Headteachers in England have a message for the government: you cannot fix special educational needs provision while simultaneously running an 'academic attainment at all costs' policy that rewards exam factories and punishes inclusive schools. The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) delivered this gentle reality check in response to a government consultation, noting a 'critical inconsistency' between the white paper's early focus on inclusion and its later 'ambition' section, which apparently forgot about Send entirely in favour of chasing grades.
Margaret Mulholland, the ASCL's Send and inclusion specialist, warned that reforms risk placing schools 'in an impossible position' unless backed by adequate staffing, funding, and training - the sort of trifles that tend to matter when you're asking teachers to do more with less. The union also raised eyebrows at the proposed 'inclusion bases' for mainstream schools, cautioning that these should not become 'holding pens, standalone units or exclusion by another name' for children excluded on behavioural grounds.
The Coram group of children's charities piled on by warning that narrowing parents' grounds for appeal to specialist Send tribunals would replace legally enforceable rights with 'school complaints processes' - a swap roughly as appealing as trading a functioning car for a unicycle. Meanwhile, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that the reforms could be undermined by the increasingly high concentration of Send pupils in a small number of mainstream schools, with the lowest fifth averaging just 10% Send pupils and the highest fifth averaging 26%. One school leader candidly admitted: 'We've always tried not to have a reputation for being good at Send so parents don't tend to seek us out.'
Daniel Kebede of the National Education Union suggested stronger local authority-controlled admissions to ensure fair placement decisions, because apparently the invisible hand of the market hasn't quite sorted this one out.