SEND Help: How to reform our Special Educational Needs and Disabilities system

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has promised that reform is on the way but also asked for “a bit of patience”, warning that there is “not a silver bullet here”.

The National Audit Office says the SEND system is “financially unsustainable”. The watchdog acknowledges that the Department for Education (DfE) already has various initiatives under way for improving it, but unfortunately it concludes that “there is no evidence these will fully address the challenges”.

A government survey published earlier this year found that 59 per cent of parents who sent their child with SEND to a mainstream school felt their child was well-supported there. This made for a striking comparison with the parents of children at special schools, 90 per cent of whom thought they were well-supported overall.

School leaders have consistently raised concerns that there is a lack of resource and funding available to support young people with SEND. Now the government is considering where to start with its reforms – with ministers already indicating that inclusion in mainstream education is the preferred model.

Phillipson has stressed the importance of making mainstream schools more inclusive. Similarly, schools minister Catherine McKinnell has said recent research could “pave the way for a sustainable system in which schools cater for all children, and special schools cater only for those with the most complex needs”.

To gather ideas for making that inclusive model work in the best way possible, experts are urging the DfE and schools sector to look to other countries for inspiration.

In that vein, the work of Dr Susana Castro-Kemp, director of the UCL Centre for Inclusive Education, may be of help to ministers. She is currently heading up a two-year investigation of SEND practice in nine countries: the four UK nations, plus Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland and Australia.

In its aim to influence SEND policy change in England, the project will look at the various ways of working in these countries. In Australia, for example, there is an early school intervention system. Children there are less likely to transfer to another school due to SEND, and schools are more likely to have a reduced class size due to children with SEND.

In Belgium, there is an expectation that students should be supported in mainstream schools, with a transfer to special schools being an exception. Meanwhile in Ireland, resource is put into workforce training.

In Finland, the current system involves a three-tier approach: general support, intensified support, and special support. All children receive “general support” as default but can be moved into one of the other tiers if a teacher becomes concerned. No official diagnosis is needed for the child to receive the support. (In England, securing a diagnosis is often a key focus for parents as they feel it would make their child more likely to be prioritised for extra support.)

Dr Henri Pesonen, now a professor in the Department of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo, grew up in Finland and worked at both the University of Helsinki and the University of Eastern Finland, is an expert on the Finnish system.

“If the teacher sees a child struggling and they become concerned, they can take it to the school welfare group,” he tells The House. “The welfare group consists of a school psychologist, principal, other teachers and school nursing, and maybe the parents. But it’s very much based on: if there’s a concern, they can start implementing more intensified support quite fast.”

Implementation and practice vary considerably across the country, Pesonen adds, as municipalities are free to decide how the support is implemented.

While the three-tiered approach is fully inclusive, there are still special schools and classrooms for those who need more intensive support. The approach is generally popular, but Pesonen admits the change has brought “a lot of paperwork for teachers” in mainstream schools.

The professor is positive about the reforms. But he thinks the recently elected conservative government’s promise to tackle SEND could be interpreted as the country returning to a two-tier system.

Another country of interest to Castro-Kemp, despite not being covered by the UCL project, is Portugal. A push since 2008 for inclusion within mainstream settings means only a few special schools remain – a model that may be of interest to the UK Labour government.

Castro-Kemp, who is from Portugal and was completing her PhD there when the changes came into force, describes it as a “revolutionary movement”. There are “not very good data-keeping mechanisms” in Portugal, but she says there is some evidence that SEND practitioners are now “a lot happier with the system”.

Professor Mel Ainscow, emeritus professor of education at the University of Manchester, and a long-term consultant to UNESCO, agrees. She says that Portugal is “probably the most advanced in terms of inclusion and equity”.

Kemp, who worked as a psychologist in an early childhood intervention programme in Portugal, says the reforms included a state-funded early childhood intervention system that sees the data of all children – from birth – being shared between the education and social care systems. “I have never had an experience of true multi-agency working as I had in Portugal,” she says.

Before the election, Labour expressed interest in the idea of multi-agency working. At a Centre for Social Justice event in London earlier this year, Phillipson said Labour hoped artificial intelligence (AI) would help to join up existing records for children to improve co-ordination between education, social care and the wider services that support families.

DfE’s new Science Advisory Council would be well-placed to look at this area of innovation.

Ainscow says it is encouraging to see the phrase “inclusive education” being used by the new Labour government but fears it will not be completely embedded. “It’s got to be more fundamental to the way in which the education system develops,” he says.

You cannot simply take a policy from another country and import it into England because there will be important differences in context.

What we can learn from places such as Portugal is that “principle pushes policy”, Ainscow adds. In other words, inclusion is the starting point for all policies in the system – such as the curriculum. In the UK, the government has launched a curriculum review, which it says will look at inclusion, while Ofsted says inclusion will be a key part of its report card system.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the Canadian province of Ontario, all school boards are required by law to provide special education programmes and/or services for students with SEND. These services are tailored to meet students’ individual needs.

If concerns are raised in Canada around a child’s learning or development, they may be discussed by an identification, placement and review committee (IPRC). Run by the school board, it decides the level of support that the child requires.

A range of options are then available, including placement in a regular class with indirect support or resource assistance, part-time withdrawal, special education class with partial integration, or full-time special education class for the entire school day.

Unlike other SEND reviews that are currently taking place, which focus on outcomes and on policy “in a static way”, Castro-Kemp says she is keen to avoid efforts to “import” other countries’ policies to England.

“What we’re trying to do is to find out the fit between policy elements and then how they are perceived by different stakeholder groups, and that includes the practitioners, the families and young people who are neurodivergent or who have disabilities themselves,” Casto-Kemp explains.

“We’re not just interested in looking at what’s in the policy and the outcome, but the different processes in between that may lead to higher levels of satisfaction with the system.”

Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at the school leaders’ union Association of School and College Leaders, agrees.

“You cannot simply take a policy from another country and import it into England because there will be important differences in context. It is more about using research findings to help inform a wider strategy that we can apply to our own education system. We look forward to seeing the results of this research.”

Comparisons between different systems – and their data – are far from straightforward, given there is a range of definitions for the term ‘SEND’.

With these caveats in mind, leaders nonetheless believe England’s SEND system could benefit from the government and the sector looking at as many international examples as possible.

Mulholland says: “It is clearly a challenging area to get right – and the more evidence we can see, about what has and hasn’t worked elsewhere, the better.” 

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