Conclusiones del capitulo

Human beings develop in relation to others (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The most important interactions we have are face to face or voice to voice. When these interactions are positive, they build our self-esteem and confidence and our ability to develop further. When these inter-personal interactions are negative, they have a strong destructive power. The foundation of disagreement resolution lies in each of us treating the others in our personal and working lives with respect and kindness. We have used

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‘kindness’ rather than ‘empathy’ here deliberately. Empathy requires understanding of the other’s situation and we do not always have that information. Kindness allows for the fact that the person we are interacting with, be that a child, young person, parent, SEN case worker or someone else, will have their own personal struggles. No-one has an easy life all the time or even most of the time. Parents of a child or young person with SEND have many additional challenges to deal with compared to other parents. Those children and young people with SEND face issues every day that other children and young people do not. Everyone working in LA SEND teams is working under pressure, as are all education, social care and health professionals.

We begin with this very basic theme for good reason. The disagreements around SEND that were discussed in interviews with us startedwith a public employee behaving less well than was expected by the child or young person and/or parent/s concerned. The public employee could be a teacher, a headteacher, a SENCO, a GP, a consultant, an EHC plan officer, a SEND manager, an educational psychologist – it could be

anyone. Sometimes this behaviour happened well before the LA decision that later became the focus of the open disagreement. Sometimes the person whose behaviour fell below the parent, child or young person’s expectations was not involved in the later open disagreement. But that person’s behaviour made the child, young person or parent feel like a victim of disrespect (e.g. views being ignored or dismissed), injustice (e.g. being deprived of support entitlement), even of “cruelty” (a word used by several parents to describe how their child had been treated in school). That behaviour, if not quickly acknowledged and mended, created a more generalised sense of distrust in public employees. Distrust then made disagreements more likely. We learned this by listening to parents telling us about what happened before the disagreement. Figure 8 provides three examples out of many such instances reported by parents.

Figure 8: Behaving less well than expected

Behaviour Context and impact

Refusing to listen Parent 57 described attending a meeting to discuss the way forward after a refusal to assess decision. The LA SEND manager brought with her the child’s case file. Parent 57 reported that the manager opened the file and closed it, put her hand on top of it and said, “This file is closed and that’s it.” Parent 57 lodged an appeal straight away, having understood this to mean that her daughter was not being viewed as a person but as a pile of paper.

Being discourteous Parent 77 called his case worker to ask for the rationale behind a refusal to issue a plan for a non-verbal child with autism, sensory processing disorder and severe learning difficulties, given that all the professional reports seemed to indicate that the child needed one. He said that the case

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Behaviour Context and impact

worker responded with, “I don’t care what [medical doctor] had to say. He’s not an educational expert like I am.” The parent refused to speak to this person after that phone call, only communicating with the area manager. After several further negative experiences of LA staff behaviour, they gave up trying to resolve the disagreement and lodged an appeal. Being unkind to a

child with SEN

Several parents described incidents of staff behaviour at school that were unkind at best, cruel at worst. In each case, the child was punished for behaviours that were a direct result of their SEN. These incidents were very distressing for the children and the parents and created a deep mistrust.

Source: Interviews with parents

We heard from local authority employees that some parents behaved disrespectfully to them. As we’ve seen, this can be triggered by the power of the back story of the

parent’s previous experiences with another person. Occasionally such parent behaviour was experienced as harassment. Individual SEND case workers, officers or managers described feeling persecuted by a parent during working hours. This, too, had a destructive power that fuels disagreements. Figure 9 provides some examples of individual parents behaving less than respectfully and kindly to school and LA staff.

Figure 9: Some parents treat LA staff disrespectfully and unkindly

Behaviour Context and impact

Bombard with emails • One parent described her concern about how her child was being treated at school. She explained that one of her responses was to write e-mails to the school every single day for months on end, asking for information or stating what she wanted to happen.

• One LA SEND manager told us that some parents were aggressive, rude and threatening to her. One parent had sent her 650 emails within a six-week period, often one per hour, starting at 7am. Some of these e-mails were also copied to the local MP and/or to the Department for Education. To protect herself, the SEND manager lodged a complaint against the parent.

Make multiple Freedom of

• More than one parent told us about making multiple Freedom of Information requests – e.g.

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Behaviour Context and impact

Information Requests after a refusal to assess, one parent said, “I bombarded the local authority with [multiple] FOI requests, just so they’d know they were dealing with someone who wasn’t going to go away lightly.”

Shouting • Some parents described ‘losing their rag’ with LA SEND staff and described shouting at the person on the phone, behaviour they later felt ashamed about.

Source: Interviews with parents and LA focus groups

Once relationships between a parent and an education, health or social care employee had gone wrong, parents described feeling a huge sense of responsibility to fight for justice for their child. They felt they had to rescuetheir child’s situation, to prevent immediate and long-term damage to their child’s quality of life. They described this in terms of ‘fighting’ and ‘battling’ for their child (see Figure 10)

Figure 10: Parents feeling responsible for rescuing their child's situation

“It's quite exhausting actually. You think, 'Here's the next battle. It's all about battling it out. It doesn't feel collaborative or supportive of the child.” (Parent 2)

“My [child] has a rare condition so we had to battle for support.” (Parent 87) "Before we had the big battle with the local authority over the EHCP, I had a big battle with the CCG over funding for some specialist treatments that he needed, so I've been down that route as well." (Parent 5)

"We had a huge battle to get the health in the education section. That's when the SENDIASS was brilliant." (Parent 34)

"Once you are in somewhere [i.e. educational placement], why do we have to fight every year to keep [our daughter] there? Our county has no

specialist colleges. It concerns me that every year we will have to go through the same thing - the battle starts again." (Parent P9)

Source: Interviews with parents, 2016-17

The three negative interaction positions described above – of victim, persecutor and rescuer – were first recognised as hallmarks of negative inter-personal interaction by

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the psychiatrist, Stephen Karpman (1968). He called it the Drama Triangle. ‘Drama’ because when we engage in interaction from any of these three starting points, we ‘play a part’ rather than act as respectful, kind human beings, responsible for our own

actions. All of us ‘act out’ on this Drama Triangle whenever we believe we are a victim, or that we must ‘get back at’ someone else or that we must ‘rescue’ someone else. The relevance of this to disagreement resolution around SEND is that it helps to understand the depth of emotion generated by some SEND disagreements. It also provides us with a tool to notice when we, or someone else we are interacting with, is ‘acting out’ one of these parts. Once we’ve noticed this, we can practice resisting the strong, unconscious psychological urge immediately to join the drama, acting out an opposing role. Instead, we can consciously choose to behave as a rationale, respectful human being, responsible for one’s own actions. This includes how one responds to the other person in a disagreement. For example, several LA SEND team representatives described to us how they consciously chose to adopt non-adversarial behaviours

towards parents during mediation meetings and appeal hearings. These behaviours included deliberately sitting beside, rather than opposite, the parent during mediation meetings and taking time to sit with parents before an appeal hearing to explain in a friendly manner what to expect during the hearing (for further details, see the

forthcoming associated Good Practice Guide, Cullen, 2017).