An intriguing story about special educational needs popped up in the Sunday Times on last week. The Dean Trust, an academy chain, was accused of segregating disabled pupils and those with special needs, bussing them from its top academy to what angry parents termed a “ghetto school”.

Looking beyond the hype and emotive language, the outstanding school, Ashton-on-Mersey School, serves an affluent Cheshire suburb, is sponsored by Manchester United and is rated “outstanding” by Ofsted. However, the trust told the parents of two-dozen children that it would send them to Broadoak School in Partington, one of the most deprived areas of Greater Manchester, claiming it was due to “limited resources” at Ashton-on-Mersey.

Parents are up in arms. They chose Ashton for their children, not the other school: now they’re being taken down the road. There’s also a 40-minute journey between the schools.

The trust’s chief executive was quoted as saying the move was necessary because of the high number of children who are disabled and with special needs already in Ashton-on-Mersey: he stated that Broadoak was “well-equipped with outstanding support” and that many pupils already split their education between the two schools.

I have no knowledge of the schools, the area or the trust in question. But it seems to me that this story shines a spotlight on some of the intractable problems surrounding support for children who are disabled or have special needs.

Since time immemorial, parents of children with special needs or disabilities have had to battle to get the support they need. Being married to an expert in SEND - dyslexia in particular - I’ve heard too many stories over the years of desperate parents reaching the very door of a tribunal before the local authority (LA) caved in agreed to provide the particular help their child needed.

I’m told some LAs even now deny the existence of dyslexia. Cunning arguments are formulated to prove that dyslexia is not a single problem, but an “unhelpful umbrella term” for many different specific learning difficulties. Such evasion is also a handy way of declining to take responsibility for (or fund) children with the condition.

Given the onward march of academisation - forced or otherwise - one might be tempted to think that, if LAs have so often been the ogre with regard to special needs provision, the problem will soon be in the past. In future, surely, academies and their controlling trusts and chains will provide the support.

Not quite. As I understand it, one of the few educational responsibilities left to LAs will be the coordination and provision of special needs support. Moreover, as we know, LAs are in desperate financial straits, councils as a whole being required to trim tens of millions off their budgets, year on year. Special needs will not be immune: just as schools and academies alike are already taking the hit, exposing broken government promises on protected funding.

There isn’t enough money in the system: the rationing will continue, as will the refusal of responsible bodies to take on the burden of special needs support, because doing so involves significant cost.

That Sunday Times story casts the Dean Trust as the villain of the piece: but it’s not as simple as that. The trust claims to have good provision in one of its academies: why would it go to the expense of duplicating or extending that in another one? We’re frequently assured that one advantage of academy chains lies in economy of scale; centralised resources mean specialised services are located in particular institutions, not spread across the whole.

A trust makes its decision and allocates its resources thoughtfully. This seems logical; ust what government ordered.

But it’s not good for the children. Their families want them, special needs notwithstanding, to attend that “outstanding” school close to home. Instinctively, one’s heart is with them: the rational head, by contrast, concludes that the trust is using its resources sensibly and appropriately, as required.

In our brave new educational world, special needs and the concept of inclusion remain too often an area of complexity, obscurity and conflict. That desperate parents still have to fight the system to obtain necessary support for their child’s disability or special needs is something that shames us all.

Dr Bernard Trafford is headteacher of Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and a former chairman of the HMC. The views expressed here are personal. He tweets at @bernardtrafford

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