid as a mother. I was told I had to attend parenting classes, and while I was there, I was made to look foolish all the time with their patronising words, but I was not going to be browbeaten by egomaniacal and condescending wannabes who believed they knew better than me about my child.
I eventually contacted the Son-Rise Program in America. I phoned them, they phoned me, and they really helped me help my son. They were absolutely great. In fact, I don’t know where I would be without them.
With their help, I eventually managed to get eye contact with him, which I couldn’t do before. This was great progress, and just that alone made me smile.
It’s not easy being the parent of an Autistic child, or any special needs child, but believe me, it does have its ups and downs as well, but eventually I started to see more ups than downs.
I learnt that going against my son was not helping, and I needed that link, which needed to be extremely loving and respectful. I did say respectful, not compliant, which is what most schools do.
Before my son got into boarding school, he did go to special needs classes, which were absolutely useless. At the first sign of trouble, they would send him home and tell education that I took him out of school of my own free will.
In the end, I just taught him at home. Do you remember those Ladybird books from years ago? They were great and loads of flash cards because I figured that teaching him needed to be repetitive, but also fun. We would start at 9 am and finish at 3 pm with 15-minute breaks with milk and cookies, because the brain of a special needs child can only take so much in at a time.
Yes, there would be meltdowns; I would be crazy to believe there would not be any, but a time-out was the way. I would just let him calm down in his room, and then he would come back on his own accord, and if not, we would just start again the following day. Nothing was set in stone, but it worked.
What I’m trying to say is that nothing is impossible when done in the right way and in the correct setting.
The problem is with other people who have no concept of what special needs mean. Not only that, but people who have no idea judge unrelentingly.
We assume that the child is not normal, but I always used to say, ‘How do you know it’s not normal? Perhaps it is, perhaps before we crawled out of the muck we were like this, and how we have become is just a mutation.’ Now, in our society, we are expected to be a certain way. Always be yourself, not what others demand of you.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 