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I’ve been looking at the Department for Education (DfE) statistics on children and young people identified within the English education system as children/young people with learning disabilities, recorded in an annual census of schools. In the Special Educational Needs (SEN) statistics there are a number of mutually exclusive categories of SEN, three of which concern children with learning disabilities – Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD), Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD) and Profound & Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD). There are a number of other SEN categories recorded within these statistics (Specific Learning Difficulties; Speech, language and communication needs; Social, emotional and mental health; Autistic spectrum disorder; Visual impairment; Hearing impairment; Multisensory impairment; Physical disability). Within the annual census, a child can be classified as having a ‘primary need’ in one of these categories, and optionally classified as having an additional, ...

Sorry – I went off on one a little in my blogpost about the LeDeR report . This will be a shorter blogpost that I should have written in the first place, with a bit about the findings of the report and how they fit with what else we know. The first thing to say is that this is a report of work in progress, as the scope of the LeDeR has only just become national, there is a big backlog of notified deaths where reviews have not yet been completed, and there is incomplete information for many deaths. For example, almost half (48%) of the 1,311 notified deaths in the 17 month period are from the North of England, where work on the LeDeR programme took off first. We will need the LeDeR programme to continue for longer, on a national basis, to get a better sense of what is happening nationally. It’s also important to bear in mind that any notification system is likely to miss the majority of adults with ‘mild’ learning disabilities, who were labelled as such in education but are not known as...

Today (4 th May 2018) the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDeR) Programme published its Annual Report 2016-2017, summarising the work of the 3-year programme since it started in June 2015 up to the end of November 2017. According to the report (there is also an easy read summary) the purpose of the LeDeR programme is as follows: “The Learning Disabilities Mortality Review (LeDeR) programme was established to support local areas to review the deaths of people with learning disabilities, identify learning from those deaths, and take forward the learning into service improvement initiatives” (page 5). As ever, people on Twitter are a great source of commentary on this report so if you use Twitter, the hashtag #LeDeR will start you off. In this blogpost, I will focus on what I think this report reveals about the pervasive and systematic institutional disablism faced by people with learning disabilities. How do I discriminate against thee? Let me count the ways 1)   ...