\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>hen I was 11, a woman at the hospital asked me what school I was starting in September. I still remember her surprise when I told her I would be going to the local girls grammar, as the hoist pulled my wet limbs out of the physio pool. I was a child but already familiar with those few seconds: the time between a person seeing my wheelchair and the flash across their face as they tried to recalibrate their expectations.<\/p>\n That was the summer of 1996, five years before the law required schools to make \u201creasonable provisions\u201d for disabled pupils, and only two or three decades after it was the norm to segregate us in \u201cspecial schools\u201d with rudimentary curriculums, away from \u201cnormal\u201d children.<\/p>\n I thought of this as I read Labour\u2019s overhaul of Send, the system for special educational needs and disabilities in England. These are significant and complex changes, many of which will not fully come into force until 2030, but \u201cinclusion\u201d is the overriding theme: all mainstream schools will now have tailored support to \u2013 in the government\u2019s words \u2013 \u201cmake every school truly inclusive\u201d, with multibillion-pound funding for 60,000 additional special-needs places and \u201cinclusion bases\u201d in all schools. Children with the most complex needs will still be able to attend specialist schools.<\/p>\n This comes after a decade in which failed reform has seen more and more disabled kids siloed out of mainstream schools. Between 2012 and 2019, the number of children with Send in English mainstream education fell by almost a quarter, while those attending specialist schools rose by nearly a third. At the same time, teaching assistants \u2013 who typically provide help for pupils with additional needs \u2013 and specialist teachers for deaf children have been cut.<\/p>\n The government, to its credit, is keen to stress that attempts to tackle this are not about saving money, but the narrative that pupils with special needs are an expense the country can\u2019t afford is never far away. Read the media coverage this week and you\u2019ll see much of the focus is on \u201cspiralling costs\u201d and the soaring number of children with Send plans. As the Times put it, the overhaul won\u2019t stop the cost of educating Send students \u201csoaring until the end of the decade\u201d.<\/p>\n There are very valid questions to be asked about how public money is being used for special-needs education. Private schools are currently being paid \u00a32bn a year by councils to teach disabled pupils, with such institutions \u2013 often backed by private equity firms \u2013 charging more than twice the price of the state sector. Meanwhile, by 2030-31, local authorities in England are expected to shell out \u00a33.4bn just for transport for children unable to attend their local school.<\/p>\n And yet it is telling that critics of Send spending typically don\u2019t focus on the pressing issue: the private sector is making tidy profits from taxpayers without improving outcomes for already disadvantaged disabled children. It is not a coincidence that in recent years the right has focused on the idea Send budgets are being squeezed by \u201coverdiagnosis\u201d of conditions such as ADHD and autism. Last year, Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, called the sight of children wearing ear defenders in school \u201cinsane\u201d; a two-for-one on spreading the idea that neurodivergence is overdiagnosed while normalising mocking a child\u2019s disability aid. There is never any mention of whether the child is reaching their attainment goals or getting the best support from the funding. The aim here is not to use public money more effectively \u2013 it is to offload the financial burden of children with disabilities, by any means necessary (and few methods are easier than perpetuating the myth they\u2019re not actually disabled at all).<\/p>\n There is, of course, another type of \u201cvalue\u201d that comes from inclusion \u2013 one that can\u2019t be fitted on to a Treasury spreadsheet. When announcing the changes this week, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wrote in this paper that the reforms will mean children with Send would get the \u201cenrichment and stretch\u201d of spending time in classrooms with their peers. This is true. But it might be time we also spoke about the enrichment for non-disabled children that comes from going to school with disabled pupils. Of growing up alongside someone who may speak, move or learn differently to them but who supports the same football team or listens to the same bands. Indeed, critics of Send spending may not find it quite so natural to deprive disabled children of an equal education if their minds had been \u201cstretched\u201d by sitting next to a disabled friend at school.<\/p>\n As an adult, I know the woman by the pool that day wasn\u2019t being rude or mean. She was shaped by the country she lived in at the time: one that meant it was unlikely a girl who looked like me would get a quality education and that told her this was just the way things were. I was the first wheelchair user to ever go to that school. My class spent the first year being taught in just two rooms. They were the only ones I could get to. Over seven years, my local authority built lifts, hired assistants and widened a toilet cubicle. When I went back to give a careers talk a while ago, another lift had been installed \u2013 and more disabled girls had been through their doors. That happened because of laws enshrining disability rights, activists and MPs who campaigned for them, and public funding that paid for it.<\/p>\n As a Reform government waits in the wings, it is worth remembering such progress is not a guarantee: it is hard-won and all too easily picked apart. If you want a sign of where a nation is heading, there are few clearer litmus tests than how those with power see disabled children. Are they a problem to be erased? Or valuable kids to be included? For all the niche policy details of \u201cinclusion\u201d, it is really just a term for treating disabled people as part of society, just like everyone else. Be wary of any politician eager to put a price tag on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was 11, a woman at the hospital asked me what school I was starting in September. I still remember her surprise when I told her I would be going to the local girls grammar, as the hoist pulled my wet limbs out of the physio pool. I was a child but already familiar<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[166,3427,3824,1121,9890,4800,3225,588,1014,23359],"class_list":{"0":"post-45305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-children","9":"tag-disabled","10":"tag-frances","11":"tag-labours","12":"tag-mainstream","13":"tag-reforms","14":"tag-ryan","15":"tag-schools","16":"tag-send","17":"tag-transformative"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}