‘You feel like you constantly need to fight’
One reason SEND reform is so fraught is that parents with experience of fighting for the crucial education, health and care plans that guarantee a level of support for their kids are already highly politicized. They have fought the system before — and they know the law inside out.
Letters from worried activists concerned the shake-up will mean a loss of provision for some children have already started. Dozens of special needs and disability charities signed a letter in Sunday’s Guardian raising the alarm about any changes to EHCPs. Officials deny existing EHCPs will be withdrawn.
Many in the new intake of MPs who arrived with Starmer’s landslide victory last year are young parents familiar with the struggles to get adequate support for their own children.
Jen Craft, the Labour MP for Thurrock, in Essex, was one of those welfare critics. She also has a primary school-aged daughter with Down syndrome, hearing loss “and she is a pickle,” as Craft endearingly put it.
“We’ve had services cut, we’ve been run to the bone and as a parent you’re in a system where you feel like you constantly need to fight,” she told POLITICO.
“You don’t want to have to be this whole speech and language therapist … as well as a sort of gladiator warrior going into battle to get every day … they just want to be mum — and if we do this right and we do this well that’s what we could achieve,” she said.
