'This story matters to everyone': Why ITV News is putting the Spotlight on Send

When individual stories begin to illustrate wider failure, they begin to matter to everyone, writes content editor Neil Barbour on ITV News' Spotlight on SEND day.

Every story matters to someone. As a journalist you see this every day.

Whether it's someone facing a battle against cancer, or a whistleblower uncovering malpractice, or the group organising a charity fete, their story matters to them.

But when the individual stories begin to illustrate wider failure, they begin to matter to everyone.

For over a decade, children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities - or SEND - have been failed by a system which is supposed to help them.

Everyone with any knowledge of SEND knows this.

Now, the consequences of this failure are being played out across the UK.

So why are we dedicating a day of coverage across every ITV News Region and Nation in the UK?

Because this story will matter to everyone.

The experts are unequivocal - lives are being lost, in both a theoretical, and literal sense.

Futures which could be bolstered by adequate support are left unrealised.

Children who could turn into adults who work, who learn, have families, are being denied those opportunities because the system is failing them now.

But when you speak to families of children with SEND you realise another troubling truth. Lives are being lost in a much more urgent, physical way.

The mental health crisis among children and families with SEND is being fuelled by the failure of support.

Children, often dealing with complex mental health issues, are forced to wait months for adequate therapy. Even then, that help is limited. This leaves anxious, depressed, and sometimes suicidal children stuck at home without the right support.

Mums and dads, under immense pressure, tired of facing daily battles with authorities whose purpose is to provide support, are reduced to shells focused on survival; not living their lives, just enduring them.

Add to this the reality of schools, both mainstream and specialist, struggling to provide any support at all, let alone the right support, councils papering over billions of pounds of budget holes, and the picture becomes clear.

This is why we're highlighting the crisis across the UK.

The collapse of the SEND system represents something deeply worrying.

In a country where most parents expect to be able to send their child to a good school, to get a good education, the parents of SEND children can't hold the same expectation.

And when a country can't guarantee a reasonable education for its children, it's not just a failure of the state - it is a failure of society.

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