It is international Down syndrome awareness day on 21 March 2017. To help raise awareness, we are writing a series of articles about Down syndrome and education. Today we are discussing secondary and further education for children and young adults with Down...
Children with Down syndrome were not always entitled to an education. We are looking back over the history of Down syndrome and their access to education. We’ve come a long way in understanding the needs of children with Down syndrome. Below is a...
The findings of a GL Assessment report out on 24 February 2017, ‘Hooked on labels not on needs’. The survey polled 810 teachers from 19 January to 1 February 2017. In summary, the findings are: 57% of teachers in the survey think...
Personal budgets and direct payments are a way that individuals can manage their own care and support. There is an increasing drive by the government in recent years to promote it. It has been around in social care for a while but is relatively new in the...
Pupils who have special educational needs (SEN) support, including those children with Education, Heath and Care Plans (EHCP), have the highest exclusion rate in the UK. The Department for Education found that children with SEN are over 7 times...
We’ve been asked to clarify how special educational needs funding (SEN funding) is handled in schools. We are told that some local authorities (LAs) are ‘deducting’ the first £10,000 and others are ‘deducting’ the...
There is still quite a lot of confusion about how therapeutic provision should be provided to a child or young person who has an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) . Yesterday, 6 January 2016, we received a letter from a local authority which...
The case of R (C) v Westminster City Council (2015) has just been reported. Unfortunately, we have not been able to locate the case on free databases and, as yet, have not received the full citation. The case concerns a judicial review of a...
The Upper Tribunal has provided guidance on how the Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal should approach expert evidence when there is conflicting advice. The guidance for how expert evidence should be considered by the Special...
The Department for Education (DfE) has released two substantive reports assessing the impact of the special educational needs and disability reforms. The special educational needs and disability reforms took effect in September 2014. Before this, in...
