The autumn term looks set to deliver three significant playbooks for schools: a new inspection toolkit, a curriculum review and proposals for reshaping support for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

The third requires parliamentary involvement: backbench interventions will decide whether the SEND proposals will be a false dawn or a radical change.

Before the Department for Education sets out its SEND proposals, though, a working group for think-tank IPPR is intent on shaping national thinking and it aims to report in mid-autumn.

All of this got me thinking about what is needed to improve the SEND system, with my own proposals determined, in part, by my own stories around special educational needs. A formative five experiences for me include:

1. A close family member, born with spina bifida, who spent her first five years in Great Ormond Street Hospital, then her school career in mainstream schools, before training to be a nurse and then a GP.
2. As a sixth-form student, I acted as an examination scribe for boys attending Worcester College for the Blind.
3. I started my secondary teaching career in a South London comprehensive with a superb unit for partially hearing children.
4. I was a pastoral head of 315 children in an Inner London Education Authority comprehensive in the 1980s, where there was no special needs department and no child had a statement of special needs (Mary Warnock published her landmark report in 1978).
5. As an HMI, inspector and reviewer, I have visited hundreds of mainstream and special schools across this country and internationally, each practising model provision and inclusion.

What, then, are my preconceptions about special needs provision that inform the seven proposals below?

• That the support and love of family and friends are the most important ingredient of a successful education.
• That some children and young people need top-quality educational and medical support in bespoke settings to achieve what they are capable of.
• That most children can thrive in well-resourced mainstream schools, if each child has their unique needs identified accurately, addressed precisely and reviewed regularly.
• That pupils learn and are best taught without labels.

Seven proposals for SEND reform

From this, I think there are seven key areas where things need to change:

1. The national funding formula needs to be fundamentally changed to eradicate the “funding apartheid” that leads to differences of up to £3,000 per pupil in the nation’s schools. Change this and you change much of the argument about proper investment in special needs.
2. The “medicalisation” of mild learning difficulties needs to be addressed, along with the diagnosis inflation that has accelerated post-Covid. There has to be a cross-profession determination to reaffirm, especially with parents, a culture of successful learning without labels.
3. The local school should be where families send their children: every school should have a climate and approach that welcomes all children. Primary and secondary schools need to have a staffing complement (including a qualified Sendco) that can meet the needs of the vast majority of local children.
4. Parents should have the right to send their child - particularly if requiring a “memorandum of identified needs” - to the local school, but no other school. Education, health and care plans (EHCPs) as we know them would be phased out.
5. All children with special educational needs should be educated within local authorities or within charity-led settings. There would be no travel funded beyond the nearest school that the LA determines can meet their needs.
6. The state should not fund any SEND provision at independent schools that are run for profit. The NHS remains, for all of us, the lifelong “health bank” of last resort.
7. The best academy trusts and individual schools already have well-established, on-site resource bases to cater for most educational needs: this model should be built on with intent. And every special school should be formally twinned with a mainstream school so that accomplished learning and teaching practices are generously shared.

Hopefully the IPPR will take note. Although, I’d caution, make seven fine recommendations, as I have done, and you might get some traction. Make a dozen, and they’ll sink!

It was Sir Winston Churchill who declared to his fellow MPs, with precious little confidence in them, that if you make two points in a maiden speech in Parliament “the buggers will forget the first”.

Roy Blatchford was founding CEO of the National Education Trust and previously served as one of His Majesty’s inspectors of schools (HMIs) in England. He is the founder of Blinks Education

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