We Are Setting SENCOs Up to Fail

We are setting SENCOs up to fail. After everything they've already carried, that makes me furious.

Not at schools. At a system that keeps treating one exhausted, undervalued professional as the solution to problems it created.

I say this as someone who has spent years working alongside SENCOs. As someone who supported children with Down's syndrome in mainstream schools for many years, not as a teacher, but as an educator who sat inside those systems long enough to understand how they actually work. As the founder of two charities building specialist resources for learning disabled children and young people. And as a mum to a 17-year-old with Down's syndrome who has sat across the table from some of the most dedicated, stretched, brilliant SENCOs you will ever meet. And some not so brilliant.

What we are actually asking

The SEND reforms place SENCOs at the centre of everything. Individual Support Plans, statutory reviews, earlier identification, better joined-up working across education, health and social care. Every single commitment in this reform runs through one person in a school building.

A person who, in most schools, also has a teaching timetable. A caseload that can run to over a hundred children. And a level of legal accountability that has just got significantly heavier.

Only 1 in 7 SENCOs describe their workload as manageable.

SENCO vacancies have more than doubled in five years. In some areas, three-quarters of SENCOs changed role within two years.

Not because they stopped caring. Because the job became impossible.

That is not a workforce ready to absorb a major system overhaul. That is a workforce already waving a flag. And we are not looking up long enough to see it.

The accountability trap

Here is what I keep coming back to (and I know I keep banging on about it, but I am very passionate about this). The reason EHCPs grew the way they did was not because parents are unreasonable or schools are failing. It was because the EHCP was the only part of the system where provision was clearly defined, legally binding, and someone could actually be held to it.

The new system risks making the same mistake the old one did. If schools assess need, write the Individual Support Plans, and are responsible for delivering them, all without any external accountability structure, we have not fixed the conflict. We have just moved it.

Right now, when things go wrong, there is at least a structure outside the school. A legal duty. A route to challenge. A referee.

Remove that, and parents and schools end up locked in disputes that neither of them wanted. Schools, who in the vast majority of cases genuinely want to help, become the target of a frustration that should be directed at the system. Parents, who are not fighting schools but fighting for their children, run out of places to go.

I've been that parent. One school took us all the way to the Secretary of State to say no to my daughter. When they got her anyway, they did a brilliant job. Because parents and schools are not usually on opposite sides. The system just keeps building walls between them.

These reforms, without meaningful external accountability built into the lower levels of support, risk making that conflict the new normal. And it's children and families who will pay for it. Closely followed by the SENCO.

The people nobody talks about

While we're here, can we talk about teaching assistants?

The majority of day-to-day specialist support for children with SEND is delivered by TAs and learning support assistants. They are among the most committed people in any school. They are also among the lowest paid, with the least structured training and almost no career pathway worth staying for.

The quality and level of their professional development for TA’s is rarely in the same realm as the teachers themselves. The reforms do not substantially change this. And yet they are the ones in the room, every day, with our children.

If we want inclusion to work, we have to invest in the people making it happen on the ground. Not just the SENCO at the top of the structure, but every single adult in that chain.

The maths doesn't add up

The government has committed real funding to these reforms. Some of it is genuinely welcome. But SEND funding increased by 5% last year. The number of children identified with SEND increased by 11%.

There is a gap there. And someone is absorbing it. We all know who.

What I want schools to hear

If you are a school leader or a teacher reading this, I want to be clear about something.

You are not the problem. You are being asked to hold a system that was never designed to sit inside one building, delivered by one person, without the time, resource or external support to do it properly.

The reforms can be the beginning of something better. I genuinely believe that. But only if we are honest about the gap between what is being promised and what is actually possible with the workforce we have right now.

SENCOs need to be on senior leadership teams as standard, not as an occasional courtesy. Teaching assistants need proper pay, proper training and a career worth staying in. And the accountability structures in the new system need a referee that sits outside the school, or we will spend the next decade watching the same conflict play out in a different postcode.

Our children deserve better. So do the people working so hard to include them.