It has been an interesting week in SEND discussion with ITV News focusing a day on reporting of the SEND crisis and those individual and families affected and a report commissioned by the County Councils Network and the Local Government Association by Isos Partnership.

 The headlines of the "Towards an effective and financially sustainable approach to SEND in England", report are something most, including Prior's Court, would agree on:

• "Reform of the SEND system is essential"
• "Reform of the SEND system is also unavoidable"
• "The root causes of this crisis are systemic and require national reform"

But it is the beneath-the-surface details and the proposals where there real cause for concern.

Two particular points we want to raise as an organisation are:

• We agree that the "adversarial relationships between local authorities and parents" is perverse but disagree that this is "inadvertent" due to "a loss of parental confidence that mainstream schools can meet their children’s needs."
  It remains the local authority's responsibility to meet the needs of a child which is set out in their EHCP and parents should not be shamed into fighting for that, directly or indirectly. Particularly indirectly when council spending SEND is directly linked to the risks of local authorities going under financially. Local authorities could and should be more vocal about the inadequacy of the status quo of their funding support.
• One of the main proposals in the report is for more SEND support with mainstream schools. The report "argues that currently many mainstream schools, early years settings and colleges lack the capacity, resources, and in some cases, the expertise to meet the needs of many SEND children, resulting in more parents seeking ECHPs and an over-reliance on special school placements."
  We must not lose sight of the fact that there will always be a place for special schools for a cohort of individuals with high support needs - and views and needs of these individuals and their families should not go unheard.

Dan Whiteway, Marketing & Communications Manager