Children with special educational needs are being let down

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

A report has shown that disabled children and those with special education needs are not getting into the right schools (PA)

As a recently retired special school headteacher I am unsurprised at your recent report on the difficulties of children with special educational needs and disabilities accessing appropriate secondary school placements.

It is my opinion that the 2015 revised Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Code of Practice outlining how the needs of these pupils should be met is one of the cruellest acts of legislation passed by parliamentarians. The code of practice is strong on rhetoric yet weak on resources. It raises parental expectations whilst offering little meaningful funding to facilitate the effective multi-agency working that is needed to meet the needs of some of the nation’s most vulnerable young people. It has created increased bureaucratic demands by widening the age range the code of practice covers whilst scything the very local authority budgets that would fund the administrative teams overseeing this process. It is being implemented meanwhile by schools and colleges seeing their budgets cut in real terms.

Many of us predicted the problems that are currently unravelling during the initial consultations on these changes. We were seemingly ignored and now it is some of the nation’s most vulnerable young people, and their families, who are shamefully having to pay the price.

Peter Crockett
Royal Wootton Bassett

IVF is worth the money

Having just come out of my first IVF cycle and losing our baby at six weeks, I feel that Sirena Bergman in her piece “IVF is costly and ineffective – time to stop offering it on the NHS” has no idea of the emotional and physical things a woman going through IVF has to endure. When the only thing keeping them going every day is thinking one day they may get their miracle from IVF. Sirena quite clearly has never needed IVF to conceive a child, and I really do hope that no one has to experience the hurt and pain that I have gone through.

I have never smoked, I don’t drink and I have a healthy lifestyle and I have paid my taxes since I was 18, however there are thousands of people every year that have plastic surgery, and other procedures on the NHS. Do you not think this is where we should be looking rather than taking away some people’s only hopes of having a family?

I will be forever grateful for the care and hope the NHS have given me and my husband.

Natalie Hill
Address supplied

Crossrail and HS2 are an affront to the North

So London is to get a new Crossrail link costing £15bn to go with the HS2 rail line to the North, starting with Birmingham, and then heading to Manchester and Leeds – the Northern powerhouses. You ask if Crossrail is the beginning or the end, and I think we can safely say it will be the end of such ambitious projects. Politicians don’t seem to recognise that there are vast swathes of the country that need investment in both road and rail infrastructures but, being in the North, don’t warrant any consideration.

How lovely it will assist the neglected south-east side of London. How shameful that all that money is being spent on vanity projects (Crossrail isn’t being called the Elizabeth line for nothing, watch out for a gong for the person who thought that idea up if he hasn’t already got one) when the total sum could be spent on improving the lives and transport facilities for the whole country.

For someone who lives in the North East, a place politicians don’t even know exists, it’s not Crossrail but flaming bloody hopping mad rail!

Ken Twiss
Yarm

We need to build homes not investment opportunities

I have recently come across a practice which serves to illustrate the current attitude to housing in this country. That attitude, developed and matured over the last three decades, is characterised by the change from the belief that housing provides homes to the assumption that housing is an opportunity for investment and short-term gain.

The practice was discovered by friends who were trying to buy a flat “off-plan” in a new development in a London suburb. They found that this off-plan flat had already been sold once. The previous “owner” was an investor in Taiwan who had sold it on within a few weeks, making a profit and forcing up the price of the flat. I emphasise: all of this has happened before the flat has even been built. Presumably, this purchase and sale cycle could happen several times before any development is completed. Each time the price of housing will be pushed up. Young people hoping to find a home to buy can never compete with a system which condones this profiteering. I wonder when we will begin to regard housing as a social need not a means of making a quick buck and legislate to that effect.

Janet Price
Enfield

I’ll take Hammond’s soft Brexit over May’s chaos any day

It’s difficult to know what to make of Theresa May as it becomes clear she has no fall-back position and has effectively wasted a year of our time-constrained Brexit negotiations. Her slapdash Brexit Secretary David Davis arrived totally unprepared for the first round of talks last month and gave every impression of a UK rabbit trapped in the EU headlights.

The de facto stance increasingly appears to be Chancellor Philip Hammond’s soft Brexit and if that is indeed the case the sooner the relevant positioning papers appear the better.

Rev Dr John Cameron
St Andrews

I am not shocked that Brexit and education are inextricably linked

I’m fed up with all these surveys about Brexit. Of course we know that most people who want Brexit are a bit dim (Brexit caused by low levels of education, study finds). Just look at who’s running the country.

Patrick Cosgrove
Bucknell