By Thomas Kinsella

Headlines over the weekend have claimed that children are being denied NHS occupational therapy support simply because they attend private schools. Phrases like “Orwellian” discrimination (GB News) and “two-tier NHS” (Daily Mail) have been splashed across tabloid front pages, suggesting that well-off families are being persecuted for going private.

But the real story is more complicated than that. It’s not about reverse discrimination or state spite. It’s about systematic design flaws, inconsistent commissioning rules, and the growing crisis in support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Yet most press coverage has failed to engage with these issues in any meaningful way. Instead, it has misdirected public outrage and failed to hold those in power to account. As is often the case, the media have found a convenient culture war headline and run with it, rather than ask difficult but necessary questions.

At the centre of the story is a commissioning policy used by some NHS trusts that limits access to children’s occupational therapy services to those attending state-funded schools. This is not new, nor is it a blanket ban on care for privately educated children. The rationale, which is not by any means beyond critique, is logistical. NHS therapists are integrated into the state education system, and delivering equivalent support across hundreds of independent schools would stretch a system already at breaking point.

What’s missing from most reporting is the crucial point that children with EHCPs (Education, Health and Care Plans) are still entitled to NHS occupational therapy regardless of school type. The real problem, then, is not a deliberate NHS snub of the privately educated, it’s that EHCPs are often extremely difficult to obtain without, as an article has pointed out in The Independent, a “battery of assessments”.  So far is there is a scandal here, that is it.

But this nuance doesn’t translate well into headlines, particularly in an environment where vast sections of the national press are increasingly committed to manufacturing outrage. The story, as told by many outlets, has been curated to fit a familiar narrative: that the state is hostile to aspiration, and that hardworking families are punished for making the “wrong” choices. The lack of scrutiny applied to commissioning decisions, or the failures of government oversight, shows how little appetite there is for responsible reporting when an easier, more emotive line is available.

As with other examples documented by Hacked Off, such as “two-tier policing” headlines, the deeper policy story has been buried in favour of clickbait. That isn’t just lazy journalism. It actively obscures the systemic failures that deserve attention.

Unsurprisingly, IPSO has remained silent. As the body run by the press for the benefit of the press, IPSO has consistently failed to address misleading narratives that rely on cherry-picked facts and distorted framing. The result is a regulatory void where misleading impressions go unchecked, corrections (if issued at all) are buried, and the public is left with a distorted view of the world. The true victims of a broken SEND system are invisible, and newspapers like the Mail on Sunday are failing to properly speak up for them.

At a time when public trust in the press is already at historic lows, this episode offers yet another example of why a truly independent regulator (such as Impress) is not just desirable, but necessary. Until such bodies are empowered and adopted across the sector, these stories will keep coming. The press will continue to misreport and divide, through the use of culture war clickbait headlines, instead of holding the government to account for the real problems, like insubstantial public service provision.

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