Sheffield mum's joy and frustration as autistic child finally gets SEND school placement after battle
An autistic child has been offered a SEND place at a Sheffield school after a lengthy battle with the city council.
Emma Bower had been battling, unsuccessfully, to get her six-year-old, non-verbal autistic son an appropriate school placement when she approached The Star.
She claimed she had ‘approached practically everybody in the local authority’ to get help, but to no avail.
She’D been in touch with her local MP, Clive Betts, and instigated two tribunals, but felt like she was continually hitting walls, she said.
Then, on September 14, The Star shared the family’s plight, explaining how Emma’s son was being taught in classrooms without other pupils as the mainstream school he’d been placed in was ill-equipped to handle his unique needs.
Three days later, Wednesday September 17, Emma received a call, informing her that her would be moved to the integrated resource school she knew would be able to help.
Although pleased for her son, Emma said she is frustrated that nobody had listened to her before she went to the press.
“It makes me all the more frustrated, because nothing’s changed,” she told The Star.
“His needs haven’t changed, the school’s the same, but there’s reputational damage.”
Before, the local partnership responsible for SEND services - which includes Sheffield City Council and the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board - had been claiming that a mainstream school was suitable for the youngster’s needs.
They had been blasted by a damning Ofsted report in March this year, which found ‘widespread and/or systemic failings leading to significant concerns about the experiences and outcomes of children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), which the local area partnership must address urgently’.
This included children waiting for an ‘unacceptable length of time’ to have their needs assessed and met, and too many youngsters with special educational needs being ‘permanently excluded’ leaving them with ‘unacceptable’ breaks in their education.
Emma believes that the partnership’s previous decision was not rooted in evidence on her child’s needs, but rather a lack of space and ‘balancing budgets while children like my son are left without a suitable education’.
“Three days after the article and suddenly they decided to agree with me,” she added.
“It’s what I’ve been fighting for all this time.
“I get a call on a Wednesday afternoon saying they reviewed all the information again, but before they were fighting me so hard on it.”
Sheffield Council has been contacted.