Teachers and union officials have lined up to warn proposed radical changes to the funding of special educational needs provision will have a chain of disastrous social and economic consequences.
Staff from the county’s seven Pupil Referral Units have issued the alert just days before North Yorkshire County Council closes its consultation on “remodelling” its budget for children and young people with high needs.
They have claimed proposed changes will lead to:
- Pupil Referral Units either closing or losing most of their staff and seriously restricting their varied curriculum
- Increased truancy, child exploitation and antisocial behaviour and more costs to the public purse
- Mainstream schools being told to stop excluding high needs pupils and extra classroom disruption.
A consultation meeting at County Hall, in Northallerton saw council officers emphasise changes were necessary as the £44.8m government funding the authority receives for special educational provision had not increased in line with the soaring number of people aged 25 and under assessed as needing an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).
Around 1.6 per cent of the 163,000 people aged 25 and below in the county have an EHCP, but this is expected to rise to more than 3,300 by 2022, a 30 per cent increase.
Seventy-three per cent of the rise in EHCPs has been in the areas of interaction, particularly autism, and emotional and mental health.
The council says changing the way the services are funded will ensure the council makes the best use of the £44.8m and make sure the authority meets the needs of those with an EHCP.
The meeting became increasingly heated as teachers said the council’s proposals would see alternative education provision cut by more than 80 per cent at units such as those in Northallerton, Harrogate and Scarborough over the next six months.
Art teacher Kate Kersey said it would be impossible to run many subjects under the proposals.
She said: “The main subjects of maths and English would stay, but behaviour within the Pupil Referral Service would disintegrate, it would be very difficult to teach the children with a skeleton staff. It would be an absolute disaster, pupils are furious. Pupils would not go to school.”
English teacher Alex Boyce said students that were “already at the edge of the community would lose their safety net”.
He said forcing students with high needs from Pupil Referral Units back into mainstream education was not the answer.
Mr Boyce said: “They are already vulnerable and have very difficult lives with increasing mental health needs. I would imagine there would be an increase in truancy, students missing from education, an increase in coercion into criminal activity, drug running on County Lines and we already have a problem with that with some of our students.”
Teachers said they had been left incredulous by the council’s claim that as its proposals were implemented “there should be little, if any, need for a young person to be permanently excluded from school”.
They raised fears there would be nowhere for excluded pupils to go and questioned how the council intended to force academies to start taking previously excluded pupils.
The teachers also highlighted how the number of exclusions in the county had rocketed by 42 per cent between the 2016 and 2017 academic years.
After the meeting, National Education Union organiser Karen Carberry said the council needed to listen to what it was being told by teachers, parents and students.
She said: “They need to engage fully and understand the impact of what they are proposing because it will have absolute devastation. It will mean really poor outcomes for the people they need to support and protect.
Ms Carberry added while the council has proposed launching the changes from next September mainstream schools would not have sufficient time to prepare to take on pupils with special educational needs.
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