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May 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Sarah Harris
18:04 EST, 14 May 2012
|
18:04 EST, 14 May 2012
The practice of wrongly labelling hundreds of thousands of pupils as having special needs is to be ended.
One in five children in England – about 1.7million – is given extra help at school, most of them with genuine problems such as autism, dyslexia and hearing problems.
But ministers believe that up to 450,000 youngsters are identified as having special educational needs, or SEN, without justification.
There are fears that children are easily being diagnosed as having special needs that need catering to simply for being remedial
It is feared that badly behaved pupils and slow learners are being listed as SEN to massage league tables.
The Department for Education will today reveal it is tackling ‘over-identification’ by raising the threshold schools will have to meet to class pupils as special needs cases.
The category of ‘behavioural, emotional and social development’ will be overhauled to prevent abuse.
Professor Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment Studies at Buckingham University, said the special needs label has been used as an excuse by some schools for not doing their job properly.
‘It’s extraordinary to think that over one in five of our children is classified as having special needs,’ he added.
‘In the recent past, diagnosis has been far too lax. If a child has been making slow progress or hasn’t been behaving well the school, really without any checking, could label them as SEN.’
Referring to league tables, he said: ‘If you’ve got a lot of slow learners or children with difficult behaviour, you can give an account of why your scores are relatively low. It’s almost a justification for poor performance.’
Children who are not as smart as the classroom counterparts are being branded as special needs pupils
State schools are legally required to
support special needs pupils and numbers have climbed from 1.53million
in 2006 to around 1.67million last year. In most cases, the assessment of the needs of a child is up to their school.
PARENTS GET THE RIGHT TO BUY IN EXPERT CARE
Parents are to be given the chance to purchase specialist and disabled care for their children.
Ministers will today hand families the power to control personal budgets for youngsters with severe, profound or multiple health and learning problems.
This means that they will be able to choose the expert support that is right for their child, instead of local authorities being the sole provider.
Parents have long complained they have had to battle hard to get statements of special educational needs for youngsters facing the most severe difficulties.
These statements, introduced by the 1981 Education Act, set out the child’s difficulties and what should be done to secure a suitable education.
However, it is often not clear for parents who is responsible for delivering on the statement and some say they are forced to go from ‘pillar to post’ to get support.
Speech and language therapy are funded and commissioned by health trusts while other help may need to come from education authorities.
Youngsters have often faced multiple assessments from different agencies over months or even years to get the basic support they need.
Special needs campaigners have also accused some councils of being unwilling to ‘statement’ pupils because of the legal entitlement and possible extra costs.
In the biggest reform of special needs for 30 years, the statementing process for children with profound, multiple and severe learning needs and disabilities will be scrapped.
It will be replaced by a single assessment process which will force education, health and social care services to plan services together by law from 2014.
In addition, parents will be given the legal right to request a personal budget to decide – and buy – which specialist services their children require. There will be no ‘cap’. Need will prevail.
Pupils are put on a programme called ‘school action’ or – if they require further help – on ‘school action plus’.
Numbers in the latter category reached 500,155 last year compared with 393,080 in 2006.
In severe cases, councils make a formal assessment of needs based on specialist advice. The number of pupils in this ‘statement’ category has fallen from 236,730 in 2006 to 224,210 in 2011.
The Government plans to overhaul statementing by introducing a single assessment process and allowing parents to buy in specialist disabled care from 2014.
It will also merge the school action and school action plus categories. A public consultation found the categories were ‘far too broad’ and included children whose needs could be met by strong teaching and pastoral care.
Ministers will provide ‘tighter guidance’ on which children should be identified as having special needs. There will be improved training so that teachers can more accurately assess and diagnose their needs.
Ministers insist that this will not affect funding.
A Government report published today says the category of behavioural, emotional and social development is unhelpful and overused.
Experts have been charged with bringing it up to date. Ofsted revealed two years ago that schools may have wrongly labelled as many as 450,000 children as having special needs.
In some cases, pupils ended up with learning or behavioural problems after being failed by poor literacy and numeracy teaching early on.
Inspectors even visited a school where pupils were categorised as having special needs simply because their fathers were fighting in Afghanistan.
They also found that some councils appeared to offer incentives to label children because some types of educational need brought in extra funds.
A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘We are working with experts to draw a much tighter definition so children who need the most help, get specialist provision. And we are putting in place much better training.’
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louise newqueay and la bit sweeping in your generalisations aren’t you. Its one thing to have an opinion about the government another to brand everyone as a serial benefit breeder. Get a grip and blame those making these decisions not everyone else..
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Most of the people commenting on here would be branded SEN as you gave failed to understand the article. It’s not about the existence of ADHD and autism, giving all the ignorant a chance to rant. It’s about the number of children being wrongly labelled SEN because they haven’t met a target in a particular area – such as social and emotional development. Schools need to accept children are all different and mature and learn at different rates.
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This is awful! My cousin has autism he has had his help taken away, had to move school- he can’t deal with changes to his routine and can’t fit into mainstream school.
Looks like his education will be affected again- this then impacts on his ability to have a normal independent life when the time comes!!
I know times are hard, but kids education is vitally important to move the country forward in the long run!! I would rather my taxes paid for his help than lazy people who believe it is there given right to claim dole, have children they cannot afford or worse drink and use drugs with the money given from the government!!
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SEN, ADHD, load of BS.. just badly behaved brats whose parents come under the category of serial benefits breeders.
Actually.. No the difference from now and 20 years ago, is we have the skills to and ability to define and find out if a child has a serious problem, not locking the child under the stairs because they speak fast or moves too slow or don’t keep up in a classroom with the other Children,… I enjoy living in this day and age because i know i wouldn’t of got the care or attention to help me live a normal life, …….I have Aspergers,Ocd and Adhd, and yes i have doctors in the best hospital in london diagnose me in our wonderful and amazing NHS, Which the goverment is trying to destory, ……Maybe you should spend less time offending disabled children/people and spend more time worrying in a years time whether you can put food on the table……../ A roof over your head and money in your pocket because of the Cuts, Please Don’t Red Arrow, Spend two hours writing this, TY
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Louise- ADHD and ADD can be identified on a cat scan of the brain, youre obviously an expert, using scientific tearms like “badly behaved brats”, so can you please explain to us all how the specialists and scientists that diagnosed my sister and nephew were wrong?
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This is another example where targets set by government are more important than the actual needs of each child. Teachers aren’t able to do their jobs properly because they have to abide by rules and regulations set by ministers.
Schools up and down the country have to “fiddle” the league tables to read whatever is needed to give them a good status and therefore the money they need and the government should have seen this when labour were in power and stopped so much unnecessary regulation on schools just to make ministers look better. we need to get back to basics and start teaching reading writing and Maths which is how it used to be and hopefully the government will stop putting unnecessary pressure on schools and teachers and let them do the job they trained for.
Unfortunately we now have a generation of children educated under labour who have been let down and leave school unable to read, write, spell or even speak properly.
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It’s about time. I realise that some children do have real problems but, 1 in 5? We had, in my fifties primary class, two boys who could generally be fairly relied on to be naughty. They did respond to discipline, however. They weren’t ADHD or Autistic or anything else: they were simply naughty. And when they were told to “sit down and shut up on pain of the slipper”; they did sit down and shut up. The lack of discipline from teachers and parents now makes it impossible to distinguish between children needing special help and those who are simply naughty (and all children are: my granddaughter at 2 and a half is a proper little madam). They have to be told off when they hit, or throw things. Otherwise they will keep on doing it and be labelled. Which means more money for the school….
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SEN, ADHD, load of BS.. just badly behaved brats whose parents come under the category of serial benefits breeders.
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