Children with special educational needs are being “segregated” and left to struggle in the wrong schools because councils are trying to “save on costs”, parents have told Sky News. 

Maire Leigh Wilson, whose four-year-old son has Down syndrome, says she “shudders to think” where he would be now had she not been in a “constant battle” with her council.

“I think he would probably just be at the back of a classroom, running around with no support and no ability to sign or communicate,” she said.

Mrs Leigh Wilson wanted her son Aidan to go to a mainstream school with additional specialist support, but her council, who decide what is known as a child’s Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP), wanted him to attend a special school.

The number of EHCPs being appealed by parents has risen “massively”, according to education barrister Alice De Coverley.

She said councils are struggling to meet the volume of demand with “stretched budgets”, and parents are also more aware of their ability to appeal.

Mrs De Coverley said more than 90% of tribunals are won by parents, in part because councils do not have the resources to fight their cases.

She said, in her experience, parents of children with special educational needs will put “anything on the line, their homes, their jobs”.

On whether she thinks the system is rigged against parents, Mrs De Coverley said: “I’m not sure it’s meant to be. But I think that parents are certainly finding it very tough.”

She added the number of “unlawful decisions” being made by local authorities means parents who can afford it are being “utterly burnt out” by legal challenges.

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Mrs Leigh Wilson’s case was resolved before making it to court.

Her council, Hounslow in southwest London, said they complete more than four in five new EHCPs within the statutory 20-week timescale, twice the national average.

Hounslow Council said they “put families at the heart of decision-making” and young people in the area with special educational needs and disabilities achieve, on average, above their peers nationally.

They admitted there are areas of their offer “that need to be further improved” and they are “working closely with families as a partnership”.

“We have a clear and credible plan to achieve this, and we can see over the last 18 months where we have focused our improvement work, the real benefits of an improved experience for children, young people, and their families,” a Hounslow Council spokesman said.

He added the council had seen the number of EHCPs double in the last decade and they “share parents’ frustrations amid rising levels of national demand, and what’s widely acknowledged as a broken SEND system”.

Emma Dunville, a friend of Mrs Leigh Wilson whose son also has Down’s syndrome, describes her experience trying to get the right education provision for her child as “exhausting mentally and physically”.

She said: “For the rest of his life we’ll be battling, battling, battling, everything is stacked up against you.”

Unlike Mrs Leigh Wilson, Mrs Dunville wanted her son Albie to go to a special school, but she had to wait more than a year for an assessment with an education psychologist to contribute to the council’s decision, which meant she missed the deadline for an EHCP.

“The people making these decisions just don’t see that all children with Down’s syndrome are totally different and can’t be seen as the same.”

The guidelines are that if there are not enough local authority-employed education psychologists they should seek a private assessment, but her local authority did not do that.

Mrs Dunville said her son has been “segregated” in a mainstream school, where they are “trying their best” but “it’s just not the right setting”.

Many months before farmers found themselves on the front pages of newspapers, after protesting in Whitehall against the new government’s inheritance tax rules, we at Sky News embarked upon a project.

Most of our reports are relatively short affairs, recorded and edited for the evening news. We capture snapshots of life in households, businesses and communities around the country. But this year we undertook to do something different: to spend a year covering the story of a family farm.

We had no inkling, at the time, that farming would become a front-page story. But even back in January, 2024 was shaping up to be a critical year for the sector. This, after all, was the year the new post-Brexit regime for farm payments would come into full force. Having depended on subsidies each year for simply farming a given acreage of land, farmers were now being asked to commit to different schemes focused less on food than on environmental goals.

This was also the first full year of the new trade deals with New Zealand and Australia. The upshot of these deals is that UK farmers are now competing with two of the world’s major food exporters, who can export more into Britain than they do currently.

You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday

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On top of this, the winter that just passed was a particularly tough one, especially for arable farmers. Cold, wet and unpredictable – even more so than the usual British weather. It promised to be a challenging year for growing.

With all of this in mind, we set out to document what a year like this actually felt like for a farm – in this case Lower Drayton Farm in Staffordshire. In some respects, this mixed farm is quite typical for parts of the UK – they rear livestock and grow wheat, as well as subcontracting some of their fields to potato and carrot growers.

A look at farming reimagined

But in other respects, the two generations of the Bower family here, Ray and Richard, are doing something unusual. Seeing the precipitous falls in income from growing food in recent years, they are trying to reimagine what farming in the 21st century might look like. And in their case, that means building a play centre for children and what might be classified as “agritourism” activities alongside them.

The upshot is that while much of their day-to-day work is still traditional farming, an increasing share of their income comes from non-food activity. It underlines a broader point: across the country, farmers are being asked to do unfamiliar things to make ends meet. Some, like the Bowers, are embracing that change; others are struggling to adapt. But with more wet years expected ahead and more changes due in government support, the coming years could be a continuing roller coaster for British farming.

With that in mind, I’d encourage you to watch our film of this year through the lens of this farm. It is, we hope, a fascinating, nuanced insight of life on the land.

You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday