As children burst from the school gates in a noisy gaggle, thrusting party invites and artwork at their parents, Jacqui Jackson learnt to look for a boy emerging silent and alone.

Her highly intelligent but autistic son Luke, 16, has special educational needs that leave him unable to relate to his peers, but for 10 years he was given no option but mainstream schooling.

The school run came to symbolise Jackson’s own personal hell as she picked up the pieces of an “inclusive” education policy that has brought misery for thousands of handicapped children.

She was driven to the edge as Luke endured years of bullying which culminated in a heart-stopping phone call.

“Luke had been found on the street bleeding and with a black eye after being chased from the school by a gang and beaten up,” recalled Jackson, 41, last week. “He never went back to school. He had become a play-thing for other children to ridicule, a ‘freak’ and a ‘weirdo’.

“The saddest thing he’s said to me was that for him, going to school was like being an alien, where there was this nasty species which tormented him.

“He became very ill. It got to the stage where I knew he would end up dead if he stayed.”

As is the case with three-quarters of all children with “severe or complex” special needs, Luke was educated in the mainstream. He attended a comprehensive secondary school of 1,200 pupils in Blackpool, before his mother withdrew him, first educating him at home and later paying for him to go private.

Jackson — who has seven children, four of whom are handicapped — has fought serial battles for proper educational support. “It has been very hard,” she said with some understatement last week.

“Luke was deemed too intelligent for a special school. He had written two books by the age of 13. He should have been a high-flyer, instead he has left school without a single qualification.

“The teachers had no training in special needs, he was left to cope in a class of 35 children. He suffered exclusion under the guise of inclusion.”

Jackson is not alone. One in five children in England and Wales — 1.9m — have difficulty learning, ranging from emotional troubles to the profoundly brain damaged. At least 275,000 have “severe or complex” problems.

A Labour government, with its focus on social justice and parental choice, might have been expected to improve their lot, but it has dithered in an area reaching crisis point.

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