Sector leaders have been appointed to two new expert panels tasked with advising the government as it aims to overhaul the “broken” SEND system.
Tom Rees, CEO of Ormiston Academies Trust, was in November appointed chair of the government’s new expert advisory group on inclusion, which will oversee reforms aimed at making mainstream schools more inclusive.
It has now been revealed he will be joined on the panel by:
- Susan Douglas, CEO Eden Academy Trust
- Annamarie Hassall, CEO of the National Association for Special Educational Needs
- Anne Heavey, director of insights for Ambition Institute
- Andrew O’Neill, headteacher All Saints Catholic College
- Claire Jackson, principal educational psychologist at Salford City Council
- Heather Sandy, executive director of children’s services at Lincolnshire County Council
The advisory group will meet monthly to “look at how to improve mainstream education outcomes and experience for children and young people with SEND”.
Also announced on Thursday morning was membership of the government’s new neurodivergence task and finish group, chaired by Professor Karen Guldberg, head of the School of Education, and former Director of the Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER) at the School of Education, University of Birmingham.
The DfE said the group will “help us to understand how to improve inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools, in a way that works for neurodivergent children and young people to aid reform”.
The expert panel will be formed of:
- Anita Thapar, Professor of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neuroscience at University of Cardiff
- Dr Jo Bromley, Service Lead and Consultant Clinical Psychologist for the Clinical Service for Children with Disabilities, CAMHS at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Professor Duncan Astle, Goldman Sachs Professor of Neuroinformatics in the Department of Psychiatry, and a Programme Leader at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University
- Professor Mark Mon-Williams, Chair in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Leeds, Professor of Psychology at the Bradford Institute of Health and Director of Centre for Applied Education Research (CAER) and Professor of Paediatric Vision at The Norwegian Centre for Vision
- Tim Nicholls, Assistant Director of Policy, Research and Strategy at National Autistic Society
- Ellen Broomé, CEO of the British Dyslexia Association
- Dr James Cusack, Chair of Embracing Complexity, CEO of Autistica
- Heba Al-Jayoosi, Assistant Headteacher and SENCO at Mayflower Primary School
- Miss Zoe Burlison, Inclusion Lead at The Ruth Gorse Academy, Leeds
- Hayden Ginns, Assistant Director for Children (Performance and Commissioning) across Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth ICB places (NHS)
- Adam Micklethwaite, Parent of an autistic child and Director of the Autism Alliance
Guldberg said: “We are wholeheartedly committed to engaging widely with the field, and particularly with the lived experience of neurodivergent people and they families.
“This engagement will enable us to co-produce understandings of barriers and enablers to progress, and to make recommendations that can lead to real change.”
Meanwhile Rees said the expert advisory group on inclusion will use the panel’s “knowledge and expertise, drawn from our professional and personal experiences, and a diverse range of perspectives” to also help inform the DfE’s “commitment to deliver deep and long-term change”.
“The SEND system is in urgent need of widescale reform so that it delivers better experiences and outcomes for children, young people and their families,” he said in a statement.
“The challenge is significant but so is the opportunity – to create a better and more dignified system which gives parents and professionals more confidence, and enables many more young people to thrive and leave school with the experiences and outcomes that give them choice and opportunity in the future.”
Giving the opening address at the Schools North East Academies Conference in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Thursday morning, Rees was expected to lay out problems in using ‘SEND’ as an umbrella term for a hugely diverse cohort.
“The term ‘SEND’ implies a binary between children, and suggests children assigned this label are fundamentally different from the norm, and that their struggles are a product of these differences rather than the systems and structures around them,” he was due to say.
While the term “implies a commonality of experience” among children with SEND, this is “misleading”, Rees was set to say.
Blanket use of the term ‘SEND’ “obscures individual identities, leading to generic policy and strategy which can expose children to inappropriate practice”.
“There is a lot of diversity within society and our school population, and a lot of what we categorise as ‘special’ is normal and predictable,” Rees will continue.
“We want to move from a system based on perceived “deficit” to a system built on dignity – where we see all children and their differences as part of the inherent beauty of humankind.”
