The Northern Ireland education system is not unique in facing significant challenges in meeting the needs of its children with special educational needs (SEN). However, there is little doubt that it has been uniquely unsuccessful in addressing those challenges over the past 15 years and that the SEN system is now at breaking point.
A string of recent reports has highlighted the rising number of statemented children (and those awaiting assessment), failure to meet statutory timescales for assessment, spiralling costs (associated in part with the rapid increase in the number of classroom assistants), insufficient places in special schools, a lack of effective inter-departmental collaboration and inadequacy of the school estate.
This has been compounded by the quadruple whammy of the absence of a functioning executive at Stormont for five of the past seven years, the enduring impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, unprecedented budgetary pressures and frequent industrial action by union members protesting at low pay and poor conditions.
‘Growing frustration at all levels of the system’
The result is growing frustration at all levels of the system, especially among parents and carers, angry at the failure of government to act on the more than 200 recommendations from a series of reviews and reports dating back to 2009.
The latest of these reviews, the Independent Review of Education, was published in March 2023 and paints a picture of an SEN system that is both financially unsustainable and fails to meet the needs of all children with SEN.
The past five years of statistics show a steady rise in the number of children with statements from 5.4 per cent to 6.4 per cent of the school population, accompanied by a 40 per cent rise in the number of classroom assistants. Overall, SEN expenditure has almost doubled from £254 million to £490 million and is projected to rise further in the current year.
In a desperate attempt to address the lack of capacity in Northern Ireland’s 39 special schools, the Department of Education has written to all mainstream schools to encourage them to operate Spims (Specialist Provision in Mainstream Schools) to accommodate the additional 1,000 places required. In advance of September 2024, the Department of Education recently confirmed that 80 mainstream schools have agreed to set up new specialist classes, with 134 declining the offer.
One senior official tasked with leading the latest end-to-end review of SEN in Northern Ireland commented in April to the committee for education at the Northern Ireland Assembly that there was “a lack of confidence in the system and its ability to respond to the needs of children and young people and their parents”.
The official added: “Parents, carers, teaching and wider staff often don’t have confidence that children’s needs will be met early enough.”
How to avoid ‘total collapse of a teetering system’?
So, how do we avoid the total collapse of a teetering system beset with seemingly intractable challenges? It is self-evident that we must learn the lessons of the past 15 years and adopt a new approach that puts words into action and puts children’s needs first, not balance sheets.
There is, above all, an urgent need to restore that lost confidence that children’s needs will be met effectively at the earliest opportunity by highly skilled classroom practitioners in schools - empowered with the budgetary flexibility to allocate resource as they judge most appropriate - and supported where necessary by agile, external, multi-agency teams focusing on meeting the holistic needs of children.
Under such a model, needs must be identified early (and where possible in the all-important 0-3 age range before statutory schooling) rather than needlessly delaying identification and restricting assessment under a flawed allocation model of psychological assessment which has failed to meet demand.
It is also important that we look at the latest research and best practice from other jurisdictions beyond the UK - such as New Brunswick in Canada, Finland and Portugal - which have developed highly inclusive education systems and from which lessons can and should be learnt.
‘No financial shortcuts’ in an inclusive mainstream system
In these days of heightened public accountability, we must of course spend money prudently, but we must also spend money where it is required, and we must fundamentally spend money to meet needs.
In 1978, Mary Warnock, chair of the ground-breaking Warnock Committee whose report laid the foundations for the SEN system we still have today, wrote of how in providing support to children with SEN in an inclusive mainstream system, there could be no financial shortcuts.
Warnock later wrote of how she saw meeting the needs of children with SEN very much in the same spirit as the great social reforms of the late 1940s that established the National Health Service and the welfare state, just 25 years earlier.
Warnock was not blind to the realities of cost, but noted that the “integration in ordinary schools of children currently ascertained as handicapped, if achieved without loss of educational quality, is not a cheap alternative to provision in separate special schools, and there is no short cut”. Indeed, she went on to suggest that the dispersal of services currently concentrated in just a few schools “will be considerably more expensive”.
As an educator, researcher, special school governor and (most importantly) parent of a child with SEN, I would argue that what we need today is that same ambitious, altruistic and egalitarian spirit of welfarism that Mary Warnock spoke of back in 1978. This would secure adequate funding not just to fill in the cracks in our failing SEN system, but to give us an SEN system that is fit for purpose, agile and flexible to meet changing demand - and one that is resolutely and unashamedly focused on the best interests of the child.
It is undoubtedly enormously challenging for those tasked with addressing the crisis, but as Northern Ireland’s most acclaimed poet, Seamus Heaney, once remarked, “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere”.
Professor Noel Purdy is director of research at the Centre for Research in Educational Underachievement, based at Stranmillis University College in Belfast. He is also a governor at a special needs school and editor of the journal Pastoral Care in Education. He tweets @NoelPurdy
