Funds for vulnerable children in jeopardy

A MOTHER who has raised millions of pounds for a Scottish children’s charity says she fears for her own son’s future care under the government’s austerity cuts.

Councils throughout the country are preparing to cut budgets and won’t give assurances that services provided for vulnerable special needs children will not be affected.

Now Ann Maxwell, founder of the Muir Maxwell Trust, says she is speaking out on behalf of other families concerned about the impact of financial cutbacks on families throughout Scotland.

“It has always been a difficult fight to get the right care for special needs children, but now that fight has got so much harder,” said Maxwell, who won Clarins Woman of the Year award in 2008. “Where we all hoped that vulnerable children would not be the victims of austerity it now looks like they might be.

“What we are slowly seeing now is that [local authorities] are beginning to pick at the care packages, slowly but surely deleting elements of care packages as the financial situation begins to bite.”

Last week, it emerged that Aberdeen council had cut funds for pupil assistants in some schools dealing with special needs children and in England parents were having to make long trips to take their children to school after cuts in transport. Last month, Scotland on Sunday revealed that thousands of Scots with autism will be forced to undergo personal assessments that could deprive them of vital cash payments under plans to reform the benefits system.

Maxwell’s son Muir is 15 and suffers from Dravets Syndrome, a severe form of epilepsy which requires round the clock care. She founded the Trust in 2003 to help fund services for other similarly affected families, and has so far raised £3.5 million.

Although her son has a education and residential care package at Donaldson’s School in Linlithgow, where he stays four nights a week, funded by her local authority, Midlothian Council, for the next year she has been given no assurances about what will happen when he turns 16.

“When a child hits 16 it has always been a bit of a grey area as to whether they will remain in child services or whether they will be handed over to adult services,” she said.

“If a parent can fight to keep their child in education at 16 they stay in child services but if they lose that fight at the age of 16 they fall into a black hole. It’s a very dangerous place to go because there’s nothing to support them out there. What we have been told unofficially is that a lot of local authorities are now looking at dropping all special needs children at age 16 into that black hole.”

Maxwell is concerned that when this year ends Muir – who needs so much specialist support that he requires someone to sit outside his bedroom all night in case he gets up in the night – will no longer receive funding to continue his education at Donaldson’s, where his residential care costs £250 to £300 per day. She is also worried that many other parents of children with special needs may find themselves in a similar position.

“If that happens parents have to take the child back into their own home and look after them full-time,” she said. “We know our children are going to be the victims of these cuts. All parents are consumed with worry about it. We get little enough support as it is and what we get we’ve had to fight for. I wish I could fight the fight for every parent but I can’t. There are other families who have less support than we do and they are going to have their benefits withdrawn. And if that happens there are going to be tragic consequences.”

She said she was concerned that special needs children were not being assessed correctly by local authorities. “There is not the proper assessment of children being made to clearly understand what their needs are,” she said. “The decisions regarding their fate are being made by accountants.”

Kenneth Gibson MSP, who chairs the Scottish Parliament’s cross party working group on epilepsy, said: “The issue of transition is something that the Scottish Government has been paying a lot of consideration to over the last few years, not just concerning children with epilepsy but those with autism as well as children in care homes. What we’ve looked at over the past few years is how we smooth that transition [between child care and adult care]. Although there are cuts, the ministers have made it clear that the most vulnerable people in society would not be affected by these cuts.”

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