How to Resolve Complaints using Mediation - NHS, SEN, University Student Complaints and others 

With Special Educational Needs there is an absolute lack of funds and so the chances of the LEA funding provision often of any kind is unlikely. As a parent of a child with autism I feel that the system has comprehensively failed my son. My son had a statement of SEN stopped and I took to tribunal based upon a cease to maintain statement basis. I am a divorced parent and because of my son's disability, work is impossible, so I live on a very limited budget, I paid out £1,500 for the reports that were needed [our income is 60% below the poverty line], only for the local education authority to frustrate the legal proceedings by issuing an 'empty' Educational Health Care Plan. This sends the whole proceedings back to day one, which means that all the reports have to be done again and I simply did not have the money to repeat the whole experience. Sadly, many of these education authorities act in such a totally cynical way because they know that parents do not have either endless amounts of money to fight on if they do not work, or if they work they do not have the time or capacity for the extra stress all of this entails. The local education authority suggested placing my son in a special educational needs school, I spoke to a friend of mine who is a supply teacher and having both covered absences at the suggested school and also having taught my son, she said that it was wholly irresponsible of the school psychologist to suggest a move to such an establishment as my son is comparatively far more advanced than children at that school. My son lost his full time 1:1 overnight and he went up to high school not being able to handle the change in culture from having one teacher in pretty much one classroom bar PE and assemblies, to having many teachers in many classrooms, a nightmare for anyone with executive function deficits. My son's education has been detrimented based solely upon his disability. So in his SATS tests my son scored full marks for his spellings, punctuation and grammar, this puts him in the top 1% of the country, but he was dumped in the middle set for English because he does not write quickly enough. He was very good at science theory but because of his general clumsiness he is regarded as a health and safety hazard and so again he was dumped in the middle set where he shares another child's teaching assistant. He is 14, last summer he was invited to speak at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology programming conference at Cambridge University, he is not dim, he is merely disabled and we do not have the funds to stop the powers that be from stymying his education and desecrating his chances in life. One bittersweet anecdote to demonstrate the problems we face. My son has been subject to some considerable bullying and his stuff regularly gets nicked or broken, now given that his writing equipment is the ergonomically designed stuff, this winds up costing me a lot of money. PE kit is something else that was being regularly targetted and given that the uniform kit costs £16 for the short sleeved top and £22 for the rugby top, it quickly starts to mount up. It happened a number of times and a number of times, I went in, in search of the missing items only to have to buy a new top. Eventually, I resolved that as I had already bought so many tops, I had, had enough, so I refused to buy anymore. So they kept my son in detention a couple of times and then they called me in because of course my son had told them that if there was another lost top that I would not be paying for anymore. Went in had all the spiel, so I went on and pointed out just how frequently that I was having to replace stolen and damaged special equipment that really is vital for my son, not to mention how often I had replaced, ties, jumpers and PE kit. The reality is that he needs his special pens to write and be educated, BUT you do not need uniform items to be educated and what exactly is the point of just providing them for them to be nicked. 'Well, what do you propose' was the somewhat foolish response. The somewhat obvious answer being that the PE department should be the ones addressing the bullying. Of course they do not want to admit that there could be bullying going on and insist that the kit has been merely lost, so I start saying then, in that case, there should not be a problem finding it. The exasperated teacher turns and says that we can not go on like this and that he intends to keep my son in detention forever and a day, I state that this is really good news because it means that my son will be subject to less bullying and not having a PE kit means that currently, the other kids haven't got to tolerate the spanner on the pitch that couldn't catch or kick a ball to save his life, which if he is not losing them the game, again less to bully him about. Teacher looks desperately at my son and says 'don't you want to be a prefect when you get older?', son says no because it means that you are giving the bullies more fuel, he'd rather be invisible. Teacher looks crestfallen that this emotional blackmail has not worked and tells my son to run along to registration, teacher then starts to say about suspension, so I start to act indignant that they would not protect a child that is being bullied by having his kit nicked and into the bargain, they would punish the child by making him lose a portion of his education because we are not wealthy enough to keep replacing the lost kit which had already been replaced 3 times. Teacher starts to say it is the school rules and I start to say that it is one thing to punish a child with detentions and it is quite another to move on to suspensions that actively damage attainment and that if they move to do this that I will be looking to take legal action against the academy and that I am sure the newspapers would be interested too. Teacher says that he will discuss it with the head. Teacher gets back to me. A new top was provided with pupil premium, my son now uses the disabled changing room, his PE lessons have been modified so that he gets to use the rowing machine on his own instead of participating in team games and he now works in the school library at lunchtimes. The teacher told me how bad he felt that he had not realised quite how badly my son's disability had adversely affected our lives, until he spoke with my son and learnt just how helpless he felt in the face of the obstacles and lack of help that he faces and that is why he was quite happy not to do PE or to have any break times. That particular teacher wrote the independent statement for the DWP that helped with my benefits claim. The problem is that teachers see the problems first hand, but how do you mediate with a faceless LEA who do not see the adverse results of adverse decisions, to me it seems about as likely as explaining the colour blue to a blind person.