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Tania Tirraoro can still recall the sickening feeling of rejection as she arrived at her local leisure centre to find her son’s entire class having a picnic without them.

The seven-year-old had just been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, but many parents and teachers simply judged him as a naughty child.

The former newsreader said: “There on the grass, picnicking, were the only friends he’d managed to make, along with their mums. He – and I – had been excluded. I felt gutted for my son.

“We had only just got his NHS diagnoses but no support. I asked him: ‘Shall we go over and say: ‘Hello’? and he quietly responded: ‘No, it’s OK, Mum.’ In that moment I decided I would fight for my son’s inclusion in society with everything I had.”

Tania is now one of the UK’s foremost Special Educational Needs and Disability campaigners. Her website Special Needs Jungle, which started in 2008 to help parents, now attracts 200,000 visits per month with around 50,000 followers across social media.

She is committed to highlighting the current Government’s betrayal of SEND children, and a broken system of support that leaves thousands floundering in increasingly academically charged classrooms.

She said: “The problem lies both with culture and financial pressure. Attitudes need to change. Too many teachers and local authorities see parents as trying to ‘take’ something ‘extra’ or ‘game the system’, rather than just get what their disabled children are entitled to. The constant cuts to vulnerable children’s services mean more are left without the support they need by dysfunctional bureaucracies more concerned with cost-cutting and their own policies than child welfare.”

A damning report published yesterday says the system “breeds conflict and despair as parents try to navigate a postcode lottery of provision”. It follows an 18-month scrutiny of Government SEND reforms, with testimony from 70 witnesses and 700 submissions of written evidence.

(Image: Getty)

The Commons Education Select Committee report adds: “A lack of accountability plagues the system as local authorities, social care and health providers too frequently seek to pass the buck rather than take responsibility for providing support.”

Almost 1.3 million kids need additional support in state education but only just over 250,000 have provision that is legally enforceable in the form of an Education, Health and Care Plan.

The committee recommended a more rigorous SEND inspection framework for local authorities, with clear consequences for failure; a direct line for parents and schools to appeal directly to the Department for Education when local authorities do not comply with the law; powers for the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman to investigate school complaints; and development of more employment and training opportunities for over-16s.

The Government has announced it is injecting £14billion into schools over the next three years. It has also pledged an extra £700million extra for kids with SEND in 2019/20.

But Tania said: “£700million alone is simply not enough to change local authority SEND behaviour, and it won’t address the other major problems in the system. The funding has only been announced for one year.

“Realistically, a £700million cash injection into the SEND system would only restore Local Authority funding positions back to roughly where they were before austerity. But it isn’t just money, it’s culture change that is key. You can throw millions at the system, but if councils don’t teach their SEND staff, school leaders and teachers to follow the law, nothing will change.”

She added: “A 20% increase in tribunal appeals last year is a good illustration of what’s going wrong in the SEND system, with £100million spent by councils on legal appeals since 2014 that could have been spent on children and young people.”

Nearly 9 in 10 complaints about the EHCP process are found in favour of parents, said a report by Michael King, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, describing it as “exceptional and unprecedented.

He said councils’ “severe financial constraints” were no excuse for failing to meet children’s statutory rights.

Tania from Farnham, Surrey, added: “What’s more worrying is that it’s only a small percentage of parents who feel able to fight the system. Many don’t know their rights, or feel empowered enough to complain, or simply don’t have the energy after caring for their child and putting food on the table.”

This might explain why more than 8,000 children with SEND currently have no school place. They are also more likely to be affected by off-rolling, when a child is removed from a school for the school’s benefit, rather than in the child’s best interests.

Tania and husband Marco, both 52, feel lucky they were able to fight the system and accept their son’s difference and later that of his young sibling diagnosed with similar conditions.

Ultimately, it enabled their boys to flourish. However, Tania – a member of national SEND advisory groups for Ofsted and a panel to improve SEND school leadership – is aware thousands of other parents do not have the same ability to take on the system.

And she has devoted her life to giving those parents a voice.