Special schools: Parents' views on county's £86m expansion

An £86m building project has started in Lincolnshire which will create 500 extra school places for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

There are currently more than 2,000 children in the county's mainstream schools receiving additional support, and between 20 and 80 at any time waiting for a place at a special school.

The special schools expansion comes after all local authorities were told by the government to review provision to ensure they had enough suitable places.

But do parents of children with special educational needs think Lincolnshire County Council has made the right decisions to help their children?

Jane Peck's 10-year-old son Dylan has autism and is non-verbal. As he can't communicate his needs he often gets frustrated and can become violent.

Jane says families of children with special needs live a different life from other families.

"They don't get invited on play dates, they don't get invited on sleepovers. We get stared at, we get tutted at."

She thinks the expansion of special schools is a step in the right direction, but also believes the council doesn't always listen to the parents and children involved.

She thinks her home town of Sleaford is overlooked in terms of special schools provision, meaning Dylan has a 40-minute taxi journey to and from school, which is paid for by the county council.

Jane also believes there is a real demand for a school for children who have special educational needs but are still doing well academically.

She said: "There are a lot of autistic children who don't fit into mainstream or SEN education and that's the biggest concern. For me there needs to be a middle-ground school."

Cherie (not her real name) has a seven-year-old son who was diagnosed as autistic at the age of four. We can't identify them because of a safety concern related to the child's diagnosis.

Cherie says she realised he was different from other children from a young age.

"At playgroups he wouldn't be able to sit in the circle," she said. "He didn't like the instruments. He didn't like the songs [because it was so loud]."

She is now looking into getting him a place at an independent special school because she says the current provision won't give him the education he needs.

She said: "He defies his diagnosis. He is ahead on reading and quite a few other measures."

She believes that while he struggles socially at mainstream schools, his learning isn't nurtured enough at special schools.

Ann-Marie Watson has two adult children who have special needs and she cares for her 14-year-old nephew Kai (pictured). He has autism, Down's Syndrome and a rare chromosome abnormality.

He is in a special school now after Ann-Marie, from Sleaford, felt his mainstream nursery wasn't the right place for him.

"I see a lot of children [with special needs] going into mainstream schools, but they can't cope with them. They don't know how to cope with them. They might get a bit of budget for one-to-one but that's not all the time."

She says that parents of children with additional needs face a constant battle to receive support and the only reason she knew how to help Kai was because she had been through it before.

"These kids have a right to an education, and the right education. It was easier [for me] because I'd already been through that with two children. It was much easier to navigate the system. But unless you've been through that then it's a really hard struggle."

Lincolnshire County Council says by modernising the county's special schools it hopes more children will be able to attend suitable schools in their local area.

Special school staff and parents and carers helped design the project which will generally involve improvements to existing sites, but also new-build schemes.

Martin Smith, the assistant director for education for Lincolnshire County Council, said: "Where there is available funding or opportunity to open additional schools we will look into it, but this is about quality of provision and enabling the [existing] estate to be the best it can be."

The council also said it was spending £100,000 enabling special schools to develop training manuals to help mainstream schools support children with additional needs within their own settings.