Navigating the SEND Crisis in the UK: How Blue Sky Autism is Bridging the Gaps

The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) crisis in the UK has been a growing concern for families, educators, and policymakers alike. With increasing demand for support services and limited resources, many children are not receiving the timely interventions they need to thrive. At Blue Sky Autism, we understand the urgency of this situation and are committed to bridging these gaps through evidence-based, highly accessible intervention and specialist support.

Understanding the Crisis

The SEND crisis is characterized by long waiting times for assessments, inadequate funding, and a shortage of trained professionals. This has left many families feeling frustrated and unsupported, as they struggle to access the necessary resources for their children. The impact on children can be profound, affecting not only their educational outcomes but also their social and emotional development.

Our Approach to SEND Support

At Blue Sky Autism, we believe that every child deserves the opportunity to reach their full potential. Our approach is rooted in evidence-based practices that have been proven to deliver significant improvements in speech, social engagement, and overall development. Here’s how we are making a difference:

1. Individualized Therapy Programs: Our therapy programs are tailored to meet the unique needs of each child. By integrating Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI) approaches, including our Play2Talk model, we provide personalized support that fosters meaningful progress.
2. Early Intervention: We emphasize the importance of early intervention, offering programs for children as young as six months. Our play-based therapy, combined with sensory strategies and other early intervention approaches like ESDM, PRT, SCERTS, and DIR Floortime, ensures that children receive the right support at the right time.
3. Accessible Services: Understanding the challenges families face, we offer a range of online services for those unable to visit our centers. From online parent coaching to home-based therapy, we strive to make our interventions accessible to all families, regardless of location.
4. Collaboration with Schools and Nurseries: We work closely with schools and nurseries to provide consultancy, training, and short-term placements. This collaboration ensures that children receive consistent support across all settings, enhancing their learning experiences.
5. Empowering Parents: Parent involvement is a cornerstone of our approach. Through coaching sessions and training courses, we empower parents with the skills and knowledge they need to support their child’s development at home.

The Impact of Our Work

Since our inception, Blue Sky Autism has assessed and treated over 1000 children, with remarkable success stories like those of Harris and Katie, who have shown significant improvements in their speech and social skills. Our commitment to innovation and expansion, including the development of online services in multiple languages and intensive visits for international families, ensures that we continue to meet the evolving needs of the SEND community.

Looking Ahead

As we navigate the complexities of the SEND crisis, Blue Sky Autism remains dedicated to providing high-quality, accessible support for children and families. Our vision is to create a world where every child with developmental delays, including autism, receives the support they need to thrive.

By focusing on evidence-based interventions and fostering strong partnerships with families and educational institutions, we are proud to be part of the solution to the SEND crisis in the UK. Together, we can make a lasting impact on the lives of children and their families, paving the way for a brighter future.

We’ve been very quiet for a very long time on our little blog. It’s great to be so busy, but it’s also important to have time to write so we can keep on sharing important information.

One of the things that I miss the most when things are so busy is having time to write and reflect.

Today for the first time in months, I had the opportunity to sit down and prepare for a staff training day and intern induction. One of the things I hate in any training that I run is ‘death by PowerPoint’ so I was scrolling through the many, many videos we have made a @blueskyautism over the past 14yrs. Graduation videos, birthday videos, information videos and videos for campaigns and funding.

It was when I was looking through these videos that I was hit with a stark reality.

In one of our campaigns in 2014 it talks about the fact there is no funding, policies or government funded evidence based early intervention services in the UK for young children with autism.

The stark reality I was hit with: absolutely nothing has changed. In ten years. An entire decade.

It’s just not good enough.

Our 2014 campaign was called ‘Don’t Right Me Off’ and featured a number of our nursery and social group children dressed up photoshopped into their dream job. From princesses to builders to superhero’s to scientists, every single one of those children then and now have the RIGHT to services and an education that will ensure that they reach their fullest potential and are offered all the opportunities that all children are entitled to. These services and educational opportunities should not be dependent on a budget. 

Too often children who have diagnoses are categorised as having ‘needs’. These needs are assessed and then written into official documents such as EHCPs. Needs are then ‘met’ with provision…but far too often the ‘provision’ that is provided goes nowhere near offering the opportunities that these children deserve. Far too often these documents and the people who write them focus their entire energy on trying to work out ways to save money, cut budgets and provide the bare minimum simply to tick a box. Needs are pretty subjective and you can get away with claiming that you are meeting them without very much scrutiny.

However, if we start to frame our thinking a little differently and start talking about ‘educational rights’ not ‘educational needs’, things become objective by their very nature,  and there is really no way we can make excuses around budgets or financial constraints. 

The children that we support in the UK (and across the world) have the RIGHT to the right kind of education, support and intervention. They have the RIGHT to access therapies that have decades of science and research behind them and the RIGHT to all the tools possible to help them find their voice.

In the UN Convention on the Rights of the child it states:

Article 29

1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

(a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

In short a child’s fundamental rights include an education that enables children to fulfil their potential.

10 years on we are seeing the same battles being fought by parents who should not have to fight for their children’s fundamental human rights. We are seeing the same bureaucratic machines try and wriggle their way out of providing meaningful and appropriate educational opportunities by framing these as ‘needs’ which can be ‘met’ on paper through long drawn out processes that waste the very budgets they claim they don’t have.

Don’t Right Me Off was our campaign message in 2014 and we believed back then that we could help change a broken system by trying to reframe the narrative. Fast forward to 2024 and the system is still broken, the narrative remains stuck and children are still being refused access to the things that can change their lives.

It’s not good enough, but trying to change the big picture can only really be done in small steps. 10 years seems like a long time and it seems like enough time. But we forget in all the big craziness of broken systems that it’s actually the little things that mean the most.

For 14 years we have been the light in the darkness for many, many families and we will continue to do so. We will continue to force small changes in the words that people in positions of ‘power’ use and push them to reframe their thinking through the lens of ‘RIGHTS’ not needs. 

It’s not enough, but it is a start…so watch this space! We are coming out of our little hibernation ready to fight again!

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

One of the most frequent (and most important) questions we get asked by clients is ‘how do I play with my child?’. We understand it can be tricky for adults to feel confident with ‘playing’ as it’s a skill we have most likely forgotten. We have grown up and moved away from the simple fun we had in childhood. But, play is the critical part of all childhood learning, so if we are going to help children develop their speech and other skills, we need to try and remember ‘how’ to play!

When we are adults, to understand and remember the’ how’ we first need to remember the ‘why.’ Why is play such a critical part of early childhood development and why is it such a key experience for children who are experiencing delays?

Piaget describes play as ” The work of the child.” It is the way that children explore the world around them and how early brains develop. The TV presenter Fred Rogers summed it up too when he said “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”

It is seen as something separate from everyday life, that routines need to be stopped or interrupted so that we can have allocated time to play. But let’s spin this on it’s head for a minute- play is everything for a young child. It is all that they do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night. Play is life and life is play.

What does that mean for a child who is perhaps experiencing the world a little differently? What about the child who is engaging in rigid and repetitive activities? What if a child does not speak? How can we know or understand how they play?

We see a lot of children who may be labelled by health or education professionals as being ‘delayed’ in their play development or defined as ‘not having appropriate play skills’. However, we would argue that every child that we see is already playing. They are exploring their world and problem solving and learning about the things that interest them. They may just look like they are doing the ‘playing’ in a different way. It does not mean that they do not know how to play!

Going back to our blog post on Making sense of the sensory is crucial here. As we know from looking at children’s sensory preferences, we often see young children who have specific sensory needs or interests and this informs their play. Understanding these differences and preferences is crucial for adults who are trying to use Play2Talk in their interactions and for anyone that works with young children with developmental differences.

Rather than looking at things from a ‘how can we teach this child to play appropriately’ angle, we look in detail about how the child already plays and how we can use these individual preferences and motivations to join them! There is NEVER a wrong way to play and it’s important to keep this at the forefront of any interaction with young children, particularly those who are experiencing the world in a different way.

In Play2Talk we ask parents/ carers and other adults to observe the child in their own preferred activities to try and understand a little about which sensory area they may find motivating (and which sensory inputs they may find upsetting or overwhelming). Once we have this foundational understanding in place, we can work with the child to develop activities and ‘play’ that engages them. We then move quickly towards creating these experiences as ‘2 person’ shared control activities.

We may discover in our observations that a child loves visual feedback and seeks this out in their play . This could be through spinning items/ watching things at the corner of their eye or watching objects fall. We look at creating experiences where the child would engage in rolling items down a ramp or a slide, or maybe spinning games with toys and objects. We look for ways to make the adult the critical ‘player’ in the game, where the child is super motivated to want the adult to be their play partner and spin/ roll/ crash objects and be more likely to take part in this activity as a 2 person, back and forth routine.

Play and play skills are something that we as adults are guilty of over complicating and overthinking. But by its very nature play is about having fun, for no other purpose than to enjoy! If we take the lead from the children that we are working with and look at their individual motivation, we can’t go far wrong. There is no correct way to play. We need to come away from thinking along a linear, developmental trajectory for this. Instead, we simply need to look for the smile and the laughter and meet our children where they are. They can teach us so much!

So, get down on the floor, crawl around, chase and be chased, fill and empty buckets and boxes, blow bubbles, sing songs, spin and jump, flap, whoop, stand on you head, smile with your child and laugh. This is play!

There’s been a big focus recently on inclusion in government policy across the U.K. , in an attempt to lower exclusions from education for children with additional needs. We were recently invited to the launch of one such strategy at a local council, which was actually part 2 of a 2 part launch. Which is a lot of tea, coffee and biscuits. For us it seems a bit of smoke and mirrors really, when not much is actually being put in place on the ground. Having set up as an early intervention charity over a decade ago in a very hostile environment, we have seen the practical support for young children with developmental differences across the U.K. get less and less. This is regularly blamed on Budget cuts, along with the age old excuse that ‘children should not be given 1-1 support as it makes them become dependent’ (go figure!!!). For a very long time we have seen first hand how much of an impact poor early education and support can have on all aspects of a child’s development. But nothing looks like it’s going to change for the better anytime soon.

Sometimes you just have to be the change that you want to see in the world so we decided to jump right on in and set up our own nursery here in London. The Play2Talk Nursery is in a nutshell ‘inclusion in action’. We don’t have a strict admission policy on diagnosis and we will offer a place to any child that needs a bit of extra help to build their social communication and play skills. It’s a place where everyone can belong and everyone matters. We follow the EYFS curriculum and link it to themes that our children and their families can relate to and enjoy. We ensure that all children are given the opportunity to meet their fullest potential so that mainstream school can happen with far fewer barriers, not least because the support that everyone fights for will inevitably continue to be limited by budget, bureaucracy and policy.

The past fortnight our little learners have been enjoying our Travel the World theme with family members and caregivers coming along and joining us for the ride. It’s been amazing to watch our little ones learn all about their own, and their classmates’, home countries all over the globe. Children achieved their individualised learning outcomes for all areas of this topic and we all had a lot of fun along the way, We are very proud that we have built a language rich, all inclusive curriculum where all of our pupils can experience everything that their peers have access to in other settings, in a way that makes sense to them and fosters their individual strengths. We hope that through accessing a provision like ours, where everyone matters equally, our little friends will be able to better navigate all the many opportunities that the world has to offer them.

Inclusion isn’t about fancy online strategies and policy launch events. Inclusion for us means everyone having the right to the best possible learning opportunities and everyone having the right to belong.