The full details of the Government’s long-awaited changes to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) provision are due to be outlined in a White Paper from Monday 23 February 2026. Successive Governments have faced significant pressure to do something about the rising costs of a SEND system that has become increasingly complex and adversarial. Parents and carers, schools and Local Authorities are all now ‘consumers’ in a market driven system and often in competition with each other. What is actually needed is collaboration and partnership and a wider definition of need within the local school context.
I have been studying inclusion in theory and practice since I was a practitioner in the criminal justice system in the early 1990s. At that time, I ‘noticed’ the numbers of young people coming into that system who were excluded or disengaged from school and who also had additional needs that had not been picked up by the education system. Many of those young people went on to have poor life outcomes and the statistics have remained the same over the three decades since. You only need to look at the level of additional needs within our prison system to see the correlation. My ‘evidence’ was anecdotal back then, but these observations and my introduction to a more relational and collaborative approach to addressing harm, called restorative justice, became the basis of my careers in education, SEN/D and inclusion. These eventually led to my own research, that began with the University of Northampton, when I enrolled on the PG Certificate National Award in SEN Co-ordination. In my opinion, the bottom line should be about creating more equitable life outcomes for our children and young people with a focus on building healthy relationships. This requires looking beyond a deficit-based definition of SEND and seeking to understand needs based on context, environment and culture as well as the individual.
Mel Ainscow in his 2022 article about ‘promoting equity in market-driven education systems’ highlights that the distribution of poor educational outcomes is socially unjust and that globally, England is an extreme case of the “application of market forces”. He highlights the use of market forces in various countries such as charter schools in the US, free schools in Sweden, voucher systems in Chile and academies in England. The introduction of such systems has led to an increase in school autonomy, heavily regulated quality assurance systems, greater parental choice and new business oriented ‘actors’ involved in education, but research suggests they do not show evidence of impact. In fact research by Fullan (2021) states that market-driven systems have become “catastrophically ineffective” in addressing inequities (p. 4). In reality we need to be a little more pragmatic and base approaches on collaboration that promotes greater equity rather than manipulating funding for institutional gain that improves attainment-focused outcome measures.
The development of academies and multi-academy trusts (MATs) has grown exponentially over the last decade, whilst the role of local government has shrunk meaning that Local Authorities (LAs), who have also faced extreme austerity measures, can no longer provide specialist services. In the past LAs were positioned and funded to more effectively provide geographically anchored services that shared local intelligence and developed and disseminated collective strategies and responses to local need. Now, if individual schools or MATs that may serve wide and diverse geographic areas, bring in external services, they may be of poor quality or inappropriate to meet the needs of the children and young people in that setting.
Attainment gaps since the COVID-19 pandemic have increased noticeably between the most and least disadvantaged and schools have become more insular, competitive and ‘protective’ of their own school through, sometimes dubious, targeted admissions, ‘off-rolling’ and decisions around the allocation of what should be ring-fenced funding. The proposed plans are certainly not “radical” and are unlikely to create a “truly inclusive system”. They are more likely to widen the gap of an already fragmented education system. We need systems that encourage collaboration, that build capacity and encourage positive relationships to counter ‘market driven’ policies. There needs to be measurement of equitable intent that works across the education ‘journey’ of a child and supports collaboration rather than competition. This also requires appropriate funding and leadership within Local Authorities to be able to counter the opening up of service provision and school management to the ‘market’. Finally, the role of the Leader of Inclusion, currently entitled the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo), must be a leadership role. The 2022 DfE Green Paper on SEND found that most SENCos remained on the class teacher scale rather than the leadership scale. This role is crucial to inclusive practice within our education contexts and requires appropriate professional development for those entering the role including ongoing mentoring and a qualification that equips these individuals to be strategic, evidence informed leaders.
The answer is not an additional £4bn and threats to councils if “they fail to meet their legal duties”, it is a need to go back up stream to decisions that were made in the early 2000s to provide so much autonomy and funding to individual schools based on definitions of SEND that are now out of date and ‘abused’ just to gain funding. Accountability needs to remain with schools and measures of impact need to focus on collaboration and impact on equitable outcomes for children and young people.
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