Holding the Line

Listeners woke up to the news last week that a new report by OFSTED had found that teachers had been over-identifying the number of children with special educational needs (SEN) by half a million children – yes, no misprint there - half a million.  This report showed all the dangers of what happens when you lose your agenda with the media.

The report had been eagerly awaited by the special needs sector and is going to feed into the Government’s expected review of children’s services and education. Many organisations had been involved and consulted along the way and the report process was led by a well-respected senior inspector. So on launch day how did we end up with headlines of a scandal being revealed in schools, with teachers blamed for ramping up the numbers of children with SEN? The implication was that the public purse was being overburdened with claims for resources for children that were not warranted.

As one contributor to the Today programme noted, it was a convenient conclusion for a Government who is looking for public sector service cuts to have an independent report on its desk saying that numbers of children needing specialist support was half a million less than thought. Who would have thought it possible to invent half a million children with needs that didn’t exist?!

Well, not OFSTED for a start! For those of us suddenly on the airwaves to comment on what we thought would be a constructive and sensible report found ourselves being asked to comment on the half million children with SEN who were no more. Well, the main problem for us was even finding the figure in the report. That's because it doesn’t exist.

What the report authors had done was draw attention to a concern that some children were being over identified with SEN in a particular category of need and hazarded a guess at what that proportion might be. This had then been extrapolated by the media, who used another table in the report to get to the figure of half a million. Not only did OFSTED not say that directly, but the methods they used did not support such a sweeping conclusion.

So how do we move from an obscure table at the back of a report and one particular comment to a ‘fact’ that half a million of children with SEN don’t exist? What is clear is that OFSTED provided a hook and everyone else sensing or being sold a good story jumped in.

The episode provides some interesting pointers to the way the debate about public services is going. In this febrile atmosphere there is going to be even less space than usual for any dispassionate analysis of the issues, and research will be even more contested than usual. Everyone is going to have to be more careful about what they say and how they say it if they don’t want their messages bent out of shape.

Campaigners need to be even more proactive and aware of the dangers posed by reports when pubic money is involved. And they need to be ready with their own research and rebuttals to some of the more doubtful 'facts' we will see swilling around the media over the coming weeks. If this can be done to OFSTED what hope is there for the rest of us on holding the line?