As the government prepares to set out new plans for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) reform in schools in its White Paper, Matt Wrack, General Secretary of NASUWT – The Teachers’ Union, responds to some of the key proposals.
· The DfE says it will: “Provide £1.6 bn over three years across every early years setting, school and post-16 setting, equating to thousands of pounds extra every year on top of existing core SEND funding, to run targeted and small group interventions at the earliest signs of children having additional needs.”
Matt Wrack says: “While increased early support for SEND is welcome, years of underfunding and diminished external services mean that this new funding is barely a drop in the bucket of the investment necessary to drive real improvement in schools. £1.6bn over three years may sound like a lot of money, but it equates to just a few thousand pounds per setting. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that SEND provision can be adequately overhauled with this low level of funding, or that the associated workloads for teachers could be in any way offset by throwing a bit of money in their general direction.”
· The DfE says: “Every council working with Integrated Care Boards and health board will commission local professionals –educational psychology, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy and more – so they are routinely available in every area, whether or not children have an EHCP.”
Matt Wrack says: “Schools, teachers and pupils desperately need increased access to SEND specialists. They are already supposed to have that access under current arrangements, but a shortage of specialists and more importantly, a shortfall in school funding, prevents this from occurring. It is not clear how these new proposals will remedy these issues, or how schools will be expected to cope while they wait for increased numbers of specialists to be trained and commissioned. Teachers certainly cannot fill the gaps.”
· The DfE says: “Special and alternative provision schools to provide expert training, direct interventions with children and short-term placements in their schools.”
Matt Wrack says: “Great things can come from schools and teachers sharing expertise and learning between one another. However, special and alternative provisions are often very different in size and setup to mainstream schools – precisely because their pupils require such settings – and approaches that work in small, calm settings may well be impossible to replicate in larger settings with fewer resources and lower staff to pupil ratios. It is entirely possible that when it comes to inclusion, these new proposals mean mainstream schools are being set up to fail.”
· The DfE says: “Once rolled out an average secondary school will receive over 160 days – around an additional full school year - worth of dedicated specialist time every year.”
Matt Wrack says: “Extra specialist support for secondary schools is welcome but we have no clarity as to whether it will be significant enough to meet the considerable additional demands these proposals will place on teachers. Extra specialist support proposals for primary schools are also currently unclear, which is worrying if they are to become hubs of early intervention.”
· The DfE says it will: “Train every teacher to be a teacher of children with SEND, with the biggest SEND training offer ever seen in English schools – backed by £200m - and a new requirement for all teachers to be trained to support children with SEND.”
Matt Wrack says: “Teachers have been clear that SEND inclusion in classrooms is not just about knowledge and staff training; it is about appropriate levels of support and resource. Training alone cannot compensate for insufficient staffing, lack of specialist support or inadequate time to plan and adapt teaching.
“We have said it many times, but we will say it again: one staff member cannot do the work of three or five. Unless the DfE is also implementing a system whereby teachers can clone themselves several times over, or is planning to significantly increase the numbers of support staff in schools, no amount of training will adequately improve mainstream schools’ abilities to provide for the needs of SEND pupils, and this proposal creates real risk that workloads and burdens on teachers will increase further when they are already dangerously high.”
Teachers and SENCOs remain the missing voice in SEND provision reform
“Teachers and SENCos are cast in these proposals primarily as a delivery mechanism for SEND provision, rather than as professionals whose working conditions determine whether any reform can succeed,” says Matt Wrack. “But at The Teachers’ Union, we see worryingly little evidence that the government’s proposed reforms to the SEND system will adequately address concerns that teachers have voiced time and time again.
“There is nothing in these proposals to indicate government plans to reduce class sizes, which teachers feel would substantially aid their efforts to improve inclusion. In fact class sizes continue to get bigger as schools close and underfunding forces teacher and school staff redundancies. Expecting schools to absorb additional complexity without a plan to address these deep problems risks intensifying existing pressures, not improving them.
"The proposals assume that more learners with SEND can be educated successfully in mainstream schools. But there is little evidence of any plans to address core pressures identified by staff in schools, including excessive workload, large class sizes, behaviour challenges and the ongoing recruitment and retention crisis. Without action to address these problems, any plan for SEND reform will be unlikely to succeed.
“When the Schools White Paper is released in full, NASUWT will be ready with a swift and appropriately complex analysis of the implications for teachers and schools. The education system cannot function without teachers and it is common sense that they should be fully consulted on proposed reforms that impact their workloads, wellbeing, and the lives of their pupils – preferably before they are leaked to the press for months beforehand.”
Notes to Editors
All DfE quotes are taken from the DfE press release entitled, “Specialist SEND support in every school and community.”
