Last week the Department for Education published the long-awaited Schools White Paper “Every child achieving and thriving” and its proposals for extensive educational reform in the consultation document “SEND reform: putting children and young people first”. The consultation, which will be open until Monday 18 May, invites views on changes to legislation, accountability and guidance, with a stated focus on improving outcomes and restoring confidence in the system.
Our initial response is to be delighted at such an apparent commitment to developing more inclusive education nationally! We strongly resonate with key messages of combining high standards and inclusion, and the willingness to be guided by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
In keeping with this Convention, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, inclusion is understood as a fundamental human right, not a handout or an optional extra. It is defined as the process of systemic reform, involving changes in content, methods, approaches, structures and strategies in education, so that all students can have an equitable and participatory learning experience.
Plans to create or expand “Inclusion Bases” in mainstream schools, in which children are separated from their peers, gives us serious cause for concern. Inclusion is about presence, participation and achievement, and implies a sense of belonging, of being with one’s peers and with the appropriate level of support. Separation, or any form of parallel provision under a different name, is not inclusion.
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It goes without saying that reforms fuelled primarily by the need for financial sustainability would risk detracting attention from children’s experiences and future life chances. Improving outcomes for children and young people and rebuilding trust with families have to be equally high priorities. Alleviating financial pressures on local authorities, important though it is, cannot become the driving force of reform. Quite the opposite: focusing on cost-cutting solutions is likely to keep outcomes poor and families frustrated. If, instead, the primary focus is to build capacity in schools to respond to the full diversity of learners, parents will no longer have reason to fight an adversarial system, and a large part of existing expenditure (for example exorbitant transport costs or fees to independent special schools) will naturally subside.
Let us remind ourselves what we know about these priorities. In 2009 the Lamb Report had concluded that the (then) system was not fit for purpose and, after a change of Government in 2010, the Children and Families Act 2014 was introduced. In 2019 the Government launched the SEND Review, to find out what these reforms had achieved. This reported in March 2022 that three main issues were causing concern in the SEND statutory system: poor outcomes for children and young people with labels of SEND; frustrated parents and young people; and unsustainable financial strain on the system. These were the same main concerns identified in 2009 by the Lamb Report in the previous system, so extensive reform really is very long overdue.
Developing a more efficient system, however, does not mean that the law needs to be changed again. The issues that the SEND Review highlighted may have more to do with how laws are put into practice, and less with the actual content of these laws.
The current legal framework, including duties under the Equality Act 2010 and the Children and Families Act 2014, provides robust protections for disabled children and young people. As the Education Committee said in its recent report “Solving the SEND crisis”, new legislation must not dilute these rights. The priority should be ensuring that existing duties are properly understood, resourced and implemented.
We are pleased to note proposals to strengthen guidance on Reasonable Adjustments, and hope that this offers an opportunity to restore the statutory Guidance on Inclusive Schooling which was withdrawn as part of the 2014 reforms. Its loss has left a void, and the anticipatory duty to make Reasonable Adjustments so that disabled people (pupils and staff, current or prospective) are not disadvantaged is not widely understood or implemented.
We will study these proposals in more detail and share in due course our response to this consultation here.
