pumpkinstrokemarrow

I was prompted by a claim in the Guardian that we are spending the surprisingly large amount of £30b a year in this country helping people with autism to get hold of a DoE consultation document about a new approach to special educational needs and disability, previously noticed on October 18th. The general tone of the article in the Guardian was very worthy, while that in the Daily Mail was about how scandalous it was that hundreds of thousands of school children were being branded duffers by lazy teachers. Getting hold of in this case meant downloading a pdf and getting it printed at the West Hill print shop for £10 rather than paying £30 for a proper copy. 130 pages of report of ugly design with an ugly typeface, particularly ugly in headings and titles. No pictures or tables to break things up a bit. The Treasury and the Bank of England do things much better, at least for their more important numbers.

Now when I was at work, it quite often fell to me to consume large documents such as this and to generate comments. Failure to generate a reasonable number of comments was a personal failure, not to be tolerated. In this case we have a consultation document and I have a nodding acquaintance with the subject matter, so I thought it was fair game for the comments game. So here goes.

The bottom line is that by the time I got to the end of the document, I had decided that nodding acquaintance with the subject matter was not enough to enable one to make a very positive contribution to this difficult subject. I did not know anything like enough about how the process works now to have much clue as to whether the proposed process would work any better. However, that is not enough to stop a seasoned commenteer.

There is much talk which sounds like privatisation. And the move to personal budgets, while quite possibly a good thing, certainly pushes that door a bit further open. There are to be people called strategic partners. Which in the IT world that I used to inhabit meant an opportunity for fancy consultancies to make lots of money. More generally, not at all clear to me that moving everything onto three year contracts is going to be very helpful. A huge amount of energy is going to be soaked up in letting and competing for all these contracts. Not to mention the wear and tear on all the middle managers involved. Not to mention the wear and tear on all the front line troops who don't know who they are going to be working for from one year to the next. Are the sort of people who are apt to be good at special needs very apt to be very entrepreneurial?

To try to move to a more whole person process, supporting the person, their family and the carers from birth through to adulthood sounds like a good thing.

Early identification of need sounds like a good thing.

Not abandoning ship at 16 sound like a good thing. On the other hand, there is little if any recognition that providing employment for those with special needs is not easy. In the olden days we used to expect larger employers to do their bit, and many did. The civil service did. And for those with very special needs there were asylums with their farms and occupational therapy units. I suspect much of this no longer exists although Sainbury's sometimes does its bit with helpers at the checkout - although I dare say plenty of shoppers wished that they didn't. All made much more difficult by the disappearance of great swathes of more or less unskilled work and the drive for efficiency. Much harder to hide such people on the payroll these days. Are we going to pay employers to take these people on? What about the bureaucracy that might be involved here (see below)? What about the self esteem of the specials?

Being less confrontational and less adversarial sound like good things - but I don't see how you are going to get away from the bad things altogether. Resources will continue to be scarce and parents will continue to fight for a big slice of a small pie. But I dare say a better process would reduce the number of expensive fights between lawyers.

There is a real problem with labelling; the Daily Mail does have a point of sorts. If you label someone as having special needs (SEN), as having emotion or behaviour problems (BESD) or as being disabled, you are, in some sense, consigning that someone to the dustbin. On the other hand, if you do not label you cannot deploy the necessary resources. We used to have the same argument about race, although I have not heard it much recently.

Another problem is that SEN, BESD and being disabled are strongly correlated. Plenty of people fall into all three dustbins at once.

The document is very thin on budgets and numbers. There are some numbers scattered through the text but they have not been assembled into tables where you can get a good eyeful. No confirmation, for example, of the aforesaid figure of £30b. It is very fat on what we used to call motherhood and apple pie - that is to say things that are obviously good things - but without more numbers who can say how big a slice of apple pie was going to be appropriate?

The document is full of the words helpful, bureaucratic, transparent, accountable. Which seems to amount to saying that the work done in the bad old days by Labour was the second thing and not the other three, while in the brave new Conservative world it would be the other way around. More or less mud slinging without much regard to what the words might mean. Do the authors of this document suppose that the authors of all the other documents were trying to be anything other than helpful? How can you be transparent and accountable without being bureaucratic? I would have thought that a properly documented process was exactly what you do want in a tricky area such as this. Documented both in the sense that the process in general is documented and that the application of that process to each special is documented - and this is just the sort of thing that bureaucrats are good at.

Which the document does recognise in so far as that it proposes lots of new measures for special needs providers to provide.

The document is very full of giving power to the people. Away with dictation from the centre! Conveniently glossing the fact that the whole document is yet another central initiative for the people to cope with. And I was amused to see that GLC creeps back as a helpful consortium for the provision of services. I wonder if that is the sort of thing it did before abolition by one of Cameron's predecessors?

There is no glossary. And the abbreviations get thicker on the ground as you get through the document. Thick enough that I had to keep flicking back to keep up with them. It would have be easier if there had been a glossary.

I think that is enough to be going on with!

PS: later in the day I happened to overhear a special talking very enthusiastically about his personal record and plan, part of this document's whole person theme. It was clearly working for him.