What do the SEND reforms mean for children with autism?

As it is World Autism Awareness Day, part of World Autism Awareness Week (WAAW), it is a good opportunity to consider whether children with autism will benefit from the special educational needs and disability (SEND) reforms that commenced in September 2014.

Autism is a spectrum disorder and can vary significantly. Within the spectrum are specific disorders such as Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism. The common features of all autistic spectrum disorders are the triad of difficulties:

1. Difficulty with social communication (such as facial expressions, commons phrases and sarcasm).
2. Difficulty with social integration (such as understanding and following social ‘rules’ or conventions).
3. Difficulty with social imagination (such as imaginative play, predicting what will happen next, empathy).

What are the reforms?

The SEND reforms were significant and have been described as the most significant change for a generation.

The main changes made are, in overview:

• To replace the Statement of SEN with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). The new document provides additional health and social care support which is enforceable.
• To raise the maximum age of SEN provision from 19 to 25.
• To introduce general principles that SEN provision should encourage ‘best possible outcomes’ and that families are central to decision making.
• To require that local authorities (LAs) publish a Local Offer setting out the SEN provision available in its area and nearby.
• To enable parents to request a Personal Budget.
• To enable LAs to direct an academy to admit a child with an EHCP.

The reforms followed the Lamb Inquiry which recommended that parents should be central in decision making, there needs to be a reduction in the amount of disagreement and support needs to be cooperative between education, health and social care in order to provide a holistic support package.

Will the reforms help children with autism?

In theory, they should. However, the main problem is the implementation of the reforms. From our experience so far, the following are the most significant problems:

• The local offer
  
  A DfE-commissioned review in November 2014 found that the quality, and value of the local offer varied significantly between Local Authorities (LAs). The case of R v Warwickshire was the first judicial review brought involving the Children and Families Act 2014 which found that Warwickshire at least had failed to prepare a sufficient local offer.LAs have been given very little information about what the local offer should look like or contain. The brief regulations and guidance set out who LAs should consult with and broadly what the local offer should contain. This has resulted in a postcode lottery with many LAs offering nothing more than a Yellow Pages of SEN provision.
• Personal Budgets
  
  A Personal Budget is, basically, the amount of money needed to ‘buy’ all the support detailed in the EHCP. However, even these seem to be going wrong. A DfE-commissioned report in November 2014 concluded that LAs did not know what services, resources or functions to draw on when calculating the Budget.
• Transition
  
  This is where the real problems are occurring. LAs are not following the correct process of converting a Statement of SEN to an EHCP. The general approach seems to be to copy the Statement into an EHCP with Outcomes being hurriedly prepared.Transition from Statement to EHCP must involve a full reassessment of the child’s special educational needs and should involve assessment by health and social care teams. A number of local authorities seem to consider that this is not necessary. On 26 March we attended a conference during which a number of LA representatives insisted that there was no obligation to conduct a full reassessment when moving from Statement of SEN to EHCP.

Conclusion

The two central reasons for the reforms were to reduce disagreement and to ensure holistic provision.

For children with autism, the reduction of disagreement is particularly important. Currently around half of all appeals to the Tribunal involve a child with autism. Reducing disagreement should reduce the amount that parents of children with autism feel the need to appeal.

In terms of the holistic provision, children with autism stand to benefit. In our experience, children with autism benefit from social care provision to enable access to the community and provide respite support. If those provisions are modified around a child’s autism it can be very beneficial.

The problem is that the poor implementation of the reforms is only causing an increase in disagreement. We are finding that education, health and social care teams are not working together as they should.

Local authorities have been given a huge task to implement the SEND reforms. As a rough guide, we calculated around £1 billion is needed to complete assessments for all 230,000 children with a Statement in the UK. There simply is not sufficient money in the system to give effect to the reforms.

So, whilst the reforms promise much and children with autism stand to benefit greatly, currently, those benefits are not being realised.