The Inquiry finds that there had been obvious signs of danger for several years prior to the attack. When he was 13, Rudakubana’s school had noted his unhealthy obsession with violence. He confided to Childline that he wanted to kill a schoolmate and that he had taken a knife into school for this purpose. Schools, Children’s Services, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), Child and Youth Justice, the Police — all had fragments of information. But somehow, this never formed a complete picture. No one agency realized just how dangerous Rudakubana had become, and none, therefore, took the required action. Alongside more localized recommendations for individual agencies, Fulford finds a need for greater inter-agency cooperation and information sharing.

Alongside this, though, the Inquiry also places significant related blame at the door of Rudakubana’s parents, especially his father, for a “combative and unhelpful attitude”. The agencies’ failure to intervene more effectively, Fulford concludes, is partly down to how hard the parents made that job. The parents “sought to avoid, rather than engage with, the statutory services that were available to them”, and were “deliberately selective” which agencies they shared information with. They “refused to take legitimate professional concerns seriously”. They “wanted to try to control the narrative”, sometimes “trying to turn professionals against each other” for this purpose. The parents, Fulford argues, should have “trusted” the agencies, and empowered said agencies to control their son’s case.

It is at this point that Fulford’s narrative begins to seriously trouble me, as I’m sure it will many parents of autistic children. Rudakubana is autistic. And as a parent of (non-violent) autistic children myself, I have also (variously) either done, or been falsely recorded as doing, each of the above things that Fulford castigates the parents for, in one form or another. So too have thousands upon thousands of others. And we have had good reason. If Rudakubana’s parents didn’t see fit to “trust” the agencies — if they felt it was often better to selectively withhold information, if they drew on what some agencies had said to put pressure on the accounts of other agencies — well, in general terms, that all sounds exceptionally reasonable to me. We need to talk about trustworthiness.

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The shaming of SEND families

By Steve Boggan

So let’s back up a little. Autism is not especially rare; while it’s hard to estimate actual prevalence, it’s plausibly something like 5% of the population. What is it like to be a parent of an autistic child in England today?

Well, it’s a lot of things, several of which might cast interesting additional perspectives on the Fulford report. But I want to single out one in particular. While parenting an autistic child also has its more intrinsic challenges, for many of us, by far the most stressful aspects arise from interactions with schools and public services. Not only do many of these services fundamentally fail to understand autism — crucially, they also fail to acknowledge that they don’t understand autism. In particular, it is routine for public agencies to throw honesty, integrity, balance and ordinary epistemic standards completely out of the window when dealing with autistic children and their parents. The results for families are devastating.

The following scenario is pretty typical. (Honestly: the scenario itself is fictional, but I’ve constructed it largely from a collage of actual cases.) Meet Ben. Ben is an intelligent, articulate eight-year-old. He is also autistic, though perhaps not yet formally “diagnosed” as such. Things have mostly seemed fine for Ben so far, but in the last couple of months, the wheels have started to come off as regards school. Ben is increasingly reluctant to go. When his parents do manage to get him there, he clams up. It’s hard for his teachers to get him to enter the classroom.

What’s actually going on is that Ben, like so many other autistic children before and after him, finds the mainstream school environment overwhelming. For him, it’s a perfect storm of social complexity, unclear expectations, sensory overwhelm, unpredictability. The rough equivalent for a neurotypical child would be an environment in which they were poked all over at one-second intervals with needles, while blasted with loud music, while told to stand on one leg and correctly discriminate between jokes that are funny and those that are unfunny by someone else’s standards, on pain of ridicule. Now, at the same time — and with the other hand please — write a one-page news report from the point of view of a penguin visiting your school for a day. Detention if I don’t like what you write.

Ben simply can’t do it any more. The whole place terrifies and bewilders him. It feels dangerous. His mouth goes dry and he gets stabbing chest pains at the very thought of it. Ben desperately needs the adults around him to understand this.

This is not the way the school sees things, however. In their version of the story, Ben is being stubborn and disobedient, and making bad choices. He needs to learn that he can’t always just do what he feels like, and that ignoring instructions from adults is unacceptable. The solution is to be more strict with him; there need to be consequences for noncompliance. And since there’s clearly nothing wrong with the school, the cause of all this must be parenting deficiencies.

Slightly taken aback by the suggestion but knowing that they have nothing to hide, Ben’s parents accept that a social worker is to visit their home. But the social worker already knows, going in, what her answer must be. The home environment and the parenting style are picked apart. It doesn’t look like a neurotypical household! The social worker gives the parents the lists of changes they need to make, copy-pasted out of Parenting 101.

The next part of the story has two versions; choose your own adventure. In the first, the parents humbly agree that they have been doing it all wrong, and follow the social worker’s advice. Then Ben really loses it. It turns out that all those little adaptations to his individual needs that his parents had made at home over the years, by experimentation and parental intuition, had made the home his safe haven, his one fixed point in an otherwise bewildering world. In the second version, Ben’s parents are wise to this; they politely but assertively explain to the social worker what traditional parenting methods are often contraindicated for autistic children, and that what they are already doing works for their family. Bad move: the social worker adds to her file the especially damning fact that the parents are difficult, that they refuse to accept “professional” guidance. Never mind that the professionals in question are not autism professionals — or the fact that actual autism professionals would generally back up the parents’ account.

Either way, the social worker goes away with her notes. The parents are neglectful, the home life is chaotic and lacking in boundaries, and the parents are either unable or unwilling to implement the required improvements. Ben’s parents receive a letter from Children’s Services. “We have been informed that you are placing barriers in the way of your child’s education.” Statutory social service intervention in the family is now under consideration.

Ben himself, though unaware of the story developing behind the scenes, spirals further into crippling anxiety, as the school pursues exactly the wrong response to his neurotype. Ben’s parents are meanwhile steadily going out of their minds with worry, both about Ben’s immediate plight and about being referred to social services. His dad loses his job at his next review, no longer able to perform effectively while all this is occupying his headspace. This is the agencies’ “support” for Ben and his family.

Such anecdotes became loud and frequent enough that NHS England commissioned West Midlands ADASS, an association of social care professionals, to investigate. The result was a 2024 report: “Blamed instead of helped: How parents of autistic children experience parental blame when they approach services for support.” The investigation found that 86% of parents experienced “parent blame” after seeking support for their autistic child along roughly the lines of the above.

“Having been placed on Child Protection, I felt the immense injustice in this,” the report quotes one parent as saying; “[t]hey ripped apart every facet of my life in the CP reports. It was a manuscript of grotesque lies, misinterpretations, and invasions.” “Coping with the blame and having to defend ourselves from false accusations has led to a delay in our ability to get the right help,” writes another. “Discriminated against because Health [service] lied to cover up their own negligence which has been utterly horrific and traumatizing,” relates a third. Parents report the development of complex PTSD, nervous breakdown and relationship breakdown. Some families choose to withdraw their child from formal education, or to move overseas, to escape.

I found out about this because I am part of this 86%. A while back, I spent a few months liaising with my son’s school and local authority, in a quest for appropriate support for his education. While the lack of autism awareness was blatant, the “parent blame” in my own case was applied more subtly, primarily in agency documents that I was never meant to see. I happened to obtain these documents via Subject Access Request, some time later. Reading those documents (and re-reading them, as I really should stop doing) transports me into an alternative reality. “A manuscript of grotesque lies, misinterpretations and invasions” is a pretty accurate description. In addition to the list of alleged safeguarding concerns, I was surprised to read in the official records that, just like Rudakubana’s parents, I too have apparently refused to acknowledge or discuss numerous legitimate concerns from professionals — concerns whose existence, in my case, nobody ever mentioned to me. I was surprised to read that I too have denied relevant professionals appropriate access to support my child — access that they never asked for, for “support” that they never offered. I’m officially considered a “safeguarding” risk to my child; my family is now “known to social services”, and will be forevermore.

My first reaction to all this was shock and disbelief — then anger, disgust, irrational shame, a raging sense of injustice, everything mixed together. I haven’t slept properly for several months now, since receiving that SAR. The words keep going round in my head in the small hours. I’m hypervigilant now at the school drop-off, always wondering what crime I might be committing today that could tip us over the edge into a formal safeguarding referral. I’m wise now to how things can be distorted, once the school has decided on an uncharitable interpretation of a particular family. Somebody wiped their mouth on their sleeve? “Children’s clothes are routinely soiled.” One of my children runs ahead to join her friend? “Parents have been observed not to exercise adequate supervision for ensuring children’s safety.” A child has a meltdown on the way in? God forbid. I’m on anxiety medication now for the first time in my life. Still, looking at the stories in the West Midlands ADASS report, I guess I am one of the lucky ones.

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Returning to the Southport Inquiry, all this raises two questions for me. First: while the Southport Inquiry did allow a voice to Rudakubana’s parents, it draws very heavily on agency accounts. Such agencies are known to have widespread practices of misinterpretation, distortion and outright lying in their narratives about parents of struggling autistic children. I am not in general a cynical person but I do wonder: how much credence, exactly, should we give to the Inquiry’s narrative about the parents?

But even if Fulford’s own conclusions about Rudakubana’s parents are fair and accurate as far as they go — the second, more important, thing is that there is a further question. Let us grant, at least for the sake of argument, that Rudakubana’s parents were somewhat (or very) uncooperative with agencies, that they sometimes sought to avoid agency involvement, that they were selective in information sharing, and so on. Let us also grant that these things contributed to the tragic events of 29 July 2024. The further question is: why did the parents behave in those ways, insofar as they did? And just how unreasonable were they to do so?

Well, I don’t know. But in light of the above, a rather obvious speculative answer does suggest itself. If Rudakubana’s parents started out fully trusting and cooperative, but withdrew much of that trust as a direct result of their agency interactions, they would be far from alone. In the West Midlands ADASS investigation, 73% of parents surveyed report doing the same thing; I myself have done the same thing.

Seeking to avoid the “services” that are available to me, and being deliberately selective about which ones to share information with? Absolutely; I’d have to be mad not to. I know now that I have to be careful in picking the services that understand neurodivergence and actually provide useful support, and to avoid the parent-blamers like the plague. A desire to reclaim some control over the narrative? If the official narrative says that my child is stubbornly choosing to miss out on his education as a result of lack of boundaries in the home, yes please, some opportunity to correct that narrative would be nice. Trying to turn professionals against one another? Well, if that means things like paying a psychologist to write a letter saying the same things that I’ve been trying to tell the school about what my child does and doesn’t need, then tick, I’ve done that. Do I trust the school, after all this, not to manipulate the information they record? You must be kidding.

Over the centuries, we have made enormous progress toward the ideal of having the right institutions in place for effective cooperation where it is needed, and ensuring the warranted trust that allows those institutions to be effective. But gaps remain, and we must recognize them. And where we find them, it is our responsibility, as a society, to fix them. Trust has to be earned. Support for autistic children is one such gap.

This is not to exonerate the parents in the Southport case. There are obviously differences between Rudakubana’s case and that of a non-violent child who merely struggles to access education. But if, as Sir Fulford concludes, the parents’ lack of trust in the agencies contributed to the tragedy of 29 July 2024, and if in addition, as I have speculated, the parents’ lack of trust might have been entirely warranted — well, it does bear some thought.

Days after the Local Government Association warned that eight-in-ten councils could face bankruptcy due to the rising costs of SEND provision, the Government announced it would spend £5 billion canceling their debts. This may ease council fears of financial calamity — but only adds to the narrative that costs have spiraled out of control. The Times was swift to pin these costs on “sharp-elbowed” parents in wealthier areas, reflecting a view that is popular in the Right-wing press and eagerly parroted by opportunistic politicians: that Britain is facing an epidemic of “over-diagnosis” thanks to some noxious combination of snowflakery, entitlement and greed. Meanwhile, parents, clinicians and educationalists insist that the needs of disabled children and young people are real — and to blame them for the breakdown of a system that is, in fact, woefully failing them is not merely unfair but a callous misdirection.

The debate — if that’s not too generous a term — has been cruel and at times exhausting. As the father of a young man (Joey, aged 29) with no speech, severe learning disabilities and intractable epilepsy, it feels personal. What both sides can agree on, I hope, is that the current system is broken and needs urgent reform. But my fear is that a generation of children is about to lose their legal right to an education. Given how hard the struggle to gain that right has been, this would represent an enormous backwards step for equality in this country.

***

It is worth remembering how we got here. The Provençal doctor Jean Marc Itard (1774-1838) can claim to be the founder of special education. Hearing of a non-verbal, feral 11-year-old boy who had spent his childhood in the woods of Aveyron in southwest France, Itard spent six long years trying to teach him speech and language, and rudimentary social skills. He eventually gave up on Victor (as he called him) as a lost cause — but Itard’s account of his systematic, if sometimes brutal, methods provided a template for the many approaches that followed.

By the mid-19th century, the Enlightenment dream of “educating the idiot” had given way to greater pessimism. Confining thousands of children with learning disabilities in asylums and so-called “colonies”, far removed from mainstream society, became the norm. It was also in this period that terms such as “idiot”, “imbecile” and “moron” were first used in this context. By the early 20th century, the British eugenics movement enjoyed the support of many progressive educators, intellectuals and politicians. The Nazis were so disgusted by these so-called “useless eaters”, whom they dismissed as a drain on the public purse, that they murdered tens of thousands of them.

It is often assumed that the defeat of Hitler’s Germany ushered in an assertion of universal human value. But the 1944 Education Act, one of the most cherished achievements of the postwar welfare state, divided children into two distinct groups: the “educable” and the “ineducable”. Schools for the “educationally subnormal” were established for those on the borderline, but a small cohort was rejected as not worth the trouble. Their destiny was to live in overcrowded “long-stay hospitals” for the rest of their lives, ignored and almost entirely forgotten.

It took until 1967 for this practice to be challenged, when the Austrian refugee and special educationalist Stanley Segal wrote his remarkable polemic, No Child is Ineducable. This paved the way for the 1970 Education (Handicapped Children) Act, whose chief objective was to bring educational segregation to an end. Progress was slow, however, and Segal was compelled to produce a follow-up in the 1980s which challenged politicians to deliver on what they had promised. But a parliamentary report as late as 2009 declared that the system was still “living with a legacy of a time when children with Special Educational Needs were seen as uneducable”.

Furthermore, the 1970 Act didn’t resolve how these promises should be delivered in practice. An inquiry chaired by the philosopher Mary Warnock recommended that the negative concept of educational “handicap” should be replaced with the more generous catch-all, “special needs”. The resulting 1981 Education Act insisted on support within mainstream schools wherever possible, with special schools reserved for the small number of children with defined disabilities.

New Labour stressed the ideal of “inclusion”. Thus, the 2001 SEND Act stipulated that children with learning disabilities should enjoy the same educational opportunities as their non-disabled brothers and sisters — with “reasonable adjustments” made to ensure that they could, for the most part, attend mainstream schools. The Act outlawed educational discrimination and launched the system of SEND Tribunals, whereby parents could appeal against decisions made by the education authorities.

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This rare moment of optimism was not to last, however. Complaints mounted that children with learning disabilities were holding back their more able peers, and David Cameron’s coalition government set out to “end the bias” towards inclusion. The result was the 2014 Children and Families Act, a carefully considered attempt to deliver a more holistic approach. One of its key innovations was the introduction of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), which were designed to offer a person-centered, joined-up description of a child’s individual needs and to specify the particular support that local authorities were legally obliged to deliver.

EHCPs were largely welcomed by parents and educators alike. In recent years, however, these documents have become increasingly contentious — described by some as “golden tickets”, a means of parents, especially middle-class ones, to “game the system”. Last year rumors abounded that EHCPs were going to be abolished altogether. We’ll see. However, limiting them to children with only the most severe and complex needs seems the most likely outcome.

All of this is taking place against a background where politicians increasingly cast doubt on the validity of professional diagnoses. Late last year, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, made his own position explicit, commissioning a review into the “over-diagnosis” of conditions such as ADHD and autism —  lending credibility to claims that have more often been voiced on the Right. Streeting did, to his credit, later retract his claims. Nigel Farage — who wrongly suggested that GPs were responsible — argued that we are “massively over-diagnosing those with mental illness problems and other general behavioral disabilities”. Kemi Badenoch spoke of a cultural shift in which disabilities have changed from something “people should work on themselves” to “something that society, schools, and employers have to adapt around”.

The history of learning disability is riddled with similar anxieties, resulting from similar category errors. Thus, the rapid expansion in the early 20th century of the number of people branded as “feeble-minded” — a category that lumped together schizophrenics, depressives, alcoholics and unmarried mothers — directly fueled the proliferation of inhumane asylums and “mental defective colonies”. Indeed, the Edwardians spoke of such people as a “social menace”.

But the current rhetoric is something different. By denying the validity of professional diagnoses, a number of ignorant politicians and journalists have placed the blame for the cost of the SEND system on the young people affected, their parents and the clinicians.

***

Of course, behind all this, lurks the contentious question of funding. As the rising number of SEND diagnoses have placed budgets under extreme pressure, local authorities have discovered a range of money-saving loopholes — which turn out not to save money after all.

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The SEND paradox

By Gabriel McKeown

Thus, as the National Audit Office recently reported, £2 billion is spent every year on transporting disabled children and young people to school. But many local authorities are refusing to provide such transport to disabled children over the age of 16. This is because the 2015 legislation, which mandated education or training for all young people failed to update the guidance on SEND transport to include young people from 16 to 19. The result is that many cannot attend school unless their parents pay for taxis or can drive them themselves — often long distances to one of the small number of special schools in the country. One mother I know has had to find £400 per month to ensure that her 18-year-old disabled son can enjoy the same right to an education as his non-disabled peers. And she’s confronted every morning by the sight of half-empty minibuses driving disabled younger children past her house to school. Theory has trumped practice and families pay the price.

Resorting to such loopholes suggests that the oft-repeated commitment to equal rights in education is wafer-thin. Indeed, I’m told by sources familiar with the process that the panels who make the decisions about educational placements are urged by budget holders to turn down any option which costs more than the bare minimum. The result is predictable: vast sums of public money are squandered on legal services to fight parents at the tribunals which follow, with a 2023 report putting the figure at almost £80 million a year. This has led to a tragic breakdown in confidence between families and their local authorities, with the rights and dignities of disabled children betrayed yet again.

To add insult to injury, a recent investigation carried out by Isos, a research and advisory company, seemed to place blame for these problems on the growing number of disabled children and their “demanding parents”. As one commentator put it, the “research and recommendations appear to be aligned with the financial concerns of local government, rather than those of children and young people being let down”. It’s time we stopped blaming children and their families. It is, quite simply, a form of gaslighting.

The reality is that, as with so much in Britain, the SEND system has become tragically contested. Many local authorities are reluctant to issue an EHCP, or lack the expertise to do so properly. Writing one is in any case a tortuous process, requiring reams of expert evidence, with parents advised to describe their child’s disabilities in the most negative terms imaginable. Even when an appropriate EHCP is agreed on, success depends on securing not just a place at the right school, but also the vanishingly rare specialist intervention required: speech and language and occupational therapy, dyslexia support, and so on.

The irony is that the EHCPs are well-designed tools that identify individual needs and provide the legal framework necessary for addressing them. Crucially — and almost entirely overlooked amid the current noise — an EHCP describes more than just education, and includes health (“H”) and social care (“C”) needs. It provides crucial support for children from impoverished or troubled backgrounds as well as those with health issues. My Joey, who required a residential setting suitable for his intractable epilepsy, is one of those people who benefit from EHCPs. The crucial point is that every child is different and every child has different requirements. We can only deliver on the great ideal of “person-centered” educational support if we engage with the wide range of challenges that our children and young people face.

The EHCPs are not perfect and could be streamlined, but parents know that they offer the last legal bastion protecting the rights and dignities of their disabled children. The financial challenges faced by local authorities will not magically disappear if EHCPs are abolished. Scrapping them would not curb the rate of diagnoses either — it would simply serve to shoot the messenger.

It’s not as if parents of disabled children aren’t hard-pressed enough already. As Scope’s “Disability Price Tag” indicates, families with a disabled member have to find on average an additional £1,095 per month to achieve the same standard of living as non-disabled ones. In other words, the state is hardly keeping disabled children and their families in the lap of luxury.

What’s more, as a new report by the charity Cerebra has concluded, instead of receiving help, parents “face a relentless, hostile, and bureaucratic fight for basic support. They are met with disbelief, repeated assessments, and processes that leave them feeling blamed or broken.” Surely they deserve better.

Meanwhile, politicians who are concerned about the rising costs of educating disabled people should stop blaming the children — and start looking into where the money is actually being spent. Private finance has poured into the sector in recent decades, creating a highly profitable network of independent special schools, academy trusts and residential care settings. Senior management, property developers and shareholders have all benefited handsomely from the huge fees that they can extract from local authorities. This money could be used to make children’s lives better. Instead it is being extracted by a small army of lawyers, consultants and financiers. If there is a system that is being gamed, here it is.

***

Finally, we should consider a grim but significant statistic: the median life expectancy for a (white) man with learning disabilities is 63, compared with 81 for the general population. There are many reasons for this, but the dreadful consequence is that the vast majority of people with learning disabilities will never draw a state pension, receive winter fuel allowance or travel benefits, let alone incur any of the considerable costs incurred in health and social care by an aging population. It’s a brutal fact that short lives cost the state less money.

Meanwhile, every child, regardless of cost, regardless of ability, has a legal and moral right to an education. It is hard to imagine politicians questioning whether society can afford the £8,500 a year that, on average, we spend on non-disabled children, whatever their academic abilities. And so, the underlying question remains: are we prepared to grant children and young people with learning disabilities the same educational opportunities as their non-disabled siblings?

If the answer is “no” — if we conclude that some children are fundamentally “ineducable” — we must abandon our cherished notions of equality of opportunity and universal human rights. But if, instead, we insist that that all children have an inalienable right to an education, we must bring rationality, pragmatism and a renewed sense of shared humanity to ensure that every young person, whatever their differences, receives the support that they need, so they can thrive, grow and realize their potential. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out where to stand.

“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.