School leaders have questioned whether resourced provisions are the best way to ensure a more inclusive system and warned this approach can result in “exclusion in its worst sense”.

Concerns have been raised about the focus on mainstream schools opening resource bases for pupils with special educational needs ahead of the government announcing its planned reforms to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support.

Ministers have made it clear they expect mainstream schools to take on more pupils with SEND and the Department for Education has commissioned guidance for establishing “best practice” on running resourced provisions and SEN units in mainstream schools.

School leaders at a panel debate on the SEND system at the Schools and Academes Show in Birmingham on Thursday voiced concern that mainstream schools operating these bases might not be the best approach.

SEND support in mainstream schools

Emma Bradshaw, the CEO of Alternative Learning Trust, a five-school trust with alternative provision settings and special schools in the South East, said these bases “aren’t necessarily the answer”.

She said: “There are resource bases that are in the heart of the school and that senior leadership teams are very passionate about teaching in. But equally a lot of people will tell you, ‘I don’t permanently exclude - we keep all of our kids,’ but actually those kids are in a garage down at the end of the school site with the teacher that should have retired 10 years ago, and they don’t get any outcomes, and they go on to become Neet [not in education, employment or training] and nobody deals with what’s behind the behaviour.

“They’re just contained. Now that isn’t inclusion - that’s actually exclusion in its worst sense.”

A Tes investigation last year highlighted how the use of resourced provision and SEN units was growing but that schools needed more guidance and funding to run them effectively.

Resourced provisions and SEN units provide education for pupils with SEND in a mainstream school. In resourced provisions pupils are still expected to spend the majority of their time in mainstream lessons while in SEN units pupils will spend the majority of their time in that base.

Heba Al-Jayoosi, assistant headteacher at the Mayflower Primary School in London, also questioned the focus on resourced provisions during today’s panel discussion.

She said: “Resourced provisions, I don’t think, are the efficient answer that they’re looking for. If you ask a lot of families and neurodivergent children...or those who are otherwise deemed hard to place, they don’t really want to be stigmatised in that way, in education in silos alongside mainstream.”

She told the panel that she was “more in favour of adapted spaces where all children can learn” and said that a school’s curriculum “has to be adapted so that it’s flexible and broad”.

Call for better school facilities

However, Ms Al-Jayoosi highlighted the barriers created by mainstream school buildings.

“If I was to have a magic wand and devolve funding anywhere, it would be towards mainstream school build,” she said.

“It’s very clear the direction the DfE wants us to move towards is the idea that schools are for everybody, but we don’t have, for example, the facilities that are in place in special schools.”

She added: “And there’s been a lot of talk for many years about increasing the complexity threshold in mainstream schools. And I agree with that. The staff are skilled and incredibly creative.

“They can teach all children, and that should be what’s happening. But if you don’t have the appropriate space, if you have a child who is going to be overwhelmed by your sensory environment, then your build is the major barrier at the moment.”

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