As an illustration of the gap between high politics and everyday reality, last week’s news stories about education policy were grimly perfect. The government was making a lot of noise about new restrictions on sex education, many of which seemed to answer entirely confected fears. On his visit to Essex, Keir Starmer launched his weirdly titled “first steps”, which included the recruitment of 6,500 new teachers for England’s schools – an indication of good intentions, but not much of an answer to the fact that, at the last count, 40,000 of them left the profession in a single year. Meanwhile, the education system’s most urgent and awful crisis continued to grind on, with barely a murmur from either of the main Westminster parties.
After long years of failure, provision for children and young people with special needs and disabilities – or Send – is now in a state of complete breakdown. On Friday, the BBC ran a report about widespread local delays in providing kids with the support they need, which was placed in news bulletins. One of its case studies centred on Freddie, a five-year-old from Staffordshire recovering from a stroke caused by complications from chickenpox, and unable to attend school full-time without proper help. One curt quotation from his mum said it all: “He’s been neglected for a year. He’s been completely forgotten about by the system.”
It is hard to know where to start. At one end of the age range, we are now reaping the consequences of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s effective abolition of New Labour’s Sure Start programme, and what that meant: the sidelining of early intervention, and special needs only being acknowledged when kids reach crisis point. In our schools, extra support is falling victim to a mounting shortage of teaching assistants. Thanks to austerity, councils are........