An email to Bridget Phillipson
Bridget Phillipson is the Secretary of State for Education. I sent her my thoughts on her interview on BBC Radio 5 Live where she double-down on the Gemma Collins marketing strategy. And called SEND parents ‘kill joys’ with no sense of humour.
See here.
I CCed in my own MP, Marie Goldman, too so she could hear my thoughts on this matter; though I did email her three days ago anyway with my concerns about the SEND Reform White Paper Consultation process.
I am angry. And I will not be silent while our SEND children’s rights are weakened by the reform proposals. And no one has ever accused me of being silent.
Email body:
Hello,
I am one of those ‘kill joy’ SEND parents. I heard you doubling-down on the Gemma Collins backlash in your BBC Radio 5 Live interview from 20th May.
It’s quite hard to have a sense of humour when you’ve just spent the last 6 weeks reading a lengthy White Paper, digesting it, processing it, comparing it to the current system, realising these proposals strip away your disabled child’s legal rights to an education that meets their specific needs, and then having to answer 39 detailed questions in the consultation document. And all while reading about how the government has ‘already decided on much of the reform proposals’, before consultation.
For many SEND parents, particularly over the last 6 weeks, you, in your capacity as the Secretary of Education, have been the main source of the doom and gloom in our lives.
Then, the day after I pressed send to the consultation questions, which was an exhausting process by the way (was it designed to be?) alongside my full time job, my life, and parenting two small children, one of whom is visually impaired, we get a jokey video from the Department of Education with Gemma Collins. No indication that you or your department understand the seriousness, the exhaustion, the lengths, the fight SEND parents and teachers went through not only during this consultation period, but for years previously. Or even, seem to care at all, given your comments on the interview I mention above. Is punching down to the SEND community and those who support them part of the Department of Education’s communication and marketing strategy? There are people in this world who uplift others and those who pull others down. Your comments in that interview mark you as the latter.
The Prime Minister (Kier Starmer, in case that changes before you read this email) spoke about the notion that these reforms aimed to build the trust back in the system for SEND parents, who have lost their trust in the broken system we have now. Hearing this filled me with optimism. Then I read the White Paper, and that optimism ebbed away. I have felt gaslit, lied to, insulted and demeaned during this consultation period. I saw videos of you and Georgia Gould saying legal rights weren’t being taken away with these reforms, while I was reading in black and white that they were. That EHCPs weren’t being taken away from SEND children, when in reality they are being changed completely to mean something entirely different, as to be something entirely different just called an EHCP. And finally, a jokey meme video with Gemma Collins was the final stomp of the boot to turn me into a new ‘kill joy’ version of myself.
My trust in this government and the Department of Education is at an all-time low. And given my years of fighting for my son in the SEND system, that bar began in hell.
I have CCed in my MP, Marie Goldman, so I can express these thoughts with her as well.
I hope your conscience allows you to sleep at night,
Gemma Wilkinson-Lowe
