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SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

My name is Robert Rice. I have set up this website to publicise statistics which are likely to be of interest to all parents and others concerned with children with Special Educational Needs (SEN). To find out more about why I have done so click here.

To see the statistics, which cover the whole of England and Wales, please click here. I happen to live on the border of Kent and East Sussex, so I am particularly interested in those two counties, which is why you will find them highlighted in the statistics, but otherwise the figures provided are exactly the same for each of the 170 LEAs shown.

If having seen them, you feel that your LEA is not meeting the needs of SEN children, then do please feel free to print out the statistics and show them to your local county councillor. I have found that although councillors may talk proudly about the success of their educational policies, they are quite unaware of how they stack up in practice, let alone against other counties.

You may also be alarmed about the overall level of appeals. The duties of LEAs towards SEN children are set down clearly in the Education Act 1996 (£37.70 from HMSO), the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (£7.50 from HMSO) and The Special Educational Needs Code of Practice (which includes some important statutory instruments, especially The Education (Special Educational Needs) (England)(Consolidation) Regulations 2001 (sic), in its Annex A; free from DfES ref 581/2001). The question is: has the government provided adequate funding to meet them ? If you feel that the answer is no, then you should be talking to your local MP, armed with these statistics.

If you have any comments or queries on this site, please email me; but I am afraid that I cannot provide any guidance myself. If you would like such guidance, then a good place to start is the Independent Panel for Special Education Advice (IPSEA) tel. 01394 384711. They are a registered charity, and if having looked at this site you feel you would like to help them help parents of SEN children, they would be enormously grateful to hear from you. Their address is 6 Carlow Mews, Woodbridge, Suffolk, and the man in charge is John Wright.