Political Correspondent Romilly Weeks spoke to an anonymous whistleblower who works in a Local Authority dealing with families trying to access support for SEND
Senior council managers encouraged colleagues to make it difficult for families to access special needs support and laughed about denying help to children with SEND, a council caseworker has told ITV News.
The whistleblower, whose identity we are protecting, works as a special educational needs case worker at a council.
She revealed superiors would “joke about the ways they can deny support to children and how they want to deny more children access.”
She described how she and other case workers were encouraged to make it harder for families to make their case.
This included leaving telephone numbers off emails, not replying fully to queries, and not having face-to-face meetings.
She said: “There is a real push for us not to see these parents in person, not to have those meetings, not to make the phone calls generally, not to ask for their opinion and to be quite cold and hardline on it."
“They don’t like you to have that relationship with the parent, really, because they don’t want parents to have information”, she added.
The whistleblower said staff were advised not to leave a paper trail when contacting families, or follow up with a call or email.
Instead, she said: “They like to communicate verbally via Teams meetings and then without any follow-up correspondence.
"That way, unless someone is taking a...
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