The council term formally begins at the Town Hall tonight, with Croydon facing many of the same problems which previous administrations have failed to resolve. GABRIEL MacARTHUR meets a new councillor with unique insights
Elected: Tom Bowell after the count confirmed him as a councillor for his home ward of Broad Green
Councillor Tom Bowell’s visits to Croydon Town Hall are more nostalgic than most.
Bowell is one of 23 councillors who were elected for the first time earlier this month, and who are expected to be in attendance at the council’s annual meeting in the Town Hall Chamber this evening.
Bowell, who at 24 is one of Croydon’s younger councillors, has been going to council meetings since he was 11 years old.
Back then, Bowell was an object of council discussion. Now, he attends the Town Hall as the newly elected Labour councillor for Broad Green, who has been immediately installed into the shadow cabinet, with responsibility for streets and environment.
Inevitably, Councillor Bowell often considers his early visits to the grand, panelled rooms of the Town Hall.
“You hear all the stuff being discussed, because you’re always at these meetings, but as a kid with professionals, you’re always a bit semi-detached,” Bowell says.
“You listen, you always pick things up. It’s kinda what got me interested.”
The story of how Tom Bowell moved from Town Hall waiting rooms as a child to a shadow cabinet member on the Labour front bench is one of diligence, a very supportive family and what he acknowledges was a measure of good luck.
It is also a story about a system, and a system that stopped working as it should long ago: the provision of support for children with SEND – Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.
Bowell says that he believes the SEND system is broken at its foundations, in Croydon and across the country. From Bowell’s point of view as someone who was failed by the system, it has become something which is highly profitable for the companies providing the legally-required services, done at a huge toll to both the council budget and the children it is supposed to serve.
Tom Bowell was one of those children.
Tom Bowell was born in 2001 at Mayday, Croydon University Hospital, a short walk from his West Croydon family home. From an early age, his parents noticed something was different about young Tom. Their son was slow to speak and had trouble picking up social cues.
When he started at primary school, he found himself thrown into a packed classroom where he suffered from overstimulation. “It was almost a joke if I’d last 30 minutes before being sent home,” he tells me with a bitter smile.
After two years of being “managed “, ostensibly for disruption, he was diagnosed with autism. In the context of today’s waiting lists, this was quite quick. “These days you get people waiting for years. The waiting list is insane,” Bowell says. “That’s why there has been such an uptake in private diagnosis.”
Local authorities, like Croydon, are under legal obligation to find appropriate placements for children with SEND. They are obliged to draw up an EHCP – an Education, Health and Care Plan – for every child under their jurisdiction with SEND. Often, this includes finding them a place at a “special” school, which is usually run by a private sector company, which expects to make a profit for its owners and shareholders.
It means that our councils usually have to pay those providers an extraordinary cost per pupil.
In 2011, after years of frustration and false hopes, Tom Bowell’s parents made the decision to take him out of mainstream school. For about a year, Bowell was completely home-schooled.
“The home education worked quite well, actually,” Bowell says, relief cast across his face while reminiscing. “I could avoid all the stuff which made a bad impact on me.”
What followed for Bowell and his parents were years of searching and frequent disappointment. It gave young Tom an insider’s understanding of the contradictions between how the SEND system operates, compared to how it presents itself.
Town Hall experience: Tom Bowell has been attending council meetings for more than a decade, as when he met Croydon’s then SEND ‘champion’, Jerry Fitzpatrick
Bowell and his family went through the exhaustive process of visiting school after school after school. “I felt like I had visited every specialist school in south-east England,” he says.
These schools were all privately run and designed for neurodivergent children, but none of them were right for him. Bowell was a victim of conflation.
“There’s a lot of people, and I hate to say it, sometimes professionals, too, who conflate autistic people with having learning disabilities. There is a distinct difference.
“Autism is a spectrum and presents itself radically differently from person to person. A lot of places we were sent were geared towards people with learning disabilities.” That was not a fit for Tom, a boy who would “sit on Wikipedia for hours and read articles about god knows what”.
He eventually landed at Baston House School, in Bromley, where he transitioned from primary to secondary. It was not a success. More home tuition followed, stretching out across the years that should have been his secondary education.
He tried a school in Sevenoaks. He tried Bensham Manor, which the council pushed for but his family argued was designed for children with learning disabilities, not autism. Then, in what he describes with a weary humour, the council insisted he try another school, this one run by the same private company who operated the school he had recently left.
Caseworker churn: what goes on in Fisher’s Folly, left, is not always understood by councillors in the Town Hall
It seemed that whenever his parents approached the council over provision for their son, they found themselves dealing with a different caseworker, having to explain from the very beginning what young Tom’s requirements were, and what they had tried already, often multiple times.
Caseworker churn, the extraordinary turnover in local authority staff, especially in Croydon, is a significant issue, according to Bowell.
During this exhausting period of being thrown in and out of schools, whether they catered for children with autism or not, young Tom, being his intuitive, Wikipedia-reading self, began to notice a pattern.
“I guess that’s probably the tipping point that really made me interested in politics because it was the fact that I knew they were charging us, the taxpayer, so much money.
“It was a bad school. They had no speech and language therapy as a part of my EHCP. So they’re charging the taxpayer all this money and they’re not providing the full service. I guess that was the tipping point.”
With less than a year of formal secondary education behind him, at 17, Bowell enrolled in Sutton College. He attended an adult education service where he was given flexibility and autonomy over his work. He’s been working full-time in public transport for the last seven years.
Transport business: Tom Bowell has worked in public transport for seven years. Only 1-in-3 people with autism are in work
He’s tried to get elected before: aged just 20, he stood in the previous council elections, and he has even been the Labour candidate in the last General Election in 2024, in the Tory heartlands of East Surrey, but where he relished the experience, making his own leaflets and keenly attending five hustings.
Councillor Bowell says: “Over the years, I’ve made massive progress. It’s all been step by step. Going along to the odd event here, meeting people, it’s all gradual. Nowadays I’d say I don’t feel like I have any sort of issue. That’s the thing I’m proud of most. I’m not sure I recognise the person I am now from ten years ago.”
But he is well aware, from his own personal experience and that of his family, he has learned the hard way how the “system” is failing. In some respects, Bowell suggests, the SEND system is now structurally worse.
It’s failing the people who need help, and it is failing the country. A 2024 government report found only 3-in-10 autistic adults are in work.
The public sector’s dependency on the private sector to deliver the services it is legally obliged to deliver creates incentives which, Bowell argues, are badly misaligned.
In one school where he was enrolled, “That was an expensive placement,” Bowell says.
“That was £82,000 a year in 2014. Nowadays, with inflation, we’re talking over £100,000. Per year. Per child.
“So just for one kid, plus the cost of transport: it’s big money.”
And Bowell is adamant that it is also a public spending scandal. Profit-making companies are often “charging a fortune and not delivering the support specified”.
Bowell says: “It’s an absolute scandal what goes on.”
And he adds: “I feel very lucky. I don’t want it to be: ‘Oh, well, I’ve done it, so you can do it.’ It’s not necessarily that linear. But I’m more mindful than guilty. I don’t want to pull up the drawbridge behind me.”
Read more: Our children deserve help to improve their life opportunities
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