Involving parents
When I first started in teaching, I don’t remember the term coproduction. I’d have had children with special needs in my class. I’d duly read their statement of special educational needs and try to make sure the child had the best experience I could give them. What I didn’t have is a relationship with their parents and carers. I was disconnected from that element entirely.
Even later, when I was the teacher in charge in psychiatric inpatient services, working with children whose needs had brought them as far as a hospital bed, there was little liaison with parents.
The language has changed since then. The British education system now asks that children’s special educational needs are supported with the involvement of parents and carers. Coproduction sits in the guidance and the meeting invitations.
As I type this, there is no national count of how many children with an EHCP are waiting for a school place. The figure only comes up when somebody submits a freedom of information request to a single local authority. In Kent, where I live, 417 school-aged children with an EHCP have no school place in June, and three quarters of them had been waiting more than three months. Persistent absence stands at 34 per cent for children with an EHCP and 30 per cent for children on SEN support, against 19 per cent for children with no identified need. Parents are taking their disagreement into tribunal rooms in numbers that have gone from just over four thousand appeals in 2016-17 to nearly thirty thousand in 2024-25, with a success rate (for parents) according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, of 99.2 per cent. I use the term success loosely as it doesn’t capture the challenges and difficulties that got them to that space.
When families go to the trouble of appealing, they are almost always right. This means the disagreement is never really about the evidence, it’s about who got to decide, and when.
