The highest daily cost of home-to-school transport for any individual pupil was £969 a day for Camden. Lincolnshire £650. Redbridge £630. Gloucestershire £603.92. East Sussex £577.40. Brighton and Hove £500. Dorset £481.65. Buckinghamshire £480.
The Government’s Action Plan to tackle the disastrous, miserable and ruinous situation that has developed in the provision for special educational needs says nothing about ensuring that everyone who can, learns to read.
Sometimes practical details – such as fluorescent light being used in school, but not at home – are overlooked. The interests of the individual pupil are ignored by the “progressives”.
Undoing the good work of dismantling Labour’s quangos, only to create another one, five times as big, in the Education Endowment Foundation, is plain old-fashioned folly.
The paperwork mountain grows for Special Needs – yet children are still sent to schools that leave them suffering.
Plus: The disaster zone is in the way that children with special educational needs are educated.
Educational traditionalists are wrong to believe that if we focus on academic rigour and high standards alone, everything else will fall into place.