Our schools are skint and in desperate need of help. Has anyone even noticed?

Children with special education needs and disabilities and their parents are going to find themselves at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis – with unimaginable results

Can we talk about something else now? Pretty please? Because there are things happening out there in the country that demand attention. Schools, hospitals, you know the drill. Except this isn’t the drill we need to talk about.

What’s going on in our schools? It isn’t just the everyday, normal, “we need to do something about the chronic lack of investment” (which we do). They’re careering towards a brick wall in a bust-up car at a frightening speed. And the most vulnerable children – those with special education needs and disabilities (Send) are in the front seat without belts or airbags.

Let me explain: Our daughter’s school has written to us to explain that its energy costs are poised to increase by nearly 600 per cent. You read that right: 600 per cent. Schools, you see, are not protected by Ofgem’s energy price cap. Or the government’s two-year energy price freeze for domestic consumers.

An “equivalent package” of support was offered for businesses, which would presumably cover schools. But nobody is quite sure how this will work.

Business groups have been knocking on doors and asking questions. I understand that their contacts are no better informed. Which doesn’t bode well. On top of the energy horror they face, school staff members are due a much-needed and well-deserved five per cent pay rise. Which, plus ça change, the government hasn’t provided the requisite funding for.

Throw in the uncomfortable fact that a bevy of other costs are on the rise and you have the recipe for a financial crisis, even in schools that have otherwise been well run. The letter we received warned of carnage. A host of things you and I took for granted – trips, clubs, etc – face the axe. The educational experience of a generation of young people looks set to be crippled in favour of tax cuts, which will be of most benefit to people who can afford the sunlit uplands of the private sector.

Send children and their parents are going to find themselves at the sharp end of this – with unimaginable results. Parents already spend days, weeks and months hacking their way through a Special Needs Jungle – that’s the name of one of the main support organisations. With this going on, they’re going to find themselves in the middle of a blazing inferno.

Teaching assistants – unconscionably sneered at by Kemi Badenoch during her Tory leadership run – will be squarely in the firing line for the axe. Children with what are known as education, health and care plans (EHCPs) should, in theory, have some protection. An EHCP is supposed to set out the support that a child needs and is entitled to, says who should provide it, outlines responsibilities and so on.

The trouble is, they aren’t always funded. And even if they are, the TAs assigned to children with ECHPs will inevitably find themselves splitting their time with other children in need of support who’ve lost the people who were previously providing it. That’s what happens in institutions left to fend for themselves with only starvation rations.

Faced with this situation, Send children still in mainstream schools are inevitably going to fall further and further behind as the cuts bite. I foresee (another) sharp rise in school refusal while we’re at it. It is the TAs who often make schools bearable for children who otherwise find them a hostile environment.

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Here’s the kicker: many councils refuse to grant EHCPs unless a child is first in receipt of a high level of extra support from their school. In the case of my local authority, it was 16 hours a week. This is an arbitrary extra hurdle that parents and their children have to clear before qualifying for the EHCP grail.

Given the developing nationwide budget crisis, that hurdle is going to grow into an impossible barrier. It will leave parents in a perfect catch-22 situation; told they have to secure 16 hours, or whatever, of assistance that schools can’t afford to offer in order to get the actual support they need, which is no longer there anyway. That brick wall I mentioned looms ever larger.

It is disgusting. Despicable. Depressing. Take your pick of the Ds. Here’s one of those for the government that has created this situation, and that lies and then lies and then adds some fresh lies to go as the cherry on top of the cake about the reality of what schools are facing: dismal.

I know, I know. I use that word a lot. Of course I do. How else would you describe the situation that the parents of some of Britain’s most vulnerable children are being thrust into? Yes, it is time to talk about this. It is time to shout about it.