We’re SEND teachers – these are the five things that need to change

Headteachers and experts say the special educational needs system is on the “brink of explosion” and is set to remain so if urgent changes are not made within the Government’s long-awaited overhaul. Ministers had been expected to publish their response to the consultation on special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reform this month. However, on Tuesday, The i Paper revealed the Government’s response has been kicked into at least next year, with the Department for Education declining to commented on a future publication date. The public consultation, which was live earlier this year, invited parents, teachers and specialists to have their say on the government’s proposed overhaul on the SEND system, which the former Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson described as having been “neglected to the point of crisis”. “Families are often waiting far too long for assessments, diagnoses and support for their children,” author and SEND specialist Georgina Durrant told The i Paper. “Access to services such as speech and language therapy can vary significantly depending on where a child lives, creating what many describe as a postcode lottery.” The consultation, created under the previous Starmer government, proposed fewer care plans, pledged to invest £1.6bn into making mainstream schools more inclusive, and more direct, accessible support and needs identification for the under-fives. “We seem to be caught in a period of ‘SEND reform limbo’,” said Durrant, who stressed that “overall we’ve waited far too long for SEND reforms”, but added that she would favour waiting for changes that “genuinely improve support for children” rather than a “rushed response” to the public consultation.Too many families have to fight Durrant, who is a specialist SEND tutor and has authored several books on the topic, told The i Paper the biggest issue with the current SEND system is that “too many families of children with SEND have been put in a position where they have to fight for their children’s needs to be met”. She said: “Schools and SENDCOs want to provide support early, but delays in education health care needs assessments, long wait times for assessments for neurodevelopmental conditions, and access to specialist services cause problems. “SEND support for children and young people shouldn’t be this battle that it has become – it should be timely, proactive and based on need.” Teaching staff perform care in place of nurses For Marijke Miles, headteacher of Baycroft School in Fareham, the most pressing issue in need of attention is clinical delegation – when a pupil’s complex clinical or medical needs, such as changing tracheotomies and catheters, are attended to by teaching staff instead of a qualified nurse. “Staff and pupils in schools up and down the land work in a precarious legal limbo around this on a daily basis,” she said, stressing that it is “urgently in need of legal clarification” as teaching staff are “in the invidious position of being pressured” to carry our both medically and legally risky procedures. Miles said the government legislation is routinely “grossly overinterpreted” by Integrated Care Boards, which is consequently creating a “two-tier healthcare service” and compromising thousands of young people’s right to quality medical care. Councils are in dire financial straits – it’s time to decentralise their role Warren Carratt, chief executive of Nexus Multi Academy Trust, which run special primary and secondary schools in the North and East Midlands, said it is the rising pressures on local authorities that are the most crippling. Councils are facing a conflicting pressure of rising costs twinned with a government requirement to curb spending, and as such “already have both arms pushed up their backs”, explained Carratt. Decisions about a child and young person’s SEN needs are currently made by local authorities, not schools. EHCPs (legal documents that describe children’s additional needs and unlock extra funding) are determined by councils and families can appeal decisions by tribunal – of which 99 per cent are won by parents. EHCPs will be harder to achieve and retain from 2030, and this has driven a scramble to obtain them before the end of the decade. In January, some 718,800 children and young people had an EHCP – up 12.5 per cent in a year and the sharpest annual rise since the plans were introduced in 2014. As such, the financial strains on local authorities are mounting. The County Councils Network forecasts that, even after a previous Government bailout of £5.79bn, councils’ SEND deficits will soar to £10.4bn by March 2028. However, Carratt said pressure from the Department of Education for councils curb “High Needs” spending when they go into deficit has “force[d] them them to neglect their statutory duties and pretend more specialist provision isn’t needed, whilst simultaneously the number of EHCPs being requested, issued, and subject to Tribunal directions continues to climb”. Believe the experience of parents A third of all children and young people with an EHCP are persistently absent from school – that is, missing at least 10 per cent of their time in education. Ellie Costello, executive director of Square Peg, an organisation that campaigns to resolve the persistent absent from schools says she would like to see the removal of “high-stakes consequences”, such as fines, for parents of persistently absent children. She described these measures are “blunt, crude instruments”, which leave parents and schools feeling “defensive”. Instead, she would instead like to see a better culture of “understanding and believing parents” when it comes to the needs of their child. “Too often experts and parents are locked in a diagnostic battle, because the child is able to hold it together at school, so parent’s experiences are dismissed.” “Funding needs to ring fenced, and it needs to be accountable as well,” she added. Boost teacher confidence Low teacher confidence in SEND is an issue “dating as far back as I can remember” said Emma Hollis, chief executive of The National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT), with trainee teachers reporting a lack of confidence in teaching SEN pupils “no matter how much time is dedicated to training new teachers to educate children with a wide range of needs”. In July, NASBTT reported that 65 per cent of providers do not believe new teachers are well prepared for complex SEND in mainstream settings, and only only 39 per cnet feel their own organisation is ready to develop trainees’ capability at the level required. This is in part due to the wide range of differing needs – from deafness to autism – and being confident in teaching one SEN child “doesn’t, and shouldn’t, mean you are confidence in teaching them all”. Instead, she wants new entrants “to understand that it’s about knowing individual pupils – no two students are the same even if they have the same condition as one another on paper”. To achieve this, Hollis wants “more trainee teachers to be offered experience in specialist schools as a typical part of any training programme”, as currently placements in special schools vary widely depending on course and trainee preference. Hollis said there needs to be a “sector-wide” change in the narrative around teaching. “At the moment, attending to an individual child’s needs is seen as needing knowledge that sits in the head of someone else.”