Children’s Commissioner’s Submission: Department for Education SEND Consultation

As Children’s Commissioner, I have a statutory duty to ensure that children’s views are heard. And so I want to begin, as I always try to do, with something that a child told me. I was working with a group of children, and I asked one of them what they wanted from their support service.

One child explained that what they wanted was a letter. Not to confirm they’d rocketed up the waiting list – they were quite realistic about that – but just to confirm that they were still on the waiting list. Confirmation that someone, somewhere in the system, was thinking about them.

It was a powerful reminder of how often the support systems that children rely on are all too often cold at best, and absent at worst.

In the last two years, multiple bodies, from think tanks, to teaching unions, to parliament itself, have published reports on SEND. Each of these had a theme in their title; that there was a ‘SEND crisis’.

But crisis, to me, implies surprise, or forces beyond our control. I believe that if this is a crisis, it is a man-made one. I want us to remind ourselves that the system that ensures England’s most vulnerable children can access their education being allowed to slip into ‘crisis’ is not something that just happened. It is a colossal failure of public policy, and must never be allowed to happen again.

It is clear that the existing system is not working as intended. Regardless of how well the 2014 reforms may work on paper, the fact that we are where we are indicates that something has to change. The outcomes for children with SEND are simply not good enough. The adherence to the timelines set out by law is simply not good enough. The existing system is not delivering the kind of support that children need.

One of the elements of our current system that I find hardest to see is the way it pits parents and professionals against each other. I have spent five years speaking to children, parents and professionals about SEND. No one I speak to is unreasonable. No one seeks bad outcomes for children. Everywhere I turn I see good people, trying to do their best in a system that over the course of a decade has warped into an inherently adversarial one. Nobody seems to have actively chosen this system, but now everyone appears to be trapped inside it. Local authorities under impossible financial pressure use legal teams to contest needs. Schools, insufficiently funded and inadequately trained, have to triage needed resources. Families, exhausted and frightened, become the kind of fierce advocates that institutional systems are very bad at hearing.

The person in the middle of all this is, of course, the most important one: the child who needs extra support to succeed in education.

There is no shortage of analysis of these problems. The submission that follows makes some proposals for how to fix this struggling system. But let me outline the principles that I believe must underpin any genuine reform.

The first is fidelity to the research. The proposed plan to tie action on SEND to what we know works, to upskill staff, and to put government money and backing towards a greater understanding of how to support children with additional learning needs is a welcome step in the right direction. We must act early; not necessarily in terms of a child’s age, but rather when needs begin to make themselves clear. The false economy of the current system, in which early under-investment produces vastly more expensive crisis intervention downstream, must change.

The second is a clear understanding of roles. Teachers do incredible work, but as talented as our teaching workforce is, we cannot expect them to be experts on their own subject area, experts in pedagogy, learn 300 names, and be experts in every type of need. The new system must ensure that children are supported by professionals where they need them, and that those professionals have the time and resources to actually work with children, not to fill forms or shape systems.

Third is a unified system. For too long, the SEND system has been defined by its adversarial nature. This plays out in the conflicts between parents, local authorities, and schools, but it also plays out at level of state actors. Children’s health and education and social care are commissioned by different bodies, funded through different routes, governed by different frameworks, and – let me be utterly clear here – too often driven by competing priorities. This, too, must change.

Fourth, this system must be inclusive. This term, inclusion, is referenced a great deal in the government’s proposals. The new system must ensure that all children with additional needs and barriers to learning are supported. As I made clear in The Children’s Plan, this must include children who our existing system knows too little about, and offers too little to – such as children who are bereaved, children in kinship care – as well as children with identified learning needs. The role of diagnosis in this system must be clearer, and where children have needs that are clearly diagnosed and generally understood, additional support should be offered on an automatic basis. We must look at special schools not as somehow separate to our education system, but as a vital and important part of the whole.

Finally, the new system must produce a change in our culture. Culture change is difficult to do. It is a nebulous ask. I am aware of that. But I know it can happen, and I know the power of changing a culture. I know this because as a teacher, a headteacher, and then a trust leader, I watched as the culture in education changed. I was part of this change. During my years on the front lines of education, the expectations we had of pupils rose, how we spoke and thought about classroom practice changed for the better, and so too did the outcomes of many of England’s children.

The SEND system covers a range of children. Some need additional support, and with that will learn and thrive in mainstream schooling. Others will have needs so complex that a special school is right for them. Regardless of where a child is educated, they should expect high standards, with a focus on what they can do, and should not be approached from a position that starts with what they cannot do. Those standards might look different from other children’s, but nonetheless should be high. We need to create a world that is just as thrilled to see a Children’s Commissioner’s Submission: Department for Education SEND Consultationyoung person in a special school learn to better communicate or to take on tasks necessary for more independent living as a mainstream school is to see all 9s at GCSE.

I return now to that child who just wanted a letter; who just wanted to feel seen. They must be at the heart of the new SEND system. The most important change of all needs to be how we listen to children. When we consider the success of the reforms, we must consider if we have created a world where the systems that children rely on feel warm and responsive.

Children must feel safe, supported, and cared for. They must have a voice in this new system. Interventions must be explained to them and their families. There must be space for a conversation. Children’s faith in this system must be restored.

That responsibility is colossal. So too is the opportunity.

Twenty years ago now, England’s education system tried something new. Heads like me were asked to be part of it. We were told “these schools are failing, we need you to change them, and we will work with you to make that happen.”  That was an enormous burden, certainly – but it was also an enormous gift.

I believe the same is true now.

The system is failing. We must work together to change it. The future of education and, I would argue, of English childhood itself, will be shaped by how adults in positions of responsibility decide to engage with this moment. It must be the end of all of our care and effort to ensure that these reforms truly are generational.

England’s children deserve nothing else.