Medway Council says it's invested millions to expand the number of places for SEND pupils, but parents say they've spent years waiting for their children's needs to be assessed.
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00:00 Improvements in SEND support in Medway, but for some it doesn't go far enough.
00:06 A new report from Ofsted has highlighted that, despite progress in mental health provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities,
00:15 young people are still waiting far too long for assessments for their needs, with inequalities in outcomes for different children in the area.
00:24 But it's not just about children here in Medway. For Leanne Jane Dale, whose daughter Katie and son Jack both have different degrees of special educational needs, every day feels like a struggle.
00:37 I do know of a lot of other friends going through it at the moment and apparently the waiting time has gone up a lot.
00:42 We waited about a year for Katie's assessment from being accepted for the EHCP assessment.
00:49 We saw the education psychologist at school. From then until we got the diagnosis and everything, it was about over a year.
00:57 So that's a long time to be waiting to get your child the right help. It's not just labelling it, it's getting the right help. That's the important thing.
01:06 It does affect you. I mean, obviously it affects your, like I say, mental health. It makes you have trouble sleeping because you're worrying.
01:13 And then obviously you're still expected to get on and care for your children with these needs, even though Medway Council don't seem to want to help.
01:22 But Medway Council say they have a plan to get everything back on track, investing millions to increase the number of places in schools for children with special needs.
01:33 They're going to see that the assessments are going to be much more timely.
01:36 Part of the investment that I referred to has gone towards paying for project teams, which have been able to help us to get through that build up of demand that occurs each year.
01:47 So we've managed to achieve quite a lot.
01:51 We've also had special recognition from the Department of Health towards the injection of funding to be able to get over that hump in terms of demand.
02:04 And we're well on track to be able to achieve that.
02:06 While there might be areas of improvement in this new Ofsted report, it's clear for children like Katie and Jack, there's a long way to go to ensure that they get the support they need.
02:17 All of these stats reporting for KMTV in Read 'Em.