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6 hours ago
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I am a special educational needs and disabilities (Send) coordinator in a mainstream primary school, a governor at a special school, and have two children with education, health and care plans (EHCPs) who attend special schools. I have read the Send reform white paper, and like it (Send support for schoolchildren in England to be given £4bn overhaul, 22 February). There are areas that need clarity, but on the whole I find it purposeful and comprehensive both as a professional and as a parent.
But one element has sat uncomfortably with me all day. Under the section on “experts at hand” it states that, with expert advice, schools can develop “immediate, cost-neutral actions that the school can take, such as introducing sensory circuits … and lunchtime calm clubs”. These examples are not cost-neutral – quite the opposite. They require adult mediation which is very high-cost. The example exposes the authors’ underlying assumption that schools have general support staff, which is not the reality. Classes of 30 children are taught by one teacher, with no “general” teaching assistant. Resources are so stripped that teaching assistant hours are wholly allocated to deliver EHCP provisions, which are legally-bound for specific children.
We are clever in how we group children to ensure the support is shared as widely as possible, but there is no spare capacity for additional “cost-neutral” provision beyond what is required in those legal documents. Mealtime assistants are employed based on the minimum legal adult-to-child ratios, and creating an additional “calm club” cannot work within those ratios. We have tried, and keep trying, to implement sensory circuits and lunchtime calm clubs – our children desperately need them – but neither are sustainable.
It could be argued that the Send reforms set out to fix this, but we must question the government’s assumption of the starting point. With a glaring misconception that high-cost activities are cost neutral, there is a danger of further workforce burnout and, perhaps more worryingly, pitting parents against schools before the reforms are even out of the starting blocks.
Name and address supplied
The objectives of the white paper, such as new buildings, increased specialist places and inclusion, are welcome. As the chair of governors of a large secondary school, I welcome the review, but its shortcomings are grave and realistic.
To begin with, it considers capital to be a solution in itself. New buildings are important, but without teachers, therapists, equipment and maintenance, attractive spaces will be poorly utilised or compel trade-offs of a damaging nature. Second, it disregards the workforce crisis. Specialist staff are in perpetual short supply; increasing the number of places without investment in recruitment and retention incentives (bursaries, fast track routes, relocation support, pay and career incentives) is only going to push the bottleneck around. Third, the plan must have transition capital and reasonable phasing. Temporary grants to fund initial staffing, training and kits are needed, and the rollout should be pegged on local workforce capacity.
Lastly, make local plans mandatory and more accountable to ensure success is based on pupil outcomes rather than completed buildings.
Michael Robinson
Gosport, Hampshire
As a paediatrician who has often cared for children with Send and contributes to EHC plans, I want to express strong support for Labour’s proposed reforms to the system. EHCPs were introduced in 2014 under the Conservatives with good intentions, but the system is slow, adversarial and overwhelmed. Families wait years, professionals spend large amounts of time navigating bureaucracy, and support too often depends on securing a legal document rather than meeting children’s needs early. Little attention had gone into improving it until Labour came to power.
In my experience, parents, teachers and clinicians broadly agree that the system is not working. Too much attention has shifted toward specialist placements, placement of children in private schools, and legal disputes, while mainstream state schools often lack the resources to include children well.
A greater focus on properly supporting children within mainstream state education, alongside clearer and more proportionate ways of assessing different levels of need, is the right direction. It will reduce conflict, free up specialist provision for those who need it most, and make support more timely. This is a progressive, forward-thinking attempt by the Labour government to build a more inclusive system that works better for children and families.
Dr Jonathan Broad
London
Change is always scary, especially when it affects our children. But while John Harris is right to interrogate the direction of travel set for Send reform in the schools white paper, I would question whether education, health and care plans really do offer “clear rights of choice and redress” (Labour’s Send revolution is a high-stakes experiment. It also threatens precious parental rights, 23 February). The battles I endured to get my autistic seven-year-old son one of these plans tested me, almost to my limits. And for what? The mainstream setting it names cannot even keep him safe.
He absconds regularly, is physically restrained and there is not one specialist teacher in his mainstream school, despite this being specified as essential in his plan. Yes, I will eventually win his tribunal, but that is at least a year away, and what school-based trauma will he face in the interim? The current EHCP process is adversarial, slow and cumbersome. Even though my son will be in the very first cohort whose provision will be reviewed, I support the ambition to make change happen, and to build a future that is better than what he endures today.
Name and address supplied
I am a teenager with ASD. I struggled in a mainstream school. I now go to a special school. Going to a special school has helped me to make friends and gain independence and learn to accept my autism. If I have children in the future they will most likely think and behave like me because of genetics, and because of that where will they learn?
If the government decides to go through with its Send reform then people like me will not be able to attend special schools. I feel I would have no choice but to leave the country for my future children’s education and I don’t want to resort to this.
Khas Alaszewski-Khargana
London
Bridget Phillipson’s article (Children with special educational needs have been let down again and again. That ends right now, 23 February) stops short of the change our schools actually need: redesigning how we educate instead of endlessly sorting who qualifies for support.
The very term Send – special educational needs and disabilities – embeds a damaging assumption that some children sit outside mainstream learning. What begins as an administrative category becomes a structural divide. Time and public money are channelled into eligibility thresholds and tribunals, while the teaching model itself remains largely unchanged.
From a disability rights perspective, this is the crux of the problem. Difference is treated as deficit; support is granted only after proof; inclusion becomes conditional. Our system still privileges a constructed “norm” – yet a norm is merely a statistical average, not an educational ideal. Schools should recognise and celebrate the full human variety of perceiving, thinking and communicating, designing learning around that richness rather than around standardisation.
Universal Design for Learning offers a practical alternative. Widely adopted internationally, it designs learning from the outset for different ways of engaging, understanding and expressing knowledge, using varied materials and assessment rather than relying narrowly on reading, writing and exams. Inclusion is built into teaching rather than bolted on after diagnosis. It supports those constrained by high-stakes testing and a narrow focus on preparing young people for an uncertain labour market, restoring space for wellbeing and intrinsic motivation.
If this government truly seeks reform, it must rethink the culture of categorisation itself. Retiring deficit-based labels and embedding inclusive design across curriculum and inspection frameworks would represent genuine structural change – moving us from managing difference to designing for it.
Danny Braverman
Tostock, Suffolk
The notion that independent Send schools are merely profit-driven ventures exploiting local authorities is a simplistic and inaccurate political narrative. Our Send provision, structured as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC), was founded directly from my personal experience as a parent navigating a failing system. Our motivation was not “profit before children”; in fact, our pricing is significantly below the anticipated government-set fee cap.
We opened to fill a critical gap: families were exhausted, and children with complex social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) needs were being left without options.
While our placements are necessarily more costly than those in maintained schools, this is directly tied to the reality of the young person’s requirements. High adult-to-child ratios and essential specialist therapeutic input are not optional extras, they are non-negotiable requirements for effective care. There is simply no cheap alternative for quality specialist support that yields positive outcomes.
If the maintained sector received appropriate funding, we would welcome the redundancy of our own services. Until that time, grouping all independent providers with purely commercial operators serves only to conceal the true crisis: a surging demand for services coupled with chronic underinvestment. If policymakers genuinely want to reduce the reliance on independent schools like ours, they must move past the rhetoric and adequately fund the mainstream system so that families and local councils are not forced to seek support elsewhere.
Stephen Simpson
Head, Forestschooling UK CIC
The proposed changes to the special educational needs and disabilities (Send) system (19 February) illustrate the gaps in the government’s thinking, which is remarkable for how much priority it gives to short-term political survival (Schools in England to get budget for children with special needs as part of Send overhaul, 19 February).
Avraham Rabby, a blind person who served in the diplomatic service of the US department of state, wrote that “the crux of our problem” is not the disability or specific learning difference itself, but the failure to recognise that disabled/neurodivergent people, like their non-disabled/neurotypical counterparts, have individual “capabilities and shortcomings” and the resulting failure to facilitate their full and effective participation in society. He adds that it is “high time” this changes.
The government is behind the times compared to this thinking. Their focus on “unreasonable bills” and managing Labour MPs and parents who disagree with them instead of listening to those people’s views, fails to capture the poignant truth that there are real people – children – affected by these policy decisions.
Will these system changes result in a child aspiring for a career commonly perceived by society to be difficult or impossible for people with disabilities and/or specific learning differences – like law, diplomacy or statistics – being given the support and encouragement at school to help fulfil such career ambitions? Will children with Send be taught to advocate for themselves and stand up for their rights? Will they be taught the vital skills essential for personal and professional success and fulfilment in the 21st century? None of these questions are answered.
The lack of clarity justifies the fear of the school official who is quoted in another article as saying that this may turn into “exclusion by another route” (‘A social justice issue’: London school believes it has model for Send inclusion, 16 February). Technocratic fiddling at the edges with laws or “equalities rules” doesn’t help, and the short-termism of these priorities adds insult to injury.
Abhishek Dhol
London
