It’s taken 19 months for this government to publish its first schools White Paper, and that should have been ample time for it to arrive with coherent, thoughtful content.
One unifying perspective -- on the otherwise highly controversial topic of special educational needs and disabilities - is that reform of the current system is urgently needed. The assessment and commissioning processes are convoluted, conflict-generating and unnecessarily traumatic for families, and most people would agree that reform is not an option but an absolute necessity.
Unfortunately, the chaotic way in which the contents of the White Paper have been leaked this week provides a concerning pretext for what the White Paper will actually yield, and families and professionals deserve better.
SEND reform
Policy-announcement-by-leak creates the worst of all worlds: it leaves the consumer devoid of context, and this ambiguity allows anxieties to build, judgements to be made and entrenchment to swiftly follow.
Alongside the leaks, it appears as though the case the White Paper will be making is being established on a platform of “things are terrible and we have to change”.
Now, colour me naive, but I believe one must make a compelling case for change that inspires a belief in the positive difference it will make. Establishing your base camp in the foothills of despair? Is that really how we want to begin this transformational journey?
Outcomes for SEND
There has been a lot of repetition, too, about how outcomes for children with SEND are poor.
What data is this underpinned by, though? How are we measuring outcomes? Surely we aren’t looking at Sats, GCSEs and A levels? One of the reasons why national benchmarking of special schools got chucked out nearly a decade ago is because you couldn’t reconcile that with the additional and complex needs of children with SEND.
So making sweeping statements about outcomes doesn’t fairly reflect the policy position the Department for Education has held for many years now.
Then there’s been the finger pointing at the independent sector.
Provision crisis?
Now - clearly - there are operators that have seen huge profit margins pushed into the ever-deepening pockets of their hedge fund backers. However, that is not every independent special school, and there are lots that do good work and have stepped in to support councils with major sufficiency issues.
Many families will now be worried that their child’s school place could be at risk, and there just hasn’t been - nor have we yet seen a commitment to - capital investment in state special schools to meet need more locally.
Indeed, the government refused to take any decision on the commissioning of new state special schools for 16 months, only to then pull the plug on the majority of new school projects that were green-lit before the general election. If a week is a long time in politics, what on earth justified 16 months of inertia?
NHS failures
There also appears to be an emerging idea that the NHS model of commissioning will be used as the basis for what comes next for SEND. The last time I checked, the NHS was in a routine cycle of budget disaster and over-capacity collapse, and NHS England - the pre-eminent commissioning authority - is in the process of being slashed and burned.
Add in the cataclysmic mess that child and adolescent mental health services have been in for the best part of a decade (which is an NHS-commissioned service), and this strategy - if indeed it is one - isn’t looking watertight…
This White Paper could still deliver a deeply thought-out, reflective and realistic change programme that understands the root causes of the current system dysfunctions and seeks to address them.
It could herald a revamp of mainstream accountability measures, so that we remove the way in which less inclusive practice is rewarded and - indeed - celebrated by the same DfE that simultaneously wants a more inclusive system.
It could be clear about the absolute need for a world-class state special and alternative provision school system, and how investing in that will reduce the dependency on those high-cost independent specialist providers, with a rebalancing of the system over time.
It might also express a clear improvement plan for those who independently assess and commission support for children with SEND, so that there remains independent and objective assessment of need, the abandoning of which would be a highly regressive move.
I guess we’ll all know by Monday, so we have one last weekend to hope.
Warren Carratt is CEO of Nexus Multi Academy Trust, which runs a network of special schools
You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android
