After 27 years supporting over 30 European countries’ education ministries with their policies for inclusive education, I know one thing for sure: financing is a tough nut that no nation has yet totally cracked. Among them, however, England is struggling even to find its nutcracker.
The government’s pledge to “investigate the reasons for increasing demand for SEND support and provide a ‘costed’ plan” for reform is a tacit acknowledgment that, here as elsewhere, ‘SEND’ funding is a critical systemic challenge.
Like England, many countries are still grappling with the reasons for the exponential rise in the numbers of learners being identified as requiring additional support, let alone the detailed information they need about the impact of various models on meeting those needs.
Among those making the most progress in tacking this issue, a common thread is that they recognise that labelling learners as having ‘SEND’ has little to do with their learning needs and a lot to do with prevailing policy (thus my use of speech marks).
The differences between countries (and within them) in terms of who is identified as ‘SEND’ are huge. Some formally identify less than 0.5 per cent of school-aged learners; many others over 5 per cent.
These numbers do not reflect the actual incidence of specific learning needs and/or disabilities, nor how much money is being spent on ensuring learners receive the support they need.
What these numbers do seem to reflect are population densities and, more importantly, local funding mechanisms and the strategic behaviours that emerge from them. Indeed, the same pattern eventually emerges across most countries: where there is a system of needs-based funding, more needs are identified.
This is the point at which the conversation tends to get heated or break down altogether. But rethinking the needs-based funding approach doesn’t have to mean identifying learners’ needs less effectively. More importantly, it doesn’t have to mean providing less or poorer support.
There will need to be some introspection at the DfE
Instead, moving away from labelling some learners as ‘having SEND’ towards funding an more inclusive system overall can allow school communities – including families – to access resources without outsourcing the responsibility for saying who is ‘worthy’ of extra cash.
This would require a radical rethink of the English system, to focus funding decisions away from individual learners and towards ensuring all policies incentivise capacity building.
Helpfully, European-level work with policy makers lights the way. We know, for example, that funding mechanisms that promote capacity-building for inclusive education in all schools need to work towards three main goals:
Raising achievement
All resourcing and support systems need to promote capacity-building strategies at all system levels. These include local-level, community-based capacity-building initiatives, school-level work, and rethinking how specific and targeted resources for specialist support is made available.
Sharing practice
All forms of specialist and alternative provision settings need support to effectively act as a resource for other local (mainstream) schools.
This should be incentivised, and disseminating inclusive practice should be embedded within all pre- and in-service training for specialist professionals.
Improving training
Capacity building to meet more learners’ needs in more flexible ways needs to feature in all professional development opportunities, including teacher training and education and leadership development. Where possible, these opportunities should be open to parents too.
When mainstream settings are felt to be inadequate for meeting learners’ needs, it’s quite natural for parents, professionals and learners to feel that specialist provision offers better prospects.
Funding policies can drive this sort of segregation, or they can incentivise inclusion. To do the latter, they must be guided in equal measure by the principles of efficiency, effectiveness and equity (not just equality).
The current system is quite obviously not achieving these principles. Instead, it has resulted in a costly, inefficient bureaucracy, accompanied by a cottage industry thriving on its in-built combativeness.
If the DfE is genuinely to ‘understand the reasons for increasing and changed demand for SEN support’ then there will need to be some introspection as well as discussions with stakeholders.
A key question they will need to honestly answer is how the system incentives it has put in place have resulted in the unsustainable situation they find themselves in.
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