Schools break law by excluding autistic pupils

[chilango]

From today's Times.

This often comes up on school threads so I thought it was worth mentioning.

 

[existentialist]

View attachment 94035 From today's Times.

This often comes up on school threads so I thought it was worth mentioning.

This is going to happen more and more.

Schools are being squeezed hard by cuts to funding, and - as ever - what will happen is that resources for minority groups will feel the pressure hardest/first. If a school has to lose some staff headcount, it will make more sense to them to get rid of a couple of teaching assistants or LSAs than to lose a member of teaching staff (for example).

Other support services also risk being cut - the schools counselling provision in my LA was severely slashed, as was the behavioural support and educational psychology service, and I suspect that ongoing cuts will continue further.

What most of these services tend to have in common is that they are perceived as having less impact because they're only likely to affect smaller subsets of the school's population - the problem is that those subsets are frequently the ones where, left unsupported, they will have consequential effects on the rest of the school. Withdraw support from children with ASD, emotional difficulties, or challenging behaviours, and you quickly find that the overall experience suffers as a result. So, starting from that point - "we have a difficult child and no resources to manage them" - the option of excluding them becomes increasingly inescapable.

I've seen it happen informally - along the lines of "Well, Mrs Bloggins, little Jimmy is becoming very disruptive, and we feel that if this continues, we'll end up having to formally exclude him, which will look bad on his record, so why not keep him at home for part/some/all of the time and we'll send some work home?". Sometimes, they'll provide a "home tutor" (in my LA this usually means the child attends at a youth centre for a session or two a week), but it still means the child has been excluded from the overall educational experience, and any hope of addressing the problems. In my area, they even closed the Pupil Referral Unit (PRU - the place kids who are excluded from mainstream school are sent), in favour of returning the children to mainstream school, an experiment which has resulted in a significant rise in classroom issues as formerly-excluded children are booted back into a system they perceive as having rejected them once already, followed by at least a few exclusions as their behaviour crosses the line and the school excludes them again, this time with no PRU to go to.

I have long thought that the way we treat children in education speaks volumes about the awareness of those in charge that they can get away with a lot more than they would if these were adults with the rights of adults.

So I am not remotely surprised that this is now news. At least it is news, although interesting that it's about a group that, in the hierarchy of Misfit, comes fairly near the bottom - you won't see the "bad attitude" kids being treated quite as sympathetically by the Times et al as children who are deemed to be in greater need through no fault of their own.

 

[StoneRoad]

My OH has done a lot of this EOTAS (education other than at school) tutoring, both at PRUs and youth centres as well as "at home" - although the later is usually for something like CFS/ME or a broken hip and the former for "behavioural issues". But in the last 18 months or so, the budget for EOTAS has been so badly slashed that the successful PRU scheme has been virtually destroyed. (Successful in that most of the pupils were re-integrated into the mainstream before going into work or other activities). As most of the difficulties are still there - just with other pupils - I'm just waiting for the fallout from the wider exclusion policy ...

 

[existentialist]

A further point worth making here is that this is, in effect, the same kind of plausible deniability that the DWP achieves by farming out its disability tests to outside organisations. In that situation, it gives DWP the option of saying "it wasn't our decision that the person was fit for work"; in the education situation, the LA (itself constrained by the funds made available to it by government) passes the responsibility for individual cuts by presenting the school with a smaller budget and delegating the decision to the school itself. This is, of course, done in the name of "autonomy", but there is no autonomy when you're telling a school "do the same with less", alongside "oh, and by the way, we're watching your GCSE/SATs/etc outcomes carefully".

I think it is rare that any school, aware as it is likely to be of the pitfalls, will be saying "oh, we're cutting funding for this group of students, but they're only autistic, so it doesn't matter". Rather, what they'll be thinking is "argh, we've got to find cuts of £30,000/year, and it's a choice between a maths teacher and some LSAs. We know what will happen if we cut the LSA provision, but it's guaranteed to be worse if we lose the teacher, so we'll fire the LSAs and hope that it all works out OK".

There are other factors. My old LA's closure of the PRU was done because some New Broom (we called her Cruella) came in with lots of spiffy new ideas, including one that said "kids do better if they're kept in mainstream education rather than farmed out to a PRU". That's partly true, for some kids at least. But it's only really likely to be true if additional resources are put in place to support those kids in a mainstream environment - which there is insufficient funding for - or if some kind of determination is made as to what each individual child's level of support need is likely to be.

Here, they cut the behavioural support team at the same time as they closed the PRU, to a point where, according to a former colleague of mine, a now-redundant BST, the provision available to schools is one half day per term. Not enough to even pretend to be useful. And BSTs are (or would be) at the front line of managing PRU pupils who had been put back into the mainstream system. Likewise the ed psychs, whom I believe to have about the same level of provision, too.

Heads are often very creative about squaring these circles - there is funding for support for looked-after children, for example, regardless of their demonstrated level of need, so schools may well get some funding in for an LSA to support children in that group, but apply it somewhat flexibly so that the LSA is a more general resource. I'm doing some counselling in a primary school on exactly that basis - I'm supposed to be there to see 2 looked-after children, but I actually see one (the other got excluded before I got there), and 2-3 other kids along the way. It shouldn't be like that, and in being flexible, the head and I are both to some extent colluding with the system, but neither of us are particularly interested in making points of principle at the expense of those children's immediate wellbeing.

The whole thing is shit: Kafkaesque shit.

 

[existentialist]

My OH has done a lot of this EOTAS (education other than at school) tutoring, both at PRUs and youth centres as well as "at home" - although the later is usually for something like CFS/ME or a broken hip and the former for "behavioural issues". But in the last 18 months or so, the budget for EOTAS has been so badly slashed that the successful PRU scheme has been virtually destroyed. (Successful in that most of the pupils were re-integrated into the mainstream before going into work or other activities). As most of the difficulties are still there - just with other pupils - I'm just waiting for the fallout from the wider exclusion policy ...

Stand by for demonisation of "feral kids". And their parents. I expect someone will come up (again) with the wheeze of making benefits conditional on children's attendance at schools and/or behaviour.

Interestingly, a lot of the kids in our PRU were classified as "child in need", or as young carers (or both). They were the ones getting their siblings out of bed, dressed, fed, and off to school before coming in themselves and raising hell. So the parents were pretty much out of the loop already, although this wasn't usually evident until they'd got to the PRU or were being seen by the (fast-disappearing) specialist services.

"Home" tuition of PRU kids was usually because they'd been effectively excluded from the PRU, something that was rarely and reluctantly done when their behaviour put others at so much risk that they had to go. Mainstream "home" tuition was, as you describe, more for physical illness, although quite a few school refusers (often itself something that was flagging up underlying issues) would get it too. I suspect school refusers will get lumped into the truant/Bad Kid bracket, too.

 

[StoneRoad]

Those likes were for supporting the points existentialist is making, not agreeing with the policies - budget cuts - causing the actual decisions.
I agree : Kafkaesque shit is an understatement, and the kids will be suffering further disadvantages in the much longer term ...

 

[existentialist]

The PRU in our LA was so successful that it had opened a "sixth form" - they'd turned previously unmanageable kids around to the point that they'd not only grabbed themselves a handful of respectable GCSEs, but were actually prepared to voluntarily attend school (PRU) to start their advanced education.

That, of course, has been flung onto the bonfire, too.

 

[zippyRN]

A further point worth making here is that this is, in effect, the same kind of plausible deniability that the DWP achieves by farming out its disability tests to outside organisations. In that situation, it gives DWP the option of saying "it wasn't our decision that the person was fit for work".

There's no need to read any further to realise the rest of your post will be hyperbolic and /or inaccurate ...

Amazing how many experts on the DWP forget it is the DWP who employ DECISON MAKERS , for that is their job title and it is the DWP that refuses to allow decisions to be made by clinicans instead favouring making the decisions remotely and by classical works for t'cahncil type snivel serpent.

 

[existentialist]

There's no need to read any further to realise the rest of your post will be hyperbolic and /or inaccurate ...

And no need for me to read any further to realise the entirety of your post will be charmless and rude.

Not to mention that your attempt to demonstrate my hyperbole and inaccuracy seems to rely on semantic nitpicking . Well done.

 

[ViolentPanda]

There's no need to read any further to realise the rest of your post will be hyperbolic and /or inaccurate ...

Amazing how many experts on the DWP forget it is the DWP who employ DECISON MAKERS , for that is their job title and it is the DWP that refuses to allow decisions to be made by clinicans instead favouring making the decisions remotely and by classical works for t'cahncil type snivel serpent.

The "decision maker" makes their decision not primarily based on the claimant's application/renewal form, and any medical evidence supplied, but primarily on the "disability analyst"/HCP's report.
Having seen the HCP's report from my PIP assessment, and compared his written answers to my recorded (legitimately. I took two cassette recorders to the assessment, and provided the HCP with one copy) statement, this meant that the original decision maker was drawing inferences from a work of fantasy, not from fact. I was able to go to tribunal and expose the flaws - including the 3-word "memory test" that "proved" I had no memory deficit (I had six months of assessments and training at a renowned memory clinic that said different); the assessor's refusal to believe that being deaf in one ear constituted a hearing problem (again, clinician said different, and had provided explanations as well as links to academic articles), and the physical testing of leg and arm strength that lasted a minute and a half, but which took my consultant physiotherapist almost two hours to perform and document.

Perhaps if decision makers were provided with better and more accurate data, they'd get more decisions right, and more than half adverse decisions wouldn't be taken to appeal, with almost two-thirds being won.

Sadly, too many of the assessors employed by Atos, Maximus etc, do not do their jobs properly. Not because they're incompetent, but because they're lazy.

 

[existentialist]

The "decision maker" makes their decision not primarily based on the claimant's application/renewal form, and any medical evidence supplied, but primarily on the "disability analyst"/HCP's report.
Having seen the HCP's report from my PIP assessment, and compared his written answers to my recorded (legitimately. I took two cassette recorders to the assessment, and provided the HCP with one copy) statement, this meant that the original decision maker was drawing inferences from a work of fantasy, not from fact. I was able to go to tribunal and expose the flaws - including the 3-word "memory test" that "proved" I had no memory deficit (I had six months of assessments and training at a renowned memory clinic that said different); the assessor's refusal to believe that being deaf in one ear constituted a hearing problem (again, clinician said different, and had provided explanations as well as links to academic articles), and the physical testing of leg and arm strength that lasted a minute and a half, but which took my consultant physiotherapist almost two hours to perform and document.

Perhaps if decision makers were provided with better and more accurate data, they'd get more decisions right, and more than half adverse decisions wouldn't be taken to appeal, with almost two-thirds being won.

Sadly, too many of the assessors employed by Atos, Maximus etc, do not do their jobs properly. Not because they're incompetent, but because they're lazy.

And the point I was making, which I will assume zippyRN accidentally failed to realise, was that this disconnection - the extra layer - provides DWP with the perfect excuse to shit on claimants. There are too many stories of the DWP saying "we were going on the information from the assessment to make the decision", while assessors are insisting equally defiantly that they are not responsible for the decision that is made.

DWP's responsibility ends up hovering in a kind of limbo between assessor and decision maker, while the claimant finds themselves carry the can, and bearing the actual responsibility of having to survive within a system which is calculatedly biased to make their ability to access the resources they're entitled to as minimal as possible.

ETA: and I don't think it's about laziness. There is far too much evidence of the way in which both assessors and DWP staff are incentivised to reject claims to suggest that this is just idle inaccuracy, rather than a quite deliberate effort to trivialise genuine problems and allocate blame for the situation to the claimant.