Mary Gilleece
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.
After working intensively with over 100 children with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities), I have finally met a child with actual special needs. He is a boy called David (not his real name) and is 18. He has microcephaly (a smaller head) and polymicrogyria (excessive small folds in the cortex). He has the mannerisms of a Down Syndrome child, laughs easily, has loving intentions, but lacks a full understanding of who he is and the world around him. He’s heavier than is healthy and has a wide-eyed trusting nature that puts him in danger. He cannot judge distance and has no stamina so spends most of his time in a wheelchair. While being able to read, he has little understanding of abstract concepts or emotions and seems to exist in a contented fog. I have been employed to teach him Functional Skills English and make him ready for independent living.
On his notes and EHCP (Education Health Care Plan), David has been recorded as autistic caused by his brain damage (thought to be caused during pregnancy). As an autist, it is deemed that David is capable of achieving various qualifications and living independently, largely because the majority of other children that are classed as autistic are capable of such. But this is because, from what I have seen professionally, the majority of children classed as autistic are not autistic. On meeting David, I have finally met a genuine Special Educational Needs student.
The incident has made me incandescent with rage, as it should the entire medical and political establishment.
I am employed by a council to provide extra support for children with special educational needs. All of the children I have worked with thus far, over 100, have been classified as having one or more of these conditions: ADHD, autism, ASD (autism spectrum disorder), ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), PDA (pathological demand avoidance), anxiety or depression. While all of the over 100 children I have worked with exhibit a variety of challenging behaviours and have very upsetting family situations, none of them have anything biologically or neurologically wrong with them. Not one. Until I met David last week.
As way of comparison with David, let me introduce Eoife (again, not her real name). Eoife is representative of the majority of female students I work with. Her father left when she was nine and her life capsized. Her mother had to move out of the family home and she and her three children lived in homeless accommodation for six months. Eoife didn’t enjoy school after that and has been in and out since year seven. She developed anxiety. She is on the waiting list for a suspected autism and ADHD diagnosis. She takes sertraline and melatonin. The family now live in new-build social housing and her mum is on Universal Credit. Eoife is now in year 10 and is being tutored at home by me. She has certainly had a rotten time but shows no other signs of having anything biologically or neurologically wrong with her. She refuses to do any school work because it makes her feel pressurised. Eoife is in no way unusual.
The same goes for the typical male SEND student I have. Monty for example. A 14-year-old boy who has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism and is prescribed methylphenidate, melatonin, sertraline and an anti-psychotic. He spends most nights gaming and is unsurprisingly tired and aggressive during the day. He struggled with school where he would fight. He refuses to work, saying it makes him “overwhelmed” and “heightened”. He lives with his mum, a step dad who he hates and a younger brother who has also begun to miss school.
There are hundreds of thousands of children like this up and down the country. They are very, very troubling cases, but to classify them in the same category as boys like David is deeply and disgustingly wrong. As the recent Policy Exchange report put it:
The SEND, child disability and mental health systems are failing to distinguish between legitimate and exaggerated claims for support. 94 per cent of Education Health and Care Plan assessments were successful in 2024, whilst the vast majority of assessments for Disability Living Allowance are conducted without the assessor ever meeting the child.
The black muddle we have got into regarding SEND is at the core of our national malaise for it involves lies and money. Lots of it. SEND is set to cost £11 billion this year and has apparently engulfed one in five children. The SEND lobby is enormous, powerful and made up largely of private medical health practitioners, angry mothers seeking an explanation for why their children are so unhappy, and cowardly politicians unable to speak truthfully about the society they and their predecessors have built.
In a better Britain, children like Eoife and Monty would not be burdened with bogus neurological conditions but would be treated by the state institutions they come across as children in need of stability, rich extracurricula offerings, part-time work and opportunities to socialise regularly with people their own age. Quite simply: belonging and a sense of purpose. What this would mean in practice are schools with immaculate discipline so the classrooms are calm and where free after-school clubs are offered every day, local businesses able to employ youngsters, and a string of youth clubs where young people can safely gather and have fun together.
As it happens, Eoife lives in new social housing and Monty in a privately owned home in the country. Brain-damaged David, on the other hand, lives in filthy social housing with his two sisters and wide variety of pets. His mother is a broken woman. In a better Britain, David would be living in wonderful sheltered accommodation, cared for by loving assistants and given light work and endless pleasurable craft and sporting activities to enjoy. His room would be clean and family could visit whenever they wanted. This level of much-needed state support is of course impossible because £11 billion is being spent on those with bogus SEND needs.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
