You do not need me to tell you that our current approach to education for children with special educational needs is broken. Despite the best efforts of many dedicated professionals, it too often doesn’t deliver for the children it is meant to help.
Its bureaucracy causes frustration for parents and professionals. Costs are rapidly rising and, if fully realised, would leave many local authorities insolvent. At the same time, many providers report being under-resourced.
Today, CST has published 10 principles that seek to provide a framework for a new approach. They build on our previous work over many years and discussions with our member trusts, who together run more than three-quarters of academies, both specialist provisions and mainstream schools.
There have been attempts before to reform the approach. However, we believe there are fundamental flaws that mean iterative changes are not a sensible option.
Instead, we need a new concept of what a good outcome looks like for all involved. That includes seeing the SEND system as one that ensures high-quality specialist provision but intrinsically involves mainstream schools.
Our 10 principles cover the approaches we think are needed for policy, workforce and the system overall. These are not about changes at the margins. They challenge us to think from first principles so that we can define an end-state that really delivers for children rather than piecemeal changes to our current ways of working.
First, our policy approach must have a bold vision that is rooted in dignity and expertise, and shifts away from the current medicalised, deficit approach.
We should stop thinking of special educational needs as a ‘demand’-led, bolt-on system, and instead frame it as part of a positive social mission to ensure all children – including those with special educational needs and disabilities – can grow up to live rich and fulfilling lives in which they are both visible to and valued by their communities.
These principles provide a vital baseline for ongoing discussions
People are, of course, key to this. We must invest in a national programme of workforce development so that all school staff have the knowledge, expertise, confidence and flexibility to ensure that mainstream schools can identify and support all children with SEND, including those who present with a greater degree of complexity, to achieve well at school.
This may need new roles and structures, and it is important that legislation currently going through parliament on teacher pay and conditions, qualifications and the new school support staff negotiating body does not unwittingly create new barriers to getting this right.
We need to build in ways of ensuring best practice, through evidence-based guidance – similar to National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidance in the NHS – that helps us understand the best models for effective provision, including specialist units and resources.
We also need to promote the sort of learning and knowledge building between specialist and mainstream settings that some mixed trusts already benefit from.
A ‘whole-system’ approach is key. There will inevitably be dependencies between schools, local authorities, the NHS, and other agencies, so we need to ensure that the system incentivises communities to work together.
The future system must have much stronger processes to project the demand for specialist placements and invest in building sufficient suitable placements. This includes more capacity ‘upstream’ in mainstream schools and less reliance on the statutory system for children to receive the support they need, relieving pressure on specialist providers.
SEND is a complex system. Indeed a key criticism of the current approach is that SEND itself is a blanket term that hides complexity and leads to seeing children as a series of labels rather than individuals.
That complexity means 10 principles cannot hope to reflect every intricacy of a new approach. More detail will be needed, but we believe the principles we are setting out today provide a vital baseline for those discussions.
Read CST’s 10 principles for a new SEND system here
