Standardising SEND? Be careful what you wish for!

National standards for SEND are expected as part of a make-over of the forever-failing SEND system. This follows Education Policy Institute’s 2021 conclusion that how pupils are identified with SEND varies from school to school and evidence from the National Audit Office and the education select committee that what pupils receive also varies from one area to another. But what – if anything – can SEND standards really achieve?

At the end of January, Gillian Keegan blasted the CEO of Southern Water over its “unacceptable” sewage dumping less than 48 hours after she voted in the Commons to maintain the present waste water regulations for another 15 years. This perfectly illustrates the ‘standards’ problem; they generally come in two sizes: those lacking firm enforcement and those lacking a standard worth enforcing.

The current standard for SEND provision requires schools to use their “best endeavours”, a phrase favoured by lawyers where a party has only limited control over their obligations. In sum, the Children and Families Act 2014 imprecisely balances the responsibilities of schools and local authorities. But standardising these kinds of decisions between 152 Local Authorities, 20,000 mainstream schools and 1.2m children with special needs will only entail yet more smoke and mirrors.

While academisation has played a part in reducing local authorities’ influence over the process, there’s no evidence they’d be doing a better job otherwise. The local government association has raised the pressure to increase mainstream inclusion, and standardisation is in the air, but be careful what you wish for.

One year ago, directors of NHS England and NHS Improvement hailed the “wide-ranging support received through the national consultation on the proposed new standards for mental health care”. So which type of standard did they go for, the unenforceable or the underwhelming?

Under the standard for non-urgent community mental health care, children, young people and families should start to receive help within four weeks. But that “help” can be as little as another referral. It can also tale the wistful shape of “agreement about a patient care plan”, but what if there isn’t agreement?

That’s where we so often are with SEND. It’s why we had the green paper in response to the select committee, which reviewed the Children and Families Act, which arose from Sir Brian Lamb’s 2009 report on failures in the system. And what was Lamb’s primary concern? That there should be, “communication and engagement with parents rather than standard information”.

So there you have it: Gillian Keegan will oversee the type of policy solution which Lamb most feared, a type imbued with “prophetic perceptions of value for . . . some imagined future place and time” but which has no evidence base in our schools. We’ve come full, infernal circle, and it’s so perfectly SEND.

Research has highlighted many concerns about standardisation in public sector services, including those for children.

In a study published last year, Bakkeli and Breit cautioned that “that standards do not exist in isolation but are introduced within institutionalised organisational settings”. We can certainly see schools and Trusts in that light, and there is currently no love lost between them and the DfE.

And in 2015, Ponnert and Svensson found that, in fields “influenced by organisational demands and market endeavour” (of which the schools sector is now one), standardisation “requires professionals capable of handling a mix of logics without totally yielding discretionary power”. Yet the standardisation model favoured by government threatens to bypass this key discretionary aspect.

That’s in part because, as Skillmark and Oscarsson set out in 2020, increasing deviance from standards over time comes down to organisational factors including lack of leadership, weak competency development and lack of reflection arenas. Ofsted’s local area reviews for SEND have found serious weaknesses in half of our local authorities, including precisely in these aspects.

Meanwhile, Patalay and Fried’s 2021 study points to the unintended negative consequences of mandating standardised measures which lack transferability across settings. The same is likely to be true of referrals and interventions in our diverse schools sector.

And in a related study published last year, Weenink and others collected views from practitioners that forms and procedures made it “more important that everything on paper is correct instead of the actual care we provided”. Parents want transparency and accountability in SEND provision; they don’t want documentary disguise.

As Hollnagel put it in a 2021 study, “disguising complex problems as simple problems by offering apparently ‘simple’ solutions does not really make the problems any simpler. It only makes it more likely that the solutions will not work”.

After 40 years of tinkering without satisfaction, you’d think we’d have learned.