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Bristol headteachers say SEND parents ‘feel like schools don’t want their children’
Headteachers in Bristol have said that parents of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities “feel like schools don’t want their children”.
Some pupils with SEND are held back in nursery for an extra year before starting primary school.
Primary schools turn away prospective pupils for a variety of reasons, and sometimes being held back for a year can help a child’s development, local headteachers said. But the current approach can feel “brutal” to parents.
is needed now More than ever
This year 47 children delayed their entry to primary school to stay in an early years setting. Local education bosses heard updates about issues with early years SEND education during a meeting of the schools forum at Bristol City Council on July 12.
Simon Holmes, headteacher of St Philip’s Marsh Nursery School, said: “Often primary schools say they can’t meet the needs of the children.
“Parents are then not feeling that the primary school wants their child, and coming back to us and saying can we stay for another year, and I think that’s an issue. It’s a bit brutal at the moment, to be honest.”
The demand for SEND support for children in early years education has doubled over the past five years.
In 2018, 312 children were supported, compared to 637 children this year. The cost to provide support also doubled over the same time, from £919,205 to £2.1 million.
Tonya Hill, headteacher of New Fosseway School, added: “I can understand that parents are feeling that primaries are turning away their children, or feeling that they don’t want them. It isn’t that they don’t want to meet the need or they can’t quite meet the need.
“It’s more that actually sometimes the needs are so complex, or especially at that early age not very clear, it’s a sense of actually, well, what we can do to best suit this child’s needs so that we give them the best start possible. That’s where it’s coming from, rather than ‘we don’t you’.”
Alex Seabrook is a local democracy reporter for Bristol
Main photo: Betty Woolerton
Read next:
- Protestors gather to advocate for special education needs reform
- Cases of parents taking council to court over SEND delays tripled in 2022
- Bristol’s spending on special needs education becoming ‘unsustainable’
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