As a middle-class man of a certain age, I may be ill-advised to challenge Woman’s Hour. Yet last week, Anita Rani had me shouting at the radio when she miscategorised the SEND crisis as a lack of inclusion in academies.
This one-eyed assessment, worthy of Nelson himself, overlooks the real issue. SEND provision is a textbook ‘wicked problem’ – a term coined in 1973 for issues that have no definitive formulation, no true or false solutions, correlate with a plethora of other challenges, and brook no errors from those tasked with solving them.
The current crisis is born of systemic fragmentation, legislative contradictions, chronic underfunding and pervasive blame-shifting.
A fragmented system
Fragmentation is a significant contributor to our system’s dysfunction. Structural reforms have created a hybrid system where about half of children attend in maintained schools, while the rest are taught in over 2,500 school trusts.
Instead of fostering collaboration, this structure pits local authorities (LAs), trusts and schools against each other in competition for scarce resources. Rather than aspire to success, all jostle to avoid failure.
Legislative burden
The legislative framework exacerbates this problem. The equality act and subsequent education acts confer extensive rights to children with SEND, which society is neither willing nor able to fund.
The aspiration for equality is noble but politically and financially unsustainable. Addressing the underfunding directly would be political suicide; no politician wants to be seen taking resources from disabled children.
Instead, the government shifts blame onto LAs, schools, and trust while avoiding the core issue: insufficient funding.
Chronic underfunding
LA funding for education has plummeted by over 50 per cent in the past 14 years, leaving them severely under-resourced. Meanwhile, the ‘high needs’ block is based on historical incidence of need and is lagged funding, making it doubly insufficient.
As the gap between actual needs and funding widens, LAs resort to diversion, delay and denial to manage the shortfall. Delays in assigning educational psychologists prevent assessments, which in turn delay the awarding of education, health, and care plans (EHCPs), without which need remains invisible and unfunded.
This vicious cycle ensures that only parents with the stamina and resources to fight legal battles can secure support for their children.
Someone else’s problem
Douglas Adams’s literary invention, ‘The Somebody Else’s Problem Field’ aptly describes this crisis.
Schools often say, “We’ve done our bit. Let another school take this child with particularly complex needs.” LAs, overwhelmed and underfunded, raise EHCP thresholds to limit successful applications and manage budgets. Meanwhile, the government issues incremental funding increases while criticising LAs for inefficiency.
Each segment of the system deflects responsibility, exacerbating the problem rather than addressing it.
Breakdown of trust
The end result is erosion of trust at every level. All the mechanisms of accountability perversely incentivise against inclusivity.
Headteachers see peers who exclude or off-roll SEND students being rewarded with outstanding ratings and national recognition. LAs witness schools gaming the system, threatening exclusions to force placement changes. Schools see LAs failing to meet the most obvious needs, even advising schools to exclude as a last resort.
And then there are parents and children themselves.
A new approach
Despite the grim picture, routes to improvement exist. However, they require systemic reframing rather than warm words and piecemeal solutions.
A new norm for inclusion
Schools must accept that 25 to 30 per cent of children in mainstream schools may be on the SEND register, with 5 to 10 per cent holding EHCPs.
Whole-school support models
Schools should move from over-reliance on supernumerary teaching assistants managing need by exception to whole-school models that distribute responsibility and build capacity, reducing staff burnout.
Restoring trust
Rebuilding trust between LAs, schools, and MATs requires transparency, shared accountability, and a shift from punitive measures to collaborative solutions.
Rethinking terminology
Moving beyond the term ‘SEND’ to a broader, whole-school assessment of aggregate need could promote collective responsibility over individual diagnosis.
This is a ‘wicked problem’. But by addressing its structural, legislative, and financial roots, we can begin to tackle it. To do that, we need honest, collective effort, not political, point-scoring punditry or, indeed, shouting at the radio.
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