Opinion: SEND

The SEND system is not broken. It’s doing its job 

The history of our SEND system shows our priority should not be to fix it but to create a whole new way of doing things

The history of our SEND system shows our priority should not be to fix it but to create a whole new way of doing things

19 Oct 2024, 5:00

It makes good headlines, given the reported £2.3 billion debt of all local Councils over SEND funds, and studies of parental and school dissatisfaction, but the SEND and AP system is not broken.  

In fact, it is doing exactly the job it was intended to do – in the late 19th century. That job was to remove from the still-developing  elementary schooling any children and young people regarded as disruptive, ‘defective’ or disabled so that mainstream schools could get on with teaching ‘normal’ children.

At the time, children were taught in Standards 1-6. Inspectors came each year to test them on the prescribed curriculum. A ‘Standard Zero’ class was suggested for the ‘dull’, disabled and disruptive but never took off.

Then the 1899 Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act was passed to divide the normal from the ‘not normal’ into separate classes, units and schools. The Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time expressed anxiety that provision would be too expensive as too many local authorities would find ‘too many defective children’.

Parents, regarded as part of the problem, needed to be encouraged or coerced into the removal of their children from mainstream schools. Ideologies shifted between a benevolent humanism that all the children needed special attention to the punitive need for the social control of potentially delinquent  lower-class children.

Medical (mainly) men, had the task of identifying the children through a variety of labels. There were six in 1899: idiot, imbecile, blind, deaf, epileptic and defective.

The developing science of psychology and IQ soon claimed a place in ‘diagnosis’ and assessments. By 1945, there were 11 categories.

In the 1970s, disability movements began to force recognition and re-evaluation of society’s treatment of disabled people. Following a period of claims for endless descriptive categories, by 1983 children and young people simply had a special educational need. Disability was added in 1995, completing the SEND acronym we now know.

And here we are. Children are still taught in age and ability groups. Accountability is focused on exam results and ‘raising standards’. Schools, stifled by a narrow curriculum and prescriptive behavioural expectations, can’t cope with the variety of ‘learners’. And all are expected to gain some kind of qualification and find employment.

Endless reviews have promised change

Only two substantive differences present. The first is a nominal expectation of ‘inclusion’ (with little support to achieve it). The second, that a system once designed to remove lower-social class children (and later, children from racial minorities too) now increasingly excludes children from middle-class families too.

Today, nearly two million children and young people ‘managed’ or excluded from mainstream are regarded as in need of some form of special education or alternative provision. 

Meanwhile, the DfE allows some fifteen conditions of ‘need’. Parents, carers and – for those who can access them – lawyers fight over the expanding claims for an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) – a necessary means of gaining either a special school place or mainstream support.

But specific policy iterations aside, the issues that dogged the development of this sub-system from the outset are largely the same issues facing policy makers today: ever-increasing costs, parental pressures, lack of capacity and training, and controversies about the accuracy, number and distribution of diagnoses. 

Endless reviews have promised change. The latest, the last government’s ‘SEND and AP improvement plan’ remains mostly undelivered (underwhelming as it was) and a new government is offering warm words about finally ‘fixing’ the ‘broken SEND system’.

But the SEND system is not broken. Under-funded? Yes. Under-resourced? In every sense, yes. But no amount of funding and resource is going to fix a system that’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, or ever keep pace with changing and increasing demand.

Worse: tinkering with incentives and targets can only, at best, redirect its exclusionary consequences onto the families it was always meant to exclude, driving inequality.

Our knowledge and understanding have increased dramatically since the 1800s. Our best practices too. It’s time we designed a new system with these at their heart.

Special needs and sin-bins by Sally Tomlinson will be published in 2025

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6 Comments

    • The law is perfectly clear. Local authority policies are unlawful and often discriminatory.

      Your suggestion that the system serves to segregate those with SEND is misleading; the LAW serves to ensure that EVERY child receives an appropriate education (whether that be in a mainstream or specialist school, or otherwise educated), whilst the main aim of local authorities is to save money and to Hell with the law. Until there is accountability, children with SEND will continue to be failed.

  1. And how do you describe a 10 years old child doesn’t have a school place or any kind of help since February2024 because we fled a domestic abuse. I would have stayed with the abuser rather than taking my child out of his school to go to a safer place
    Of course the system is broken %100

    • It is a broken system when we do not have the money, staffing and resources required to address children’s needs, whatever type of setting it is. This is what needs to change. We also need to stop peddling the idea that mainstream schools are the best places for all children if only we tried harder and were inclusive enough, and that special schools are some sort of bins where we discard children who don’t fit in. We need a joined up, properly funded system. Do what is right for the child, not what is simply cheap.

  2. I work in the speech resource of a primary school…just by delaying diagnoses by specific standardizedtesting UK has failed its SEND population. The absolute lack if sensory integration therapy and occupational therapy is shocking with the najoruty of all these children in desperate need of it.No wonder there are no takers for the texting positions. Children who yet have potential and high capacity to learn and be properly integrated are wasting in 1:1 supervision. I have worked in INDIA with the best pediatric rehab as a Special educator…yes, the public pay through their noses but it WORKS. Their children improve!!

  3. Graham R

    It also feels as though, and in no way judging the children or parents, too much spent on expensive private providers with very little financial incentive to school in mainstream with specialist support. My daughter’s single form entry primary school struggles with the standard allocation & the additional allowance claimed for any children falls far too short in terms of financing adequate, let alone exceptional, specialist staffing.