The government’s inclusion tsar has said he would like to see the term SEND “retired” as he spoke of problems with the current “medicalised model” for special educational needs and disabilities.
Tom Rees, Ormiston Academies Trust’s CEO and chair of the DfE’s expert advisory group for inclusion, highlighted issues with categorising pupils under the “umbrella term”.
He told journalists at the ASCL conference today he would “like to see a world where you can retire the label of SEND, because we’ve become much more precise in our understanding of different needs, and this sort of generic label that we use at the moment would be redundant”.
He said it was “hard to see how you might go from where we are today to there”.
But he said he would like to reach that point in the next decade, and to have “a more expert school system that had less reliance on that label”.
‘Medicalised model’ of SEND is a ‘problem’
Rees said the word SEND led to certain needs that are “predictable and normal” – such as speech and language needs, which is the most common type of need for those receiving SEN support – being treated as “exceptional”.
He added that the current “medicalised model” of SEND “seeks to sort of do what medicine does”.
“Which is almost to categorise, identify need, with the idea that there’s a treatment or there’s something that you could prescribe,” he said.
“In an education setting and a broader society, there’s problems with that.”
Children with SEND ‘not a homogenous group’
In his keynote address on Friday, Rees also highlighted issues with categorising pupils under the “umbrella term” of SEND.
“Underneath it are lots of different needs,” he said. “We often for shorthand use SEND as a way of grouping children, but it’s not a homogenous group…in that group there’s so much variety.”
The education system must move away “from thinking about SEND as something separate” and instead make it something that is focused on and embedded into the entire education system, with good provision built into “the core of mainstream schools”.
Demand for SEND support has soared in recent years.
The National Audit Office (NAO) says that between 2015 and 2024 there was a 140 per cent increase in children and young people with an education, health and care plan (EHCP).
As of last January there were 434,354 pupils in schools in England with an EHCP, 4.8 per cent of the pupil population. A further 1.2 million receive SEN support, around 13.6% of all pupils.
“It’s too big a number to deal with through individualised…specialist support,’ said Rees,
He spoke firmly as he described the EHCP-based SEND system as “bad”. “I think we need to acknowledge that and just say it,” he said. “It’s a bad system.”
‘We’ve got a badly-designed system’
The i Paper recently quoted a source stating the government’s direction of travel was “changing the threshold for EHCPs to make [them] harder to get”.
Asked whether he believes the threshold for EHCPs should be lowered, Rees said the focus of his advisory group, which was launched late last year, “is more about how we can build that provision into the core of mainstream schools”.
Pressed further, he said: “I think we’ve got a badly designed system…I think that’s why [the] secretary of state’s right to say we need to step back and look at the whole system and to take our time to do it.”
Rees’s speech coincided with the launch of the government’s ‘Inclusion in Practice’ project, which aims to “identify and share practical, scalable solutions for inclusion in mainstream schools”.
The six-week call for evidence began on Saturday. “We’re hoping it will capture examples of good practice in the system,” said Rees.
