SEN Green Paper correctly reported, thanks to Full Fact
We are pleased finally to be able to report that the Daily Mail has corrected the record on its reporting of how many children are misdiagnosed with Special Educational Needs (SEN), on page 38 of today's edition. "Last year an Ofsted report estimated 450,000 had been wrongly diagnosed as requiring special needs teaching. The Daily Mail was among a number of papers to incorrectly state that Ofsted put this figure at 750,000."
In future we won't be settling for less than separate correction, though—click the picture to see the today's correction in context.
The publication of the Special Educational Needs (SEN) Green Paper today is important for the 1.7 million children currently classified as having SEN, their parents and teachers.
The consultation for it was launched in September, presaged by the report from Ofsted on children being inappropriately classified with SEN. That report was, as the Daily Mail says, widely misreported in a way that had the potential to set the debate off down in a unjustified direction.
Full Fact went into action to correct the record, it must be said without Ofsted's help. In fact we had to team up with disability expert Lord Low of Dalston to table a Parliamentary Question to force them to say on the record that the reports were wrong.
- We briefed members of the House of Lords before a debate on the report to make sure they got the right story, and got the Minister to acknowledge the misreporting.
- We got the Guardian and the New Statesman to correct their stories by pointing out the mistake to them.
- By complaining to the Press Complaints Commission, we got first the Telegraph and the Independent and now finally the Daily Mail to correct the record too.
- And we responded to the Government's consultation to highlight the problem to try to make sure that nothing the Government said in the Green Paper would provoke similar misunderstandings.
We are pleased that, in today's coverage of the Green Paper, that false claim has been eliminated and people can get on with having the real debate.
UPDATE: The PCC susequently arranged for the correction to be re-printed as a standalone item.
