To Cambridgeshire, then, and a small anti-cuts protest outside Cambridge country council:
I talk to a couple called Tracy and Stuart Evenden. Like the 20 or so people here, the Evendens are fighting a shock (parents got a letter out of the blue just before Christmas) Cambridgeshire county council decision to cut resources to a special needs education unit. The unit is called EOTAS, which stands for Education Other Than At School. The Evendens’ 15-year-old son is a student at this unit.
EOTAS caters for children who are unable to cope in the mainstream. Some have problems with physical health, and some with mental and emotional health. Some children are on the autism spectrum. The Evendens’ son attends EOTAS because he was bullied so viciously by students at his mainstream school that he started to go under. It seems that by the time he was 11, his terror was destroying the family. The move to the EOTAS unit, with its expert staff and supervision, pushed that horror into the past. Now, of course, it is back again. The council’s plan is to return these refugees from the mainstream to mainstream schools. “The only other alternative for [our son] is home schooling,” Tracy says, “but then he’s out of school.”
The council is running a consultation exercise with service users until 20 January, but nobody here is investing much in it. The Evendens say their emails to councillors and their MP (their MP is Andrew Lansley) have gone unanswered. While we’re here today, EOTAS students take a petition into a councillor’s office and try to talk to him, but they are downcast when they come out an hour later. They say the councillor was not reassuring. He would not back the EOTAS unit and would not commit to reversing the council’s decision. He told them every effort would be made to support them when they were returned to their mainstream schools. That was the first – and in the Evendens’ case, at least – only contact these people have had with the council about the threat to EOTAS, apart from that letter just before Christmas.
I speak to an elderly couple who say they are worried about their daughter – her behaviour problems meant she was moved from mainstream school to mainstream school before she settled at EOTAS. They are new to this kind of fight and don’t seem to understand how council operates. Not many do.
This is the first part of a longer piece which I’ll upload when I get to a better bandwidth.
This is awful, I have a child Eho has autism and he will have to go to mainstream high school , I know this will be incredibly hard for him, and he will not have the support needed as staff just aren’t trained in this area , and are often understaffed in first place, they shouldn’t be closing theese schools ,they should be opening more, and if they close them, they should put adequate support in mainstream schools to cope. Just another example of cutting money where they believe they will have least opposition! It’s a disgrace !
It certainly is a disgrace. The staff at this school ARE trained, but are being cut back. The thing is – most of these children were at an endgame stage with mainstream schooling before they were finally moved to Eotas – everything mainstream had to offer them had already been tried. Now, they’ll be returned. This couple’s boy has been at Eotas for several years and was starting to do reasonably well academically, which meant that he had a future – education, maybe a good job and so on. All that’s been removed at the stroke of a pen. And people wonder why I get angry when I say Labour is nowhere at these things.
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