Mum wins £130k school fees fight

Published on Friday 18 February 2011 19:03

COUNCIL bosses have been told they have to find up to £130,000 a year in extra school fees for an autistic boy after a dramatic court ruling.

Edinburgh City Council wanted ten-year-old Oscar Narine, from Polwarth, to remain at a school in the Capital. But yesterday his mother, Mary Narine, won a 15-month battle to send him to Rudolf Steiner's Camphill school in Aberdeen.

The costs at Camphill could be as high as 156,360 a year, compared with an estimated 19,759 a year for Redhall School in Edinburgh.

Mrs Narine insisted that Camphill would give Oscar a better chance in life.

She went to the Additional Support Needs Tribunal for Scotland when the city council turned down her request to let her son go to the residential Aberdeen school.

The tribunal found in her favour but the local authority took the case to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, asking appeal judges to overturn the tribunal's decision.

Lord Hamilton, sitting with Lady Paton and Lady Cosgrove yesterday backed Ms Narine.

The council had asked the judges to consider their responsibility towards other children in the same position as Oscar.

But in the written ruling issued yesterday, Lord Hamilton said the tribunal's decisions could only deal with one child at a time.

The court heard that Oscar had learning problems and that his behaviour had become more difficult to deal with as he had grown older.

He lived with his parents and his younger brother and sister in their flat in Polwarth and his behaviour at home could often be "especially challenging".The Camphill school had a good track record for dealing with such cases and there was "an appreciably better prospect" of Oscar's needs being met there, the judges were told.

The tribunal argued: "In this case, the advantage of Camphill School being a residential school is that it enables Oscar to learn to exist and function as a social being and to learn to communicate and interact appropriately with others."

The tribunal also argued that the extra costs were not unreasonable because "the development of Oscar's personality, talents and abilities to their full potential was much more likely at Camphill than at Redhall".

The city council claimed it would be "an affront to common sense" to ignore the consequences of Oscar's school bill for other children, including those with autism, in the local authority's area.

The tribunal was wrong to say that "suitability always trumps cost", they said.

The judges said that, in law, the tribunal was right to consider Oscar's case on its own merits and the consequences for other children were "irrelevant to the exercise."

A council spokesman said: "We support children to stay in Edinburgh with their families by investing heavily in high quality day care, respite, activities and learning support."