News

Inclusion at the Heart of the School System – Tom Rees

Keynote at Schools North East Academies Conference 2025 – Thursday 23^rd January 2025, 

With sections taken from ‘5 Principles for Inclusion’ (Newmark/Rees 2023): https://cstuk.org.uk/knowledge/discussion-and-policy-papers/five-principles-for-inclusion

1. Introduction

Good morning everyone. It’s brilliant to be here with you all this morning and I want to start by acknowledging the fantastic work of Schools North East who run such interesting and vibrant events both here and across the country. 

And travelling up to Newcastle last night reminded me of a memorable visit, nearly 30 years ago to the North East.

It was September 17^th 1997, and just a few days before I started my teaching degree at university, when I came to watch Oasis in concert. And some of you might remember that this was a famous night here on Tyneside – not only because Liam Gallagher wore a Newcastle shirt as Oasis played to a packed Newcastle Arena, but because not far away at St James’ Park, Newcastle United beat Barcelona in the Champions League, thanks to an Asprilla hattrick. I remember the whole city feeling like it was a carnival that night.

Of course, at that time, we were just a few months into a new Labour government, with bold plans for education and a new Education Secretary in David Blunkett who famously had strong views on how specialist education could be improved with an agenda around inclusion in mainstream schools.

And I reflected this morning that, although I feel a lot older these days and obviously we have made significant improvements to the school system since 1997, there are some things that feel very familiar. Oasis are touring again. Football continues to thrive here in Newcastle and of course we’re just a few months into a new Labour government. 

And I am pleased to say, we have an education secretary in Bridget Phillipson who is very clear that reform of the SEND system is at the centre of the educational agenda.

And this is good news. 

For a long time, we’ve known that reforming the SEND system is the most important priority in our school system. But we also know that this is one of the hardest and most complex reforms for government to do.

I know that inclusion is one of the things that both motivates and frustrates so many of you here today.

On the one hand, I know it’s one of the reasons that so many of you choose to be in the roles that you are in now. To help children who need the most help to learn and succeed in schools.

But on the other hand, it’s also one of the things that frustrates so many of us, because of the sense that the system makes it hard to do the right thing. And we see this in data sets from across the country.

• Headteachers consistently say it’s the thing they have most challenge with
• Trusts in the annual survey say it’s the biggest issue they’re concerned about and want support with
• Teachers say they don’t feel like they have the right amount of training
• And one of the findings from the latest teacher wellbeing survey, is that one of the biggest drivers of frustration is that teachers feel they are letting children down through not being able to give them the support they need.

Reforming the SEND system is the single most important policy area for us to be focused on as profession in the next 5-10 years.

I think we have a window of opportunity to tackle this at national policy level, but I also think this is a moment for schools across the country, and in particular school trusts, to rise to this challenge.

So I am optimistic about the journey ahead and energised by the opportunity to build a school system in which more children can thrive. But for us to be successful, we need to start by being honest about where we are now.

2. What needs to change

Education doesn’t work well enough for children identified has having special educational needs.

It probably never has.

Since the beginning of mass schooling, our education system has struggled with the challenge of including all children in a positive and meaningful way. Society has always struggled to include and some efforts of past societies seem shocking to us today. At its most extreme, up to the 1950s some children with intellectual disability were not sent to school at all and were instead placed in asylums or institutions. At this time, children with learning disability were routinely classified as uneducable, and pupils were labelled with terms such as ‘maladjusted’ or ‘educationally subnormal’.

The post-war movement, led by parents of children and young people with learning disabilities, challenged this obvious segregation. And the landmark Warnock report in 1978 which paved the way for the education act in 1981, was crucial in helping us understand that there are important differences for us to understand in the way that some of us find learning difficult. And that these aren’t things we should stigmatise, hide away or be ashamed of – but differences that we should know about, understand more about and then be able to help children with these differences to learn better. This gave birth to the SEND system, a system that since then has sought to provide additional support for children who are identified as having special educational needs and disabilities.

But 45 years later, and despite obvious progress on many fronts, our SEND system is in crisis. There isn’t an alternative way of describing a system, which is simply not working for too many children, families or schools. 

Since the Department for Education’s Green Paper in March 2022 and the national SEND improvement plan published in March 2023, there has been renewed debate and speculation around this issue. And through this, and subsequent reports such as ISOS, the National Audit office, IFS and the recent Public Accounts Committee, it’s become clear that this is not just about lack of funding or poor implementation, but about having a poorly designed system.

• Parents are not happy and are experiencing a frustrating and adversarial system
• Professionals in the system are frustrated by the system which prevents, rather than enables them to support children in the way they want to
• Overall, although we are spending a lot of money on the system, we’re not seeing the improvements in outcomes 
• Most importantly, the SEND system is not delivering improvement for the children it was designed to help and, this is not just about educational outcomes

And I think we need to acknowledge this. The 2014 reforms, which we had a lot of hope and optimism about, have made things worse. We should be honest about this and say ‘the system isn’t working because it’s a bad system’ and not dance around that and pretend that it’s because schools haven’t done it well enough, because we need more funding, or because it’s the fault of parents or worse still, children and young people.

I think there are three fundamental problems with the SEND system that we need to acknowledge.

1. Too often, inclusion is a secondary consideration, something discussed separately to the concept of a great education that is the right of every child, and something that is considered after areas such as the curriculum and qualifications, teacher training or behaviour. SEND has become a separate system and is often something which is left to ‘someone else’ – a SENDCo or a TA, rather than us seeing inclusion as a fundamental design principle of the main education system. Taking an ‘inclusion by design’ approach.
2. And this has led us to think of children with SEND as a separate group.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is an umbrella term used to identify and describe children who require extra help and support to be successful in school.

Under the SEND label sit a whole range of varied and different learning needs including those with physical disabilities, those with identified learning difficulties and disabilities, and many others without a formally identified condition. 

The term “SEND” can create a false divide – the idea there are the ‘SEND children’ and ‘normal children’ – and that children with SEND are somehow different from the norm.

The term SEND also implies a commonality of experience.

This is misleading and obscures the individual identities of those assigned the label. This leads to generic policy and strategy and can expose children to inappropriate practice.

Our SEND system rests on an outdated, medicalised model of ‘deficit’ which too quickly reaches for labels and diagnoses and provision which is ‘additional and different’. As Nicole Dempsey, Director of SEND and Safeguarding at Dixons, argues so powerfully: ‘There are not children and SEND children. There are just children.’ 

3. And thirdly, because so much school-based activity is now not about helping children to learn better, but is part of resource allocation administration. SENDCos, teachers and Ed Psychologists spend far too much time carrying out the process of statutory assessment.

And this is problematic because there are lots of good processes that we can use when working with children and families such as “plan do review”, person centred planning and multi-disciplinary meetings, but which go wrong because they are used at moments of escalation and to access resource. 

And when this happens, they are of less benefit to children and become distorted with their primary purpose being about accessing resource.

Too much of this activity is framed through a deficit lens, locating the problem within children and families. For children and families who need the most support, the process of assessment lacks dignity and is adversarial in nature

So…

Almost 40 per cent of young people are now assigned the label of SEND at some point in their school career. This is clearly too high a number to deal with through specialist or personalised intervention. Meanwhile, evidence points to this categorisation being both inconsistent in its application and ineffective in attracting the necessary support.

EPI research into this in 2021 found that:

• SEND identification varies widely across England, and when examining what is behind this (at primary school level), differences between schools account for a large majority (two-thirds) of this variation in identification.
• The school that a child attends therefore makes far greater difference to their chances of being identified with SEND than other factors, such as children’s individual learning needs or experiences.

We need to aspire for a system where the vast majority of learning needs become well understood and catered for in every mainstream school through ordinarily available provision, that doesn’t rely on categorisation or labels. And to do this without parents having to fight long legal battles, or schools investing precious time and resource on bureaucracy. 

In rethinking this challenge, we need to tilt the system 

From thinking of inclusion as a separate thing, a separate system that is the responsibility of someone else, to thinking of inclusion as a design principle of the fundamentals of schooling

From additional/targeted support after a long process of assessment, to building capacity ‘upstream’ in mainstream schools so that children can access support and help when they need it

From a system built around diagnosis and assessment to a system where we have a better understanding of predictable cohort needs

From this idea that there are two types of children – SEND children and normal children to an understanding of the diversity within society and our school population and how lots of what we categorise as ‘special’ is normal and predictable

From a system built on deficit – where we assign labels to children to attract funding, to a system built on dignity – where we see all children and their differences as part of the inherent beauty of humanity

So, there’s lots for us to do and this will take a big sector wide effort. And I’m pleased to have been asked by the Secretary of State to chair an expert advisory group to make a contribution to this.

3. Introducing the EAG

Outline slide: SEND inclusion in education expert group – GOV.UK

• Purpose: To advise ministers on how to improve mainstream education outcomes and experiences for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
• Duration: From November 2024 to June 2025
• Engage with: Dame Christine Lenehan, Neurodiversity Task and Finish Group and other existing groups 
• Interact with: Curriculum and Assessment Review, Ofsted and accountability reforms and other system reforms
• Report to: Secretary of State via Minister for School Standards

Areas of focus

And these are the areas the group will be focused on. You’ll notice that rather than starting with a focus on EHCPs or special units and resource provision, it starts with the classroom.

And that’s because if we are to think of inclusion as a principle of the main system, we have to start with thinking about the universal or main offer.

Every classroom should have the highest aspirations for achievement – with a high quality academic curriculum, taught expertly. Inclusion is not about lowering expectations; it is about an aspiration for a really high quality education for everyone.  And this means that part of the conversation is about getting the fundamentals of schooling right: attendance, behaviour and curriculum. 

We should know where every child is in a local area and we should make sure they are safe and in a registered provision. Classrooms and schools should be calm, predictable environments which are conducive to learning. They should also be places of warmth and belonging, where every child is known as an individual and their strengths are celebrated.

When children find learning difficult, we want teachers and support staff, as those who know the children best, to be able to provide adaptive and personalised support whenever possible.

Parents: 

There will be lots of parents that will quite rightly say, where is the voice of parents in this work? And I want to say to parents that I understand this. As well as experiencing the highs and lows of our SEND system professionally, I’ve also spent the last 19 years of my life navigating the SEND system as a parent of a young man with learning disability. And 18 years ago, my wife and I helped to create a charity to support families through childhood – and so much of this is about helping parents to navigate the complexity of the SEND system, and to manage the challenges of transition in life. But obviously my experience is only one experience, and there’s such a variety of experiences that parents have – and so it’s important that we take time to listen carefully to parents and we will be making sure we engage well with parents directly, and through different parent groups as we go through this process.

Membership

Here are the members of the advisory group, who similarly have a diverse and deep range of professional and personal experiences of inclusion that they will be drawing on. I’m really pleased to have membership that includes Local Authorities, Special Schools, charities, the chair of the national association of Principal Education Psychologists. And we have people who run Local Authority schools, academies, special schools and alternative provision settings.

• Tom Rees, CEO, Ormiston Academy Trust (Chair)  
• Susan Douglas, CEO, Eden Academy Trust  
• Annamarie Hassall, CEO, National Association for Special Educational Needs  
• Dr Anne Heavey, Director of Insights for Ambition Institute  
• Andrew O’Neill, Headteacher at All Saints Catholic College  
• Claire Jackson, Principal Educational Psychologist at Salford City Council 
• Heather Sandy, Executive Director of Children’s Services at Lincolnshire County Council 

It’s obviously important to say that this group won’t have representation from every group or part of the SEND system. And so again, we’ll be actively engaging with lots of other groups, both inside and outside of the DfE as we do this work. 

In particular, I am working closely with Dame Christine Lenehan, who is working as a strategic advisor to government at the moment on SEND and Professor Karen Guldberg, who is chairing the neurodiversity task and finish group. Both Dame Christine and Karen have a huge amount experience and expertise that they bring to this work.

Principles

As we start this work, there are a number of principles which will shape how we work together.

1. Inclusion: a focus on how inclusive mainstream settings can continuously identify and remove barriers to learning and participation.
2. Inclusion by design: how approaches and practice in mainstream settings can be improved, rather than seeing inclusion as a separate policy or system. 
3. Ambition: the work of the Inclusion EAG will focus on how to improve inclusive education practice and will not be limited by the constraints of the current SEND system. 
4. Recognising strengths: and seeking to build on these strengths and hard work, acknowledging a system with finite resources. 
5. Consultative approach: the EAG will draw on a wide range of inputs, and will talk with education professionals, alongside other experts, parents, children and young people, and stakeholders such as employers, colleges, trade unions, and charities. 
6. Evidence and data informed: advice will be based on data and evidence and will avoid being influenced by untested theories or approaches which would be impractical to deliver within mainstream settings. 
7. Respecting diverse opinions: a recognition that Inclusion is a contested field with a divergence of views around both means and ends. The group will welcome views that challenge their own and will consider these and debate respectfully, acknowledging we will not achieve consensus and will provide advice in areas that are contested.
8. Close 

I want to finish now with a call for action and optimism.

Firstly I do think it’s time for us to shift the gear on the narrative around SEND. For years, we have heard that ‘the SEND system is broken’ and I think there is consensus on this now, including in government. Bridget Phillipson has been clear about this and said that we want a conversation that takes us beyond the scope of the last government’s improvement plan, so I don’t think we need to rehearse the arguments that things are really bad. 

I think the more important conversation we need to have now is a forward facing one – where we can look for solutions and to see where things are working well, what are the conditions that are enabling this to happen – and how we go about incentivising more of that. If you like, we need to turn our attention from where it’s lose, lose, lose to where it is win, win, win.

And in this, although there is clearly an important role for government to play – as always there is so much that can be done to improve things by the people working within it. And that is our job, alongside planning for longer term change, to be able to work out how to deliver improvement with the system constraints we have, for the kids in our schools today.

If you are interested in reading more, there are two publications that I’ve co-authored with Ben Newmark and which were published by CST and Ambition Institute. Lots of the things I’ve talked about today, are drawn from this project and build on the work and ideas of a number of brilliant people who have been working in this area for a long time.

As we move forward, it’s important we work with different networks, organisations and people across the sector. 

This will take time, and the challenge is significant but so is the opportunity – to create a better and more dignified system which gives parents and professionals more confidence, and enables many more young people to thrive and leave school with the experiences and outcomes that give them choice and opportunity in the future.

And finally, I want to say that this reform is an opportunity for us to be more ambitious than just to focus on educational outcomes. As I was reminded by Simon Knight, co-headteacher of a Special school in Oxfordshire yesterday, this is also about ensuring that all children, including those who find learning harder, grow up to live rich and fulfilling lives in which they are both visible to and valued by their communities. An opportunity for us to help shift societal attitudes towards difference and learning disability in the same way that other movements have led to societal change in the past.

I hope you’ll be part of this conversation. Thank you for listening.