By Rob Webster and Brahm Norwich
First published: 30th September 2025, tes
Momentum is now building around a campaign to protect education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.
Reactions from parents of children and young people with and without EHCPs, and the wider education community, is raising the temperature on this issue to critical levels.
Given the growing significance and urgency facing the special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system, we are concerned that the conventional ways in which government and civil servants consult stakeholders is insufficient to the task. No doubt most time is spent talking to different groups separately.
It’s crucial to be thorough but everyone involved also needs to be pragmatic and realistic about potential trade-offs involved in reforming and improving the SEND system, especially given the starting point.
We will not get changes that help teachers and children unless there is an end to the adversarial tone that has become a feature of the SEND system itself, and an improvement on the current methods of consultation that silo people.
It is vital that people with different interests talk with each other, and those developing the changes give a voice to those often marginalised from the process – those with SEND. This requires more than a box-ticking exercise.
One approach that could help to restore the trust in policymaking, which has been so tested and degraded over recent years, is a citizens’ assembly.
The creation of a citizens’ assembly would help to break the SEND doom loop, which has seen review after review of the current system but little action on the ground. We need more than an audit of the failings of the system and finger-pointing about who is to blame.
In line with the kind of thinking that has prompted the government to lower the voting age to 16, young people with SEND have a right to express their views on public policy that affects their lives, such as how schools are designed.
What’s more, they should not just be included in a public dialogue but actively involved in the design of the policy.
A public dialogue on the future for SEND would be a hefty undertaking, but we have a good insight into what one could deliver, and crucially, how to deliver it.
In 2023 we brought together young people with and without SEND, their parents and teachers to form the UK’s first citizens’ panel on school inclusion. The process resulted in the participants agreeing a workable version of inclusion.
Those involved said that being part of a public dialogue was a positive and worthwhile experience, and that they developed empathy and deep insight into the everyday lives of young people with SEND at school.
A scaled-up citizens’ assembly (bigger than our panel of 30) to debate SEND regulatory changes could involve a representative group of about 100 people and would probably take at least one year, over several one- to two-day blocks.
It would involve hearing from and interacting with experts, policymakers, people with lived experience of the SEND system and people who are none of those things.
The aim would be to build consensus and to arrive at a shared set of principles or ideas that policymakers can consider.
Following the learning from our project, it would need to be designed around the needs of participants with additional needs, who may find it more challenging to make themselves heard in what are often fast-moving conversations.
This would not replace the policy process but feed into and influence it.
This process would take a significant amount of time, but the best thing for the government to do would be to lay the foundations first, before making major changes.
Ministers say they want more support for children with SEND to be delivered within mainstream schools, but this is only possible if they set out a wider vision of what a more inclusive school looks like.
A commitment to hold a citizens’ assembly on SEND and inclusion to report before the next election would build on this, and allow much-needed room for the genuinely inclusive and expansive national conversation that education secretary Bridget Phillipson says she wants.
Public dialogue gives citizens opportunities to learn about and debate important issues in a safe and respectful space and produce practical recommendations. Using this kind of arrangement can help to raise horizons and get people thinking about the future.
Rob Webster is a senior research fellow at the University of Greenwich
Brahm Norwich is emeritus professor of educational psychology and special educational needs at the University of Exeter
