Coun Jane Scullion: We are doing our best for our SEND children
People often ask me ‘How come the council is strapped for cash? Surely emptying the bins and cutting the grass doesn’t cost that much?’ No, it doesn’t. The answer is simple: we spend most of the budget, 72 per cent in fact, on social care for our local adults and children. But behind that simple answer is a complex picture, including the money that we spend on children with special educational needs and disability (SEND).
Coun Jane Scullion, Leader Calderdale Council, writes:
Under the SEND legislation we have a legal duty to carry out assessments of need for children with special needs and disabilities. A child’s special needs may then be met in a mainstream school, with support, in a special school, or in other ways. They may need speech and language help, or special transport to get them safely to and from school. Parents can find themselves fighting for what their children need, from the moment that little baby is laid in their arms.
We aim as a council to make the journey from 0 to 25 years as calm as possible for children and young people with SEND. It’s about working together to give them a purpose in life, and a vision of a fulfilling adulthood whatever their start.
Years ago, our daughter worked in a project interviewing teenagers with Downs Syndrome. When asked about their hopes for the future the answers were, ‘a place of my own so I don’t always live with my parents, a job and a girlfriend or boyfriend’. The same as any teenager. Any decent society would fund making those hopes a reality. Why wouldn’t you want to see those children thrive?
But the combination of inflation and rapidly increasing demand for SEND support is putting huge financial pressure on the council’s budget and this will mean difficult choices. Requests for SEND assessments are running at an all-time high and the resources from government, in terms of mainstream school assistance, special schools, and home to school transport, have not kept pace.
We’re doing our best, expanding our special schools, and making plans to build a new SEND school in Mixenden, but the costs are outstripping the funding.
We know that this is going to be one of the priorities of the new Labour government, but it won’t happen quickly. The new government has promised to fix the foundations so that we can rebuild our economy, NHS, and housing. But billions were wasted on failed asylum systems and dodgy COVID contracts and you can’t claw that back and fix everything overnight. We don’t want short term fixes where private companies get rich quick, we want some certainty and stability for the care and support of our children with special educational needs.
It will be a difficult first year for the new national government and a tough one for local councils until the programmes announced in the budget really start to fix the foundations. Calderdale council is facing some hard decisions this year and next until the financial situation stabilises. We will be working on a wide-ranging set of proposals to cut cost, reduce services and operate differently to make the books balance. But we will also be doing our best to ensure that our SEND children are safe and thriving in Calderdale.