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The case for a universal SEND screener in early primary

In his first speech as inclusion adviser to the government, Ormiston Academies CEO Tom Rees told an audience in the north-east of England that one of the critical problems contributing to the special educational needs and disabilities crisis is the fact that we are spending “too much time carrying out the process of statutory assessment”, which for children and for families “lacks dignity and is adversarial in nature”.
He went on to state that there is much we can do earlier to help children who are struggling in school, but that those things “go wrong” as they tend to be used at moments of “escalation” and to “access resource”.
Basically, the help comes too late and is skewed to the wrong objective, so at this point those support attempts “stop being of benefit to children”.
In this sentiment, he echoes the clear position set out by the minister he is now serving: education secretary Bridget Phillipson. She has repeatedly spoken of the benefits of earlier identification and intervention for children who struggle at school and the need to improve that in the system.
For example, in a keynote at the Confederation of School Trusts’ annual conference last year, she outlined pledges for the system that included the following: “Early intervention is vital - so there’s increased training for early years providers to identify and support children sooner.”
We completely agree that early identification of learning needs is key to improving outcomes for all children in the education system. And we believe one of the ways to achieve that is to implement a screening programme for all children in Year 1 in all primary schools. Here’s why.
The cost of failure on SEND
The National Association for SEN (Nasen) has estimated that nearly one in five children now has identified special educational needs, with numbers increasing every year.
Many other children have difficulties that are unrecognised and unsupported, particularly in communities with high levels of social and economic disadvantage.
Low literacy levels in the UK are estimated to cost the economy more than £81 billion per year, with upwards of a quarter of all children leaving secondary education without the basic level of skills needed to be productive in the workforce.
Estimates of the cost of poor numeracy vary, but have been put at up to £25 billion by the charity National Numeracy.
By failing to address SEND, inequalities in wellbeing, academic attainment and wealth are being compounded year by year. The financial opportunity costs of inaction for government and society are immense. The personal costs to those badly served by the status quo are immeasurable.
Why the current system does not work
Formal identification of SEND typically involves ascribing diagnostic labels, such as dyslexia and dyscalculia (persistent difficulties in maths), based on underattainment in one or more educational outcomes despite adequate educational experience, compared with expectations based on a child’s age.
While having a formal diagnostic label remains a primary route for unlocking additional resource to support emerging difficulties, the existing health, education and social care systems responsible for diagnosis are neither equitable nor inclusive for all. Indeed, at present, these systems play a role in magnifying the impact of inequalities on educational achievement.
Difficulties in attaining state-funded assessment for their children drives parents to seek diagnoses obtained privately. Long waiting lists for professional services serve only to impede the delivery of timely diagnosis and the onset of subsequent intervention. Delays are exacerbated by economic inequalities, with inter-family variability in the ability to fund private assessments increasing the gaps in provision between those who can pay and those who cannot.
‘The personal costs to those badly served by the status quo are immeasurable’
Tying diagnostic labels to SEND provision raises other challenges, too.
First, the labels neither identify the intervention approach that might derive maximum benefit for an individual child, nor strongly predict their educational outcomes. The reason for this is that the specific cognitive challenges of children with particular diagnoses vary widely: some children with dyslexia, for example, are particularly slow to process information whereas others have marked short-term memory difficulties.
A single diagnosis may also fail to adequately capture the needs of the many individuals who have more complex patterns of difficulty, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia with additional symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Conversely, children with difficulties not severe enough to meet rigid diagnostic thresholds at the point of assessment may nonetheless have additional learning needs that would benefit from timely classroom accommodations and tailored support.
This substantial population of children in the grey area of having needs that are not formally recognised risk their learning difficulties becoming entrenched as they progress through education.
What we need is to decouple the process of formal assessment for learning difficulties from in-classroom identification of children who would benefit from additional support and accommodations, irrespective of any diagnostic label.
One way of achieving this is through universal screening of all children, administered by teachers during the early primary school period in the first instance.
The case for Year 1 universal screening
Universal screening in English primary schools is currently restricted to a single DfE phonics test administered by teachers at the end of Year 1. It is widely considered to be of limited value in the early detection of educational risk for individual children due to limitations in its content and use.
Other screening programmes have been adopted in a minority of regions, but are nationally inconsistent in their scope. They are also frequently restricted to the core skills linked to reading, neglecting other key achievement domains including maths.
In other areas, early screening is restricted to those children already considered to be experiencing difficulties. This non-universal approach to early screening has the clear potential to compound existing inequalities and misses an opportunity to augment the learning of the majority of children with needs that are more moderate in severity.
In March 2023, a project group formed of the three authors here, along with parliamentary officers Jack Stephenson and Tom Higginson, presented an initial policy framework to the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for dyslexia and other SpLDs (specific learning difficulties) to address the systemic limitations outlined above.
We proposed the necessary steps to improving academic achievement through the national implementation of light-touch screening for educational risk by class teachers, before any learning-related difficulties become entrenched.
‘The existing health, education and social care systems responsible for diagnosis are neither equitable nor inclusive’
The proposed screening tool would be administered to all children in Year 1. It would assess a small set of key cognitive skills that support current and future learning (phonics, vocabulary, working memory and sustained attention) through teacher ratings and light-touch assessment.
Its design would allow ease of administration, scoring and interpretation by teachers, with supporting training and documentation.
The resulting individual profiles of strengths as well as weaknesses would act as a guide for:
- Identifying individual pupils who would benefit from tailored support incorporated into classroom practice at both the classroom and small-group level.
- Augmenting the recognition of emerging needs for specialist SEND assessment in children with identified marked difficulties at this early stage of their education.
The screening profiles of individual children would be presented in accessible forms suitable for sharing with families. Data ownership should be restricted to schools and families, with no formal external reporting.
Universal early screener proposals
In March 2023, the policy framework was formally supported by the APPG for dyslexia and by NGOs including the SpLD Assessment Standards Committee (SASC), British Dyslexia Association, Social Mobility Commission and NESTA.
The proposal was personally endorsed by more than 50 MPs across the major parties.
The feasibility of implementing a universal early screener - and the additional need to provide classroom-based guidance for teachers to support pupil needs identified through screening - have been subsequently explored in three phases of consultation involving education charities, practitioners in special educational needs, teacher surveys and focus groups of teachers, Sendcos and researchers.

The outcomes of the consultations are summarised below:
- The large majority of education professionals consulted considered that teacher administration of a new light-touch Year 1 screener would be highly beneficial for maximising and reducing inequalities in educational achievement.
- Teacher-based administration is feasible with adequate resourcing of staff time spent in training and assessment.
- The value of the screener rests on the availability and signposting of accessible specialist resources enabling classroom and specialist teachers to provide effective support for pupils with specific needs identified through screening. These resources need to be developed alongside the screening tool itself, drawing on current evidence and consensus regarding best educational practice. We have already started this with MetaSENse and we are now also looking at components of these interventions so that they are not related to labels and can be applied within a universal context.
The principal outcomes of the proposed programme are:
- Improved and more systematic identification of the needs of the individual child for support.
- Reduced current systemic processes contributing to the compounding of existing inequalities.
- Earlier opportunities to understand and provide the support required by the individual child via both the classroom context and specialist SEN support where required.
- Closer child-centred partnerships between schools and families.
More generally, the benefits extend to better-informed teachers who are confident and empowered in their abilities to:
- Support their pupils on a day-to-day basis.
- Adapt practice dynamically through such universal classroom approaches to children’s needs.
- Incorporate and deliver teaching goals with learning benchmarks that are increasingly focused on the child and less on the static curriculum.
- Share insights based on individual assessment with children and their families.
Next steps for universal screening
We are currently validating the screener and preparing information about the evidence-based interventions likely to be most appropriate for children’s individual patterns of strength and weakness.
These two elements will come together in a toolkit, available to schools on a non-proprietary basis, that will be available from the autumn.
At present, the inefficiencies inherent to current systems in supporting children experiencing educational need increase both financial and opportunity costs to families and other stakeholder groups, and risk delaying access to appropriate and sensitive diagnostic services.
The non-proprietary universal classroom approach we propose provides an equitable and systematic means for recognising the current and future learning-related needs of children, which also guides additional support and diagnostic assessment before learning needs become entrenched.
In doing so, it offers a key element for advancing the UK levelling-up agenda and United Nations sustainable development goals to enhance both the academic achievement and opportunity for the current generation and those who follow.
Joel Talcott is professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at Aston University; Susan Gathercole is professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge; and Jo Van Herwegen is professor of developmental psychology and education at the Institute of Education
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