“One teacher in particular showed no sense of understanding Charlie’s problems and would actually be sarcastic with him,” recalls his mother Michelle. “When I tried to explain what his problems were, the teacher wouldn’t have it. They just said he was naughty.”

There was nothing Michelle could do to persuade, cajole or bribe the boy out the door — and nine years old is far beyond the point of physical coercion. Besides, which parent would force their child to a place where they were screaming they didn’t feel safe?

Such tearful, exasperated negotiations are now part of the morning routine in hundreds of thousands of British homes. More than one in five children is now persistently absent from school, according to the Department for Education. In 2022-23, one in 50 pupils missed over half of the school year — the figure has grown by 150% since the Covid pandemic. This is a national crisis playing out in our overcrowded, over-regimented, under-resourced schools that no amount of blaming and shaming seems able to abate.

For this is not — as Charlie’s teacher told his mother — a case of children being “naughty”. The vast majority of the absent children (92% according to one study) have special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). For vast numbers of neurodivergent and autistic children in particular, school has become a hostile environment — a place they feel unable simply to be, let alone learn, let alone thrive. Research by the National Autistic Society has found that only one in four autistic students feels happy at school. Many SEND pupils share stories of being traumatised. “By the age of 16, I was self-harming just to get through the day,” is how the trustee of one autism charity put it. Charlie would go on to threaten suicide — describing in detail to his mother how he intended to go about it.

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The academic term for this is “school distress”. A recent Newcastle University study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, describes it as a symptom of a “systemic failure” of the education system to meet the needs of young people — in effect, a denial of their legal right to education. As the study makes clear, the effects on the entire family are catastrophic, with parents often sliding into debt as they are forced to give up careers to look after their distressed children. Meanwhile, they are threatened, shamed, disbelieved and gaslit by the authorities. “I had suspected the results might be bleak, but just how bleak was really shocking,’” says Dr Sinéad Mullalley, a lecturer in neuropsychology at Newcastle University, who led the recent study into the crisis. Asked to measure the mental health effects of school refusal in comparison with 17 other traumatic life events, such as serious personal injury or sexual assault, the parents ranked it as the second-most traumatic. Only the death of a child or spouse was worse.

It is compounded by a total lack of understanding from the authorities. As Charlie’s absenteeism worsened, Michelle was called into school for a meeting with his class teacher, an educational psychologist, a specialist autism teacher, the school’s deputy head, class teacher, a speech and language therapist and a pediatrician. It was the pediatrician who told Michelle that the fact that Charlie couldn’t cope in class was essentially her fault. “She said: ‘I find lots of parents just want a label for their children to cover the fact that they’re not good at parenting.’”

Michelle was, by this point, used to criticism. “When you have a child with autism and you have difficulties getting them to go to school — for all sorts of valid reasons — you are often disbelieved, blamed, shamed and made to feel guilty,” she tells me. But to have the careless comment come from a pediatrician was actually painful.

The broader picture is that Britain’s school children are not OK. Since 2010, mental health conditions have mushroomed among Britain’s young people to the point that it is no exaggeration to talk of a crisis. According to the Department for Education, more than 1.6 million pupils in England now have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), an increase of 101,000 since 2023.

To some extent, these increases are explained by an increased willingness to share experiences as well as efforts to destigmatize mental health. But this has led to new problems: online questionnaires that diagnose just about everyone with a smartphone with ADHD; common adolescent issues pathologized as conditions needing labels and treatment; and an ever-greater number of parents and children competing over ever-diminishing resources.

It has also produced its own backlash: witness the current anxieties about “overdiagnosis” and fears of sharp-elbowed middle-class parents seeking to gain extra exam time for their darlings. None of which provides any succor to families with genuine needs — who now face the additional risk of being assumed to be somehow gaming the system. Meanwhile, the Government’s attempts to improve the woeful attendance figures have shown an almost comical level of misunderstanding. Last year, an advert featured a laughing schoolgirl and the caption “This morning, she was worried about school… but look at her now!” It was widely criticized by those involved. “I can’t begin to say how angry this makes me feel. It is making parents feel guilty. We would love our children to be able to attend school,” one parent told the BBC.

The Newcastle study makes for bleak reading. Based on extensive interviews with hundreds of parents suffering from school distress, it is the first investigation into the effects on parents as well as children. Over half of the parents developed new mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety and sleeplessness, following the onset of their child’s school distress. Almost 79% said they felt they had not been believed by school staff when raising concerns about their child, and a further 47% said they had felt “threatened or vulnerable” while trying to discuss problems with a member of school staff. “This isn’t trivial,” says Dr Mullaley “These parents are dealing with a very distressed child, but they’re also dealing with the impact of that on all aspects of their life. They’re struggling financially in an awful lot of cases, and their mental health is declining as a consequence.”

It is the dismissal of the issue that Mullalley feels is most concerning. “There is such a power imbalance,” she says. “They are threatened with fines and court action and disempowered by the actions of professionals surrounding their child.” The cases can quickly escalate: social services become involved; child protection assessments are undertaken; parents soon find their own motives questioned. “That is such a profound threat.”

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In Michelle and Charlie’s case, the situation became worse before it became better. “At the beginning, there is self-doubt and you think that the professionals must be right, and you question everything you do,” says Michelle. “But then there is frustration, because there are so many professionals involved in your child’s life, but they don’t talk to each other, and often you don’t get to find out about decisions made about your child.”

Covid, and then a transfer to a special school, only seemed to make matters more dire. Charlie became withdrawn and dysregulated, lost worrying amounts of weight and threatened suicide on several occasions. “I have a therapeutic background and I know that when a person is serious, they can tell you how they’re going to do it,” says Michelle. “That was really upsetting – that, and the fact that when he started to lose weight, I had no control over it. I couldn’t make him eat, and I couldn’t keep him safe… And all the time you feel people are judging you. Is he being difficult or are you being soft?”

The costs are not only borne by parents — who are in many cases thrust into full-time care roles. When a child is in difficulties, their parents may apply for an education, health and care plan (EHCP) assessment from their local authority. This can attract extra funding and practical support. However, the number of parents applying for an EHCP has doubled during the past eight years — and now half a million pupils have one in place. Councils’ budget deficits accrued on SEND spending are expected to rise from £2.4 billion to £6 billion by 2026, according to the County Council’s Network (CCN).

Such is the demand that only around half of the applications for care plans are processed within the regulated 20 weeks. When SEND support is not approved by local authorities, parents can appeal to a tribunal at a further cost to councils. Last year, 98 per cent of these appeals were upheld. The system is in a shocking mess, but rather than address the failure, the Government has instead floated proposals which would remove education, health and care plans (EHCPs) from children altogether.

Parents often end up in Kafkaesque nightmares as they negotiate this bureaucracy. Catriona Magee’s autistic son, Adam, 14, had been out of school for two and a half years when the local council wrote to insist that he actually was in “full-time education”. In reality, Catriona could not find a school that would take him. Adam was in his bedroom, retreating further into himself.

“It was institutional gaslighting and it blew my mind,” Catriona tells me. “I think it would break many people. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was a mother and I had to keep going, I can see why people would top themselves over this.”

By this point Adam had spent years trying to fit in at schools that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — accommodate his autism. “How he copes depends on the environment he’s in,” says Catriona. “If he’s in the right environment and he’s comfortable, you would think he’s fine. But if he’s in the wrong environment, he can’t function at all.”

In common with many students, Adam’s problems exacerbated after the second Covid lockdown in October 2021. She would manage to get him out of the door but he would be sweating and stressed by the time they reached school. “He just couldn’t get through the door, or he’d get towards the door and then he would just run or he’d hide under a bench or he’d start spinning round and round.”

He wouldn’t attend school regularly again until March 2024. During this time, Catriona engaged in a series of administrative and legal challenges with her local authority and meanwhile was forced to abandon a masters in social work and give up her regular job, meaning her household income effectively halved.

“The whole thing is so isolating,” she says. “No parent wants their child to have problems. No parent wants their child to be ‘the disruptor child’ stuck at home with no future. All I want is to get on with my life, to have a job, for my son to be happy, for him to be learning, to have friends, and to have a future. That’s all I want. And it shouldn’t be that much to ask, but apparently it’s impossible.”

As isolated as parents feel, the experience is common enough for it not to be a simple issue of individual failure. Something, clearly, has gone very wrong for many, many British children. The system is clearly no longer fit for purpose. Ellie Costello founded the group Square Peg, after her two children experienced school distress. Since 2019, she has seen the Facebook support groups for affected parents rise from 1,000 to 73,000 members, with many sharing similar stories. “We are seen either as  pointy-elbowed and entitled golden ticket seekers for our little emperors, or we’re feckless and ignorant people who don’t value education and keep our kids out of school,” she says.

She is one calling for an overarching change to the education system, with actual clinical supervision built into schools in order that teachers can get on with teaching. “Teaching and schooling is one of the only front-facing key worker services that doesn’t have clinical therapeutic supervision built into it,” she says. Under the current system, it is effectively left to the schools. Some are sympathetic and handle the problem well. Others make the matter far worse.” There is currently no overarching guidance on what best practice looks like and what the worse-performing schools can learn from the better ones.

This may sound like more resources. But as with so many of Britain’s problems, the failure to address it at source means that we waste billions further down the line. Meanwhile, we have hundreds of thousands of children spending time that they could be learning, playing, socializing — being children — isolated, miserable and traumatized in their bedrooms, and their parents slowly descending into debt, misery and quiet desperation. It’s a tragic waste. I have twice asked the Department for Education to respond to the study and to ask whether it would consider providing the training and support professionals so clearly want. Depressingly, it has failed to respond.

Last week, the Government was forced into a humiliating climb-down on its attempts to address the welfare bill. This week’s fight will be over the provision of support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (or SEND) another political hot potato — pitting underfunded councils against desperate families trapped in a broken system. Everyone involved is a victim of Britain’s paradox of good intentions, as reforms meant to safeguard the rights of vulnerable children, instead have created an open-ended legal obligation to deliver bespoke support — whether money is available or not. The result is reactive, chaotic and wildly expensive, as desperate children are left in the lurch and thoughtful reform nowhere to be seen.

Once a niche element of educational provisions, SEND has grown into a budget-devouring juggernaut. In the past financial year, total funding for young people with complex needs reached £10.5 billion. This is an increase of nearly 60% in just five years. It’s an unsustainable trend, with councils from Hampshire to London soon set to go bust.

As with many policy missteps, the roots of today’s SEND crisis can be traced back to a well-intentioned piece of legislation. The Children and Families Act 2014 was sold as a landmark shift towards a more compassionate and family-centric approach to supporting those with special educational needs. It featured Education, Health and Care Plans — known as EHCPs — which would provide support from birth up to age 25. Eligibility criteria was also broadened, so that more children could qualify for assistance. Yet, most crucially, it also reinforced the legal rights of families to receive tailored support packages. In England, one-in-20 pupils now have a formal special needs plan, and almost a fifth receive a form of SEND support. As a result, all of these children are now legally entitled to a range of specialist support services.

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Yet this increase in numbers — which continues to rise — hasn’t been accompanied by the required funding: demand has outstripped budgets to such an extent that funding per EHCP has actually fallen by 35% in real terms. Inevitably, in an effort to ration scarce funds, councils have started to unlawfully or unreasonably deny support to families. There’s an irony here: the more rights families were theoretically given, the more adversarial the system actually became. At the same time, record numbers of families have started challenging councils over support packages they felt their child needed, and by 2023, local authorities lost 95% of SEND tribunal appeals in 2023. This clumsy attempt at cost-saving had the knock-on effect of forcing councils to spend an estimated half a billion pounds defending themselves in tribunal cases.

This created a farcical — and deeply harmful — cycle of rejection and defence for families forced to fight for their children’s basic rights. They’re routinely portrayed as adversaries of the system. But the routine of legal conflict has become a sad necessity for those trying to secure support, with a mechanism intended to assist the most vulnerable transformed into yet another barrier to overcome. According to a report by the LGA, in fact, these legal hurdles produce “long-term misery, stress and hardship” for both the children and their parents. Even worse, the lengthy legal proceedings have been known to cost close to £20,000 in some cases, a figure prohibitively expensive to many frantic parents.

Councils increasingly realize that a lack of money isn’t a suitable defense when challenged, and not just because they’ve spent half a billion pounds in doomed court cases over recent years. Through the 2014 Act, Parliament had created an absolute legal obligation to provide support — without any exceptions. As a result, and unlike other types of public spending, these services can’t be pruned or means-tested when funds are low. This is the crux of the SEND crisis, and it’s the same fundamental tension wreaking havoc through local public services more generally.

In the case of SEND, the 2014 Act had the effect of giving every qualifying child a blank check for support which couldn’t be refused. This provided fertile ground for opportunists keen to exploit the legal bind. For instance, the council’s statutory duty to provide free transportation to SEND children has spawned a £1.4 billion school taxi industry. Over the past five years alone, spending on home-to-school transport for disabled pupils has doubled, with many local authorities now allocating more funds to SEND transport than to road maintenance.

These eye-watering figures aren’t hard to understand. With councils having no alternative method of fulfilling its legal obligation, the price of a single taxi journey has soared. In areas where providers are scarce, firms are able to indulge in blatant price-gouging, charging significant premiums for their services. In Bristol, a single taxi journey for one student can cost the council $150. Mini-bus trips for multiple students have been known to exceed $1,700 per trip. This open-ended commitment has forced local authorities into the role of beggar, borrower, or defendant, a situation that inevitably hamstrings relations between citizens and the state.

Promises are continuously made at the government level. Yet when the time comes for delivery, they never materialize. This creates a natural distrust and resentment towards the powers-that-be. At best, this manifests itself in a disdain for local councils, with parents believing that they are solely to blame for ineffective services. At worst, this dynamic can even transform into a deep-seated belief that the social contract is irreversibly broken. Certainly, Whitehall will soon be unable to scapegoat regional government for its structural failures and fiscal irresponsibility. At that point, of course, cheery pre-election promises will be summarily dumped.

Yet if SEND is stomping social trust into the ground, it’s far from alone. Consider, for instance, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, another case of a legal obligation whose ramifications have been financially ruinous. The Act forced the Home Office to provide accommodation and basic support to any asylum applicants who would otherwise be homeless. That may have been manageable in previous years — but quickly became impossible after a surge of arrivals, particularly via Channel crossings. With local housing capacities exhausted, the Government has resorted to mass-booking hotels as a temporary stopgap. This has seen the Home Office’s asylum support budget ballooning from around $700 million in 2019 to $5.4 billion last year. Like with SEND, meanwhile, private contractors are able to reap vast profits from the state’s absolute legal duty to house asylum seekers.

Both these failures highlight another serious structural flaw in the way Britain works. There is a total imbalance between the central government — which is incentivized to announce sweeping legislation to impress the electorate — and the local councils forced to pick up the pieces. Unsurprisingly, this creates an environment ripe for buck-passing. Regional councils can complain about their increasing responsibilities and dwindling funds, even as Whitehall can accuse councils of mismanagement or inefficiency in delivery.

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Both sides have a point, but disasters like SEND are simply the inevitable consequence of years of policy layering without sufficient consolidation. That’s ultimately a legal problem. Within the British legal system, after all, a “rights revolution” has taken place. Inspired by instruments like the Human Rights Act, it increasingly means the public is legally entitled to public services. In the case of SEND reforms, these transformed the broad human right of education into a highly specific, iron-clad, and judicially enforceable obligation to each child with special needs.

In isolation, this shifting legal philosophy may have been manageable. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a wave of austerity and marketization. Especially after 2010, the Government pursued fiscal belt-tightening and embraced private solutions to public problems, driven by the misguided belief that competition and decentralization would enhance implementation efficiency. The reality was an often-unmanageable fragmentation, making oversight difficult and reinforcing severe gaps in accountability. Britain soon became a nation that expanded rights while contracting its capacity to deliver them.

When it comes to SEND, certainly, there are signs that a little investment can go a long way — clear enough in the example of Sure Start, which drastically helped cut costs later. Yet any new funding must be focused on addressing issues at their root, rather than on the usual short-termism. Legal expenses are a prime example here. Rather than fighting families through the courts, councils might instead consider what services the vulnerable actually need. In practice, this is likely through the use of in-house providers, delivered at source, and without the pointless legal hoops.

Alas, the Government’s response to these challenges seems as reactive and piecemeal as ever, even as Labour MPs are using their newfound authority to strangle reform at birth. According to Helen Hayes, chair of the Commons education committee, reassuring parents that EHCPs remain intact is “the right thing to do”. In a sense, that’s unsurprising: no politician wants to remove the rights of vulnerable children, even if it’s a financial necessity. Yet that leaves MPs stuck in a trap of their own making, unwilling to fully fund the system but also unwilling to reform the laws that make the same system unmanageable. All the while, the cost of implementation will continue to rise, more local governments will collapse — and essential support for the most vulnerable children will only get worse. But as must surely be obvious by now, you can’t legislate with compassion if you implement with cruelty.

But of course, that’s a general principle, not an absolute rule. There are some things that should be prohibited, because the overwhelming evidence shows that even with all the information and the freedom to choose, we end up with results bad enough to justify intervention that limits the actions of individuals or groups.

That is the basis for my conclusion that it’s time to ban men.

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To be clear, I’m not advocating the elimination of my sex, nor that we be proscribed by law. My proposal is a modest one. I think men should be barred from holding elected office. Not forever, mind. This would just be a temporary measure, lasting perhaps 10 years — enough to cover three general elections under the infamous Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

At those elections — as well as those for devolved assemblies, local councils and mayoralties — only female candidates would be eligible to stand. The electorate would be unchanged: I have no desire to see men disenfranchised, not least because female politicians would need to compete for their votes. But for that decade, politics would be for women only. Men would be left to spectate, comment and criticise — and perhaps argue for faster progress towards the day when they too could wield power.

That’s the policy. What on earth is my justification for it? Why would anyone, let alone a man, propose such a thing?

Well, to go back to my initial premise: look at the evidence. We men have had an awful long time to get this right, to use our freedom and power to run things in the interests of the whole country. Have we taken that opportunity? Of course not. We’ve messed things up, and unless something radical happens, we’ll keep on doing so.

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I barely have room to list all the ways in which we’re screwing up. Maybe I should start with the most visceral — and talk about how we abuse and kill women. Even the official statistics, which inevitably exclude abuse that isn’t reported, show that 1.3 million women experienced domestic abuse last year. That’s 8% of the adult female population. Those figures include 139 women killed by men, who are generally partners and relatives.

This should be a scandal, a matter of outrage. Likewise the horrible, insidious trend towards men killing women then claiming in court that it was “a sex game gone wrong” — and sometimes getting away with it. Perhaps in some cases that’s true, but if so it’s the poisonous fruit of a rancid online culture of pornography that depicts choking women during sex as normal.

Surely though, not all men do this stuff? Surely we’re talking about a minority? Yes indeed. But where’s the male outrage, the anger from the majority? Why is it that the only politicians and journalists who regularly yell from the rooftops about these horrors are women? The fact that domestic violence and abuse are still often confined to the subdivision of “women’s issues” is proof that men have failed to use centuries of accrued power and authority wisely.

Another exhibit: the women’s prison estate, a collection of women most of whom are victims of abuse and who pose a greater threat to themselves than society. It should shame us to lock them up and worsen their lives, but again: how many men say so?

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More evidence for the prosecution can be found across the economy. Girls beat boys at school, but start to fall behind at university. Even when male and female careers begin on equal wages, the man will, on average, out-earn the woman within 10 years. The burdens of childcare and elderly parents fall on women, who don’t just suffer lower wages but smaller pensions and often worse health.

(This stuff is bad for men as well as women. I know several psychiatrists who think that male suicide — the biggest killer of men under 45 — is tied up with rigid ideas of male responsibilties to earn and succeed at work. If it were easier for more women to balance family and career, more men might do the same — and fewer men might die.)

Again, the failure to act — the collective male failure to resolve problems that are well-known and soluble but which happen to fall most heavily on women — is a sign of the failure of male leadership.

Put simply, if it were men being intimidated, beaten and murdered; men being demeaned and abused as entertainment; men whose careers were being routinely stunted — would successive parliaments mostly composed of men have done so little in response?

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This isn’t just about policies and laws. It’s about culture too, about the messages sent from those who run the country and dominate the debate to the rest of us. Imagine what the country would start to feel like if it became utterly routine, not worthy of note, to listen to a news report or political debate in which every voice was female. What message would that send to a generation of children about gender roles and aspiration? We’ve had two female prime ministers to date and those exceptions are effectively used to tell girls that if they’re truly exceptional too, they can get to the top. What if that wasn’t exceptional but normal, boring even?

Would we get better government, better politicians, if we banned men from high office? Of course not; women are no more intelligent, sensible, competent or rational than men. This isn’t some soapy attempt to argue that all-female governments would be kinder to the weak, more generous to fluffy animals and less likely to go to war than those run by men. Female politicians are as capable of vice and virtue as male ones. They’d screw up too, then answer for their failure. That accountability is the bedrock of elective politics.

Which is precisely why we men should step back and give them the chance to do so. We’ve ballsed things up, for women and ourselves. Time to give up and let someone else try to do better.