‘All teachers to be SEND teachers’ in major education shake-up ...Middle East

All teachers will be SEND teachers under a reformed special educational needs system, England’s schools minister has pledged in an attempt to allay growing fears about the shake-up.

Catherine McKinnell told The i Paper that teachers would get support on SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) as part of their initial teacher training and professional development so that they could meet all needs of pupils.

But some parents are worried that a reliance on mainstream teachers for SEND will be “too much” for the staff and could deny their children the support they need.

The Government wants more pupils with SEND taught in mainstream schools. An increase in demand for SEND education has filled up state special schools, forcing local authorities to pay for places in private alternatives that can cost nearly three times as much.

The Department for Education (DfE) has said it will “protect provision currently in place” but wants to reform a SEND system judged by auditors to have become “financially unsustainable”.

Now McKinnell, the minister leading on SEND, has revealed that the DfE is “making sure that all teachers are teachers of special educational needs, that teachers have the training and the support and the professional development to be able to meet all the needs of children within their classroom”.

Schools minister Catherine McKinnell has said ‘all teachers will be SEND teachers’ (Photo: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor)

She also said that the DfE was already “very focused on supporting schools to create that inclusive, mainstream experience” and pointed to £740m in capital funding to create more “mainstream school places for children with special educational needs”.

‘We won’t take away support – we want to improve it’

The minister added that there was a focus on the early years and identifying need “at the earliest opportunity” through a “whole variety of early speech and language interventions”, “neurodiversity initiatives” and “phonics screening”.

“We’re not looking at taking away any support that’s in place at the moment,” she said. “We just want to improve the support so that fewer parents have to fight for what should be their child’s education.”

But her comments have worried teachers. Matt Wrack, Acting General Secretary of the NASUWT union, said that as the proportion of pupils with SEND increased, schools’ support staff and resources needed to increase as well.

“It is difficult to imagine how every teacher can become a SEND teacher – a teacher who can meet all those complex needs – within our current educational system,” he said.

Parents’ anxiety has been increasing as they wait for full details of the SEND changes, which it is understood were originally due to be consulted on this Spring.

Sources have told The i Paper that the reason the unveiling of the SEND White Paper has been delayed until the Autumn is because of Downing Street’s nervousness about it coming out as controversy rages over separate plans to cut disabled people’s benefits.

A local government source said Number 10 had got “cold feet” about the optics of the SEND plan, which will be key to the future of many local councils that fund special educational needs.

The source said Downing Street had been “hesitant about publishing any sort of White Paper that could easily be framed as ‘disabled kids lose rights’, ‘disabled kids lose access to support’, and how that will go down like an absolute lead balloon given the cuts to welfare spending went down really badly”.

“There’s a real hesitancy in Government about the perception of this when it’s published,” they added.

A senior Labour source also said they understood that the opposition to welfare cuts was partly why the SEND White Paper had been delayed by several months.

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Despite the lack of an official announcement, Government figures have been giving some indication of just how big the SEND changes could be and how they could hit the education health and social care plans (EHCPs) that legally guarantee pupils with SEND a specified level of extra support in schools, often with dedicated staff and funding attached.

EHCPs could be cut

McKinnell has previously declined to rule out narrowing EHCPs or replacing them altogether, while Dame Christine Lenehan, the Government’s strategic SEND adviser, has said that the SEND review would “probably” result in fewer EHCPs and suggested that stopping the use of the plans in mainstream schools was being considered.

And last week The i Paper reported how McKinnell had declined to rule out cutbacks to the SEND tribunals that many parents rely on to secure the support their children need, and to enforce EHCPs.

The minister brought up the plan for all teachers being SEND teachers after being questioned about her promise to create a less adversarial system for parents under the forthcoming SEND reforms.

But Hayley Harding, a parent of two boys with SEND, and founder of the campaign group Let Us Learn Too, said it was unreasonable to expect all teachers to be SEND teachers.

“To say that a teacher has to be effectively a jack of all trades, and not a master of none, ultimately means that our children will not be getting the level of support that they need,” she said.

Hayley Harding with her children, Matthew, 10, and Connor, eight (Photo: Supplied)

The DfE has not given a clear picture of how the reforms will be funded.

The Government’s spending review says that £547m has been allocated for “reform of the SEND system” in 2026/27 from a “transformation fund” with another £213m for 2027/28.

DfE won’t explain why SEND reform cash drops away

The department said this was not “the sum total of SEND funding” and pointed to “a significant increase of £1bn in high needs funding for 2025-26”.

But it would not explain why the transformation money was being cut by 61 per cent after a single year or say how it would be used for SEND reform.

Wrack from the NASUWT said: “Our concern is that the reforms will actually be driven by cutting costs.

“Only 5 per cent of teachers say that the pupils they teach who have special needs and disabilities always receive the educational support to which they are legally entitled, and over half say the level of support for pupils with SEND has decreased in the last five years.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We have been clear that special schools will always be available for those who need them.

“We will improve the SEND system so parents and children get better and earlier support, while protecting provision currently in place, including the SEND tribunal.”

‘I’ve had sleepless nights over SEND reform’

Aimee Bradley, a mother of three pupils with SEND, said the uncertainty over the Government’s reforms was causing her “sleepless nights”.

The 41-year-old from Hampshire said her son Ashton, six, who is autistic with severe mental impairment, would “not cope in mainstream school” – even with the additional support outlined by McKinnell.

“It’s not enough to alleviate parents’ worries,” she said. “What they’re expecting of teachers in mainstream school is too much. It’s not fair on them.”

She said: “The amount of training that teachers go through in a SEND school is quite vast, like the amount of programs that they have to deliver in a one-to-one basis for children.

“It’s not just about the training. It’s about class sizes, environment, having provisions in place like… sensory spaces, the ability for children to be able to get up and have movement breaks whenever they want to. These are things that I just don’t feel feasible within a mainstream setting.”

The mother added: “We fight so hard, like I’m exhausted from paperwork and fighting, trying to get support, mediation, tribunals, and things like that. It [reform] is just another thing that we have uncertainty about.”

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