The farmer playing real life MINECRAFT.

Day One of the Two Day Heatwave. Todays garden temperature from our mini weather station hiding in the shade was….

That is ridiculously hot for Yorkshire, unheard of. The forecast is that it goes even higher tomorrow. At this rate I might have to take my jumper off. Unbelievably, it was so hot that Hawklad put shorts on, WOW, the last time that happened was when he was at nursery.

You can only fire water pistols for so many hours. Well if the school doesn’t send any work, you have to improvise the learning day….. So as we sheltered inside for a few moments and dried out, I tried to get my head round the Government’s latest ideas to sort out the Special Education mess. From what I can see it’s about replacing one mess with another mess while saving a bit more money….

Currently parents have to jump through a seemingly never ending number of ever shrinking hoops until their child gets a Plan approved (or mostly doesn’t). It’s a process which forces shellshocked parents to take on the mighty big bureaucracy. The lucky few emerge with a plan that is supposed to identify needs to be met. A personalised budget is then awarded to the child to help fund this. Sounds promising but what then tends to happen is that the big bad bureaucracy then says

You now have to give us that money back and that buys you a place in a mainstream school. No money no place. That money then pays for general teaching assistants who the school then use to help out teachers. They provide no dedicated help to Special Needs pupils. Then the big bad bureaucracy talks up the idea that PUSHY parents get this gold plated education for the lucky child. PUSHY parents are taking money from the majority of other pupils. This sets parent against parent while the special need pupil is mostly left without support. That’s the current system.

The new proposed system seems to be, keep the same nightmare approval process, make it harder but add in a bit of mediation when the application is almost inevitably rejected. If you do fluke it through to getting approval then rather than bothering identifying individual child need, parents are just offered a standard ‘one size fits all’ solution. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit the individual child, at least we are saving money and it’s much easier to administer.

So it’s a mess and if it changes it’s going to be just another mess, but cheaper.

Sigh, breathe deeply and slump a bit lower in the chair. Definitely time for water pistols…..

49 thoughts on “Pushy”

  4. So many problems. Maybe those at the top have never experienced the problems faced by people with disabilities. It happens here too.
    Our daughter and family live in Germany. She said they too are experiencing very hot weather. Take care.

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      1. That’s good and a bit of a coincidence, because only a few hours ago today I bought water pistols for the young relative that’s stopping for a few days next week.

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  6. Canada still beckons, Gary. I have not worked in the field for many years now, but in the 90s every Special Needs child had an individual plan, and were given the funds to make them work. I helped execute those plans, as in making sure the plans were followed. Not every one was a success, but most helped the person who needed funding, not usually the plan administrators. (There were some bad administrators who stole funds, but by now they should mostly be weeded out.)

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  10. Sounds like something else someone must have been thinking about really long to come up with the same in blue.
    Oh, wow, 38 is really hot. It is even hotter than over here. So stay as cool as possible, Gary.

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      1. That’s absolutely crazy. We have never had 40 in our area before. So, it is hotter in GB than over here… really crazy!

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