Dr Johny Daniel, Associate Professor in our School of Education, explores what the UK government could do to ensure that children with special educational needs receive the support they need in mainstream schools.
Most pupils who go through the lengthy process of being identified with dyslexia, autism or another condition end up spending the bulk of their time supported not by a trained specialist teacher but by a teaching assistant.
Teaching assistants work with great dedication, but they are not equipped with the specialist training needed to teach children with special educational needs and disabilities effectively. The result is that pupils too often fall further behind, despite the system recognising their needs.
Later this year, the UK government will publish a long-awaited document on planned policy for schools and special educational needs in England. This is set to include the intention to establish more inclusive mainstream education – mainstream schools that are equipped to educate children with special educational needs. The way to do this is to ensure specialist support is available in mainstream schools.
The gaps are stark. By the end of primary school, children with special educational needs and disabilities are almost two years behind in writing, and about a year and a half behind in reading and maths. These are not inevitable outcomes. They reflect unmet needs and under-resourced classrooms.
Parents may value inclusion and want their children learning alongside peers. But studies consistently report parental frustration that schools are often not equipped with the specialist expertise needed to meet those needs.
True inclusion cannot mean simply placing pupils with educational needs and disabilities in the same room with their peers. Without expert teaching to adapt lessons, build literacy and support language and behaviour, inclusion risks becoming tokenistic.
Instead of prioritising investment in specialist teachers within schools, funding has increasingly been channelled into outsourced provision and tribunals. Research suggests that too much funding is tied up in a small minority of cases, when it could be used to strengthen special educational needs provision in every mainstream school.
A more useful approach treats inclusion and specialisation not as opposites but as partners. Specialist teachers bring the deep knowledge of how to support particular needs, while mainstream teachers provide the shared environment where all children can learn together. When these two are connected, pupils get the best of both worlds.
A central issue lies in how the special educational needs and disabilities system currently delivers support. Many families who can afford private assessments or are able to pursue tribunals succeed in securing additional help for their child, often through placements outside the local authority system. But this approach means only a small group of children gain access to specialist private or publicly funded provision, while many others with equally significant needs remain unsupported.
This reliance on outsourcing is also costly. Expensive independent placements and external assessments absorb government funds that could otherwise be invested in improving provision in mainstream schools. In effect, public resources are concentrated on the few rather than spread to benefit the many children in need.
A more sustainable model is to develop in-house expertise. If every school had specialist teachers able to identify needs early and provide targeted support, far fewer families would feel driven to seek help through tribunals or private routes. Bringing services into schools would ensure that specialist expertise is consistently available to all pupils who need it.
It should make training in special educational needs and disabilities mandatory across the teaching profession, to reduce variation in identification and support. And it should replace policy ambivalence with a clear commitment: inclusion must be backed by specialist expertise and enforceable entitlements, not just rhetoric.
The special educational needs system is under intense strain, but this is also a moment of choice. England can continue to oscillate between rhetoric and retrenchment, or it can finally embed specialist expertise in the heart of mainstream education.
The government’s decision this autumn will shape the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children. We should not expect children to succeed without the specialist teachers they urgently need.
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