England’s special-education system is on its knees

HAYLEY HARDING’S son, born in 2014, began crawling late, around the time that other children were learning to walk. Pre-school staff warned that his speech was delayed and his concentration span was short. By the age of four he had been diagnosed with autism, of a sort doctors and teachers said could not be managed in a normal classroom. But when his mother began jumping through the hoops required to get him into a special school, his local council refused even to see him for an assessment. It seemed “unfathomable”, says Ms Harding, that a child who “could not hold a pencil for five seconds” had been abandoned by the authorities.