By Dr Daniel Stavrou, Assistant Director Council for Disabled Children, and SEN Policy Research Forum Lead Group Member
With Government declaring that the upcoming Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) reforms aim to create genuinely inclusive mainstream schools, where every child and young person feels they belong and can meaningfully engage, it might feel unduly negative to point to the size and nature of the task put to classroom teachers.
Within the education ecosystem, teachers face contradicting forces. Working with and speaking to teachers it is clear to me that they want and try to create the ‘stretching, enriching and inclusive school experiences’ the proposals promise. But they face systemic barriers, not least the way in which the purpose of education and the measurement of success have been articulated. As Gibbs put it: Educational success is judged competitively as the extent to which each student is able to outperform others. Within such a system, one cannot help feeling inclusion will always be a struggle.
The data exposing wider society’s shortcomings on inclusion seems clear: employment rates amongst disabled adults; and those with intellectual disability; disability hate crime; the destination data for those leaving school having been designated as SEND. And of course the fact the UK Government has consistently fallen foul of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), whose Committee found that it has failed to take all appropriate measures to address grave and systematic violations of the human rights of persons with disabilities. All these suggest that we are asking classroom teachers to create a more just, tolerant, inclusive and welcoming environment than society itself. In other words, we are not tasking schools with inducting children into existing social norms but rather to be a vanguard for social justice. It is not the case, as the Education Reform Act of 1986 set out, that teachers are to ‘prepare (s) such pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life’; they are asked to prepare them for a better, more inclusive version of adult life.
This preamble is not intended, of course, to negate the Government’s ambition; quite to the contrary, it’s about doubling-down on it, by acknowledging the true size and nature of the ask.
The size of the task is huge (compounded by system and society-level obstacles), and its nature is social transformation.
This being the case, it flows that a great deal of our attention should be given to the kind of support classroom teachers should be able to expect in carrying this heavy load. With all the above in mind, we set out to explore one specific aspect of this, and asked: how might the specialist workforce enable mainstream classroom teachers to pivot towards a more inclusive classroom?
On behalf of the Council for Disabled Children, we held a series of conversations with professionals including mainstream classroom teachers and a host of specialists (SLT; OT; EP; SPlD teachers; autism advisory teachers; HI / VI teachers; special school teachers) and a roundtable session. Coincidentally, our roundtable session took place a day after the publication of the Schools White Paper and associated SEND reforms consultation, so we had the chance to consider our position in relation to the Experts at Hand model which features in them. The final report with findings and full recommendations can be seen here.
We considered the possibilities of diverting some of the specialist input away from individual (‘1:1’) provision towards whole-class or whole-group input. The Government’s intent to ‘increase upfront investment so support is readily available for classes and communities of children, rather than locked behind lengthy and bureaucratic individual assessment processes’ has conceptual and pedagogical implications.
Conceptually, this promise speaks to a commitment to a vision of inclusion aligned to the UNCRPD, and an expectation of education systems to enable all learners to be educated amongst their peers and in their local community (and reversing the ‘end of bias towards inclusion’ of the Coalition days). The UK has a reservation in place to this specific point (article 24 (2) (a) and (b)), and there is clearly no intention to dissolve our special school system, but nonetheless there is an aim to enable more children and young people to successfully be schooled in mainstream. As the Consultation sets out, the reforms are about the right to attend and be included in their local schools.
Pedagogically, it marks a call for schools to ‘shift away from a narrow focus on learners’ special educational needs and special needs education as specific provision, towards extending and improving the quality of support for learning that is generally available to all learners’, as the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education articulated it.
Our participants all agreed that to enable mainstream classroom teachers make this ambition a reality, current approaches to the deployment of the specialist workforce will need to change. At the heart of this, will be the shift of the ‘professional gaze’ from being almost solely concerned with individual diagnosis and ‘interventions’, towards what might be called universal design for inclusion. We know that many professionals are frustrated by the fact that the majority of their time is taken up by statutory assessments and the associated bureaucracy, as demonstrated, for example in a 2025 survey regarding the EP workforce.
To perform this pivot in practice, there will need to be changes in the way the specialist workforce is commissioned and deployed, as well as a change in the ways in which they commonly work. Effective joint and aligned commissioning across LA and ICBs must be part of the change. However, we didn’t explore this theme and stuck to conversations on pedagogy and practice. Our participants spoke powerfully about the need for collaborative cross-discipline approaches and discussed ideas of practice such as:
Our participants acknowledged that different professions were ready to varying degrees for such a change in practice, and that each profession would have to consider this and any potential training and development needs.
Together, we put together a list of policy recommendations:
And specifically relating to the ‘Experts at Hand’ model:
In our report, we included several practice examples our participants shared which demonstrate how a new, classroom-based role for specialists might look. Practice examples from other countries are sometimes suspect, and they carry the risk of misunderstanding context. However, in this helpful presentation (20:30 – 46:08), Dr Gordon Porter of Inclusive Education Canada speaks about their School-Base Support Team model in which the professionals all revolve round the classroom teacher; and as Dr Porter puts it, their collective responsibility is to ‘make sure that the classroom teacher has success in teaching every student in their class’.
The Experts at Hand model offers promise, but to make it achieve its stated goals, and make a difference in our classrooms, it will require some refinement, and I’d argue a conceptual sharpening: it should be a mechanism of coalescing round our mainstream classroom teachers.
