'Disbelieved' parents feel vindicated after damning special needs report

“Disbelieved” parents of children with special educational needs say “systemic failings” from the council have confirmed what they have been “screaming” for years. Their comments come after a joint Ofsted and Care and Quality Commission (CQC) inspection found “significant concerns” about Derbyshire County Council’s special educational needs services.

The joint inspection, published last week, found “widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities”. It detailed: “For too many children and young people with SEND in Derbyshire, their needs have not been met for far too long.

"The system that should ensure that they receive the right help at the right time has not worked well for many years. Children and young people with SEND wait too long for their needs to be assessed and for suitable provision to be put in place to meet their needs.”

Parents and complaint reports from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman have voiced increasing concerns over special educational needs support, with dozens of children having spent terms and even years without sufficient help. This has seen the council spend hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation to failed families.

Andy Billings, from Hatton, said his family have “lived with the failure” of the council’s SEN services for nearly two years, with their 15-year-old son George still out of school, due to a lack of support since he last attended Etwall’s John Port Spencer Academy in April 2022. George was diagnosed with severe anxiety in 2018 and the hustle and bustle of his school – which has 1,972 pupils – was not the place for him, an educational psychologist determined.

Mr Billings said: “When I read the Ofsted report, I was not the least bit surprised at the scale of failure uncovered at Derbyshire County Council in relation to SEND. Telephone calls unanswered, emails ignored, laws and regulations simply not followed.

“DCC need to act urgently to end the wall of silence that SEND parents and children face each day and that change needs to start with senior councillors and responsible officers at DCC considering whether their positions remain tenable following this damning report. While the report presents an opportunity to start the much-needed change in Derbyshire, there is a national SEND crisis that stretches much further than DCC.

“There is widespread apathy from our elected representatives to the scale of harm currently being caused to children and young people with SEND. SEND parents and their vulnerable children are left to flounder without support nor the education they are legally entitled to receive. The current SEND crisis is a stain on our national identity and change is needed – now.”

Paula Williamson, from Glossop, whose two children, one of whom has been diagnosed with autism, have been out of school for a year after their schools could not support their needs and due to a lack of alternative provision in the local area. She said: “I feel the report was scathing, critical of the inadequacies that have caused life-changing stress and trauma to young people and their families.

“The report has laid down in print what families have been screaming about for years. The report validates the experiences of families when often they are disbelieved, blamed themselves and have experiences minimised. In this way the report represents the voices of families that have been ignored for far too long.”

Cllr Alex Dale, cabinet member for education, said: “We acknowledge some parents have felt increasingly frustrated often due to delays and poor communication across the system in Derbyshire and that the pace of improvement has not been quick enough, leading many to feel that their concerns have been ignored, for which we are extremely sorry. Special educational needs and disabilities is one of our most complex, challenging and sensitive areas of work and something which many local authorities are struggling with at the moment, due in part to significant capacity constraints.

“It is fair to say that our teams have been under huge pressure to process a rising number of requests for assessments, which have more than doubled over the past few years, while managing a number of other competing priorities, including trying to keep families informed of progress as efficiently as possible. We entirely acknowledge that the system locally has really struggled to cope in recent years in particular and this has meant the service the partnership provides to children and families has not been good enough at all and needs to improve more quickly, as Ofsted has rightly highlighted.

“In recent years, we’ve been making a multi-million-pound investment to employ more specialist staff, improve assessments and create more special needs school places. Part of that has funded a new case management software launched in September and as it continues to bed in, we’re confident it will start to have a transformational effect on managing assessments, making them much more efficient and transparent and most importantly, significantly improving real-time communication with families, schools and other key stakeholders.

“While some of our improvement activity has started to show some positive improvements and will hopefully continue to do so over the coming months as the impact is felt, we acknowledge there is still a very long way to go and as the Derbyshire Local Area Partnership, we need to redouble our efforts. To reiterate, as a partnership we fully accept the findings of our local area SEND inspection and we are extremely sorry to all those children and families who have been affected.”

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