Annual pointlessness

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half in a meeting room at my daughter’s school. One with a giant window, where anyone walking past could see the private and confidential information projected onto a screen because a staff member thoughtfully decided it would be easier to read than huddling around a laptop.

Nothing says confidentiality quite like displaying your child’s educational records to passing traffic.

We were there for my daughter’s annual EHCP review. The idea behind an EHCP is that it is a living document, reviewed every year so that it continually reflects the child’s needs accurately as they change over time. In theory, this sounds reasonable. In practice, the only thing more soul-destroying from a parent’s perspective is the DLA form.

Both require you to focus entirely on your child at their worst. Not on who they are on good days. Not on what they love or what makes them laugh. Not on the things that make them them. Instead, you sit there cataloguing every struggle, every difficulty, every moment of dysregulation, and presenting it in a way that highlights deficits as clearly and efficiently as possible. You have to provide examples. Evidence. Accurate descriptions of behaviours and disabilities.

Not because you want to, but because if you don’t, your child doesn’t get the help they desperately need. 

So you sit there while someone explains that the bright, charismatic, hilarious child you adore is performing “below age expectations” in reading, writing and maths, as though this is some vast moral failing that requires immediate intervention.

They explain that when she saw an ice cream van she ran across a road without looking because she was excited, and somehow this becomes evidence that she requires supervision because she has “limited awareness of danger.” As though every child in existence hasn’t momentarily forgotten basic survival instincts at the sight of an ice cream van. Although I do have admit she has no awareness of danger when she still insists on climbing and jumping off the highest object in any given area and accosting strangers to take her down drop slides. I asked her once why she kept kidnapping parents to take her on the drop slides and she told me that ‘bigger people go faster’ and as I’m ‘small’ she needs a bigger grown up. While this makes sense to her, as her mother it was not reassuring. 

You hear, in the same breath, that your child is the class “high flyer” while also being told she still reverses letters and numbers, can’t copy from a whiteboard and cannot sit through a learning session longer than ten minutes. Naturally, when I asked what that actually meant, I got a blank stare.

Because what exactly am I supposed to do with that information?

Apparently she behaves too well for a school increasingly focusing on behavioural rather than educational needs, but simultaneously cannot attend mainstream school.

Excellent.

Clear as mud.

I have no intention of moving her. She loves her school and that matters more than almost anything. But even if I had to move her, where exactly am I sending her?

Before anyone suggests hubs or integrated units: no. I’ve worked in schools with hub units. They don’t work. They fail the children inside them and they fail the children outside them. Children become separated into camps. The units become dumping grounds for children needing additional support managing behaviour, while everyone talks earnestly about inclusion.

But they don’t integrate. Not really. Allow me to pull from my own experience here: You cannot safely run a science lesson involving Bunsen burners and chemicals while another child (regardless of their needs) is ‘bear crawling’ under benches, as a teacher you have to adapt the lesson and axe the practical. Then twenty-nine children miss out for the sake of one.

Resentment builds because children are children and fairness matters deeply to them.

But equally, if a child is that dysregulated, forcing them to sit still and “cope” isn’t support either. If they’re bear crawling under tables, they don’t need discipline; they need somewhere safe to regulate. When you point are to the LSA that is in theory assigned to the child that they need to leave, they stare blankly at you and say ‘but they are not being disruptive’. By which they mean they are not shouting, fighting or throwing things. Also the LSA who should be on one to one with the child has three children with them because there isn’t the money for the ratios they should be on. It doesn’t work it not funded correctly and no one checks if the money allocated to the child is actually being spent on the child. 

Education should fit individuals.

Not force individuals into systems.

Anyway. I’ve digressed.

Because my main source of despair with the EHCP process is this: before any of it can actually happen, a faceless bureaucrat at the council has to approve it. Someone who has never met me. Never met my daughter. Never spoken to her teachers. Someone with no educational or SEND qualifications. Yet somehow they have the final say on my child’s legal entitlement. The last time anyone officially signed off on this annual document was 2022.

The EHCP was written in 2021. It has been updated every year since.

And because none of the changes have ever been approved, the tracked edits now resemble the aftermath of a stationery shop explosion. The original text is in black. Annual updates appear in blue, orange, green, pink and purple. Microsoft Word only contains so many colours before they start merging into one another. At this point I’m interested to see what next year brings. Perhaps a nice chocolate brown? Possibly taupe?

Because I have absolutely no faith anyone will look at it this year either.

At some point, if this continues long enough, we may accidentally invent a new colour entirely.

And at least then we’ll have achieved something