This week, Martin Keer, a parent with two deaf children, gave evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee. He told MPs that parents’ experience of navigating the SEND funding system was “framed through struggle” - a struggle to ascertain entitlements, with, in his words, “an inbuilt tension of funding where responsibility to the public purse dominates over children’s needs and rights to educational opportunities”.

That struggle is being played out in mounting legal disputes between parents of children with SEND and councils, which are seeing a rise in demand for provision at the same time as a huge decrease in their budgets to cope with this demand.

Parents are turning, in despair, to SEND tribunals, the number of which has doubled in the past two years with 89 per cent of their cases being won. Schools, meanwhile, are left to struggle on, while having to cope with an 8 per cent cut in their budgets since 2010.

In conversations with teachers, I’ve been told of the services previously being provided by the local authority - speech and language services, educational psychologist assessments, home-school transport - being cut to the bone.

Desperate times too often result in desperate measures. It should surely concern us all that pupils with SEND are almost seven times more likely to be permanently excluded than their peers. Many of these children arrive in the alternative provision sector with unidentifiable and unmet needs.

Schools should be places where pupils learn to be members of a good society - ones that are inclusive, tolerant and kind; a society that recognises all citizens have something to offer and in which the mark of a good society is how it treats those who need special help and greater resources.

Mary Bousted is joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union