Written evidence from Mr Sam Knight (SEN 71)

Education Committee

Solving the SEND Crisis

Perspective from a Teacher and SLT within SEND provision

I qualified as a teacher in 2010, starting in secondary as a Music teacher. I have worked as agency supply, working in every phase and seeing all angles of mainstream settings. More recently I have held teaching posts in SEND provisions (FE, 18 - 25 and all-through), leading me to my current role as a Deputy Head in a SEND setting. My experiences across all of these, very differing, settings has allowed me to experience first hand how different learners, and their families, access education and support, the successes and the failings, and has contributed to my individual perspective on the past and current state of our SEND provision.

The evidence statements that I wish to provide will cover the following areas:

Access to placement, SEND teacher training, access to specialists, and wider systemic barriers.

Access to placement; across all of the SEND schools and colleges, where I have held positions, I have always been acutely aware of the complex issues affecting admissions. Nearly all of the families we meet are desperate to secure placements, desperate because the process from their perspective is often incredibly difficult and emotionally impactful. For all learners, and all families, the question is not: “can I secure a placement for my child?”, which is most often arduous, but: “can I secure the right placement for my child?”. SEND provisions should be carefully assessing whether prospective learners can be supported according to what is outlined in their EHCPs, and they often do, but there is often pressure to fill places (financial viability) and sometimes placements are inappropriate and unsustainable. Too often SEND provisions are oversubscribed, places are in too high demand, and it can often feel that SEND provisions take on too many learners for their spaces, which is nearly always counterproductive; undoing neurodiversity affirming environments by making them busier and busier, adding to anxiety (for learners who often are experiencing high anxiety as part of their neurodiversity), and often making learning environments needlessly chaotic. Far too often families have to fight for places; going through tribunals, moving to new locations, or simply being rejected many times leading them to withhold key information (often regarding extreme behavioural challenges) in order to secure placement. The overriding issue here is that Local Authorities need to be able to have the means to offer more school/college places and/or access to appropriately qualified home tutors who have the necessary skills to adapt learning suitably, which is very often lacking. Many more SEND provisions have opened over the past 20 years, and provision has become more therapeutic, but families are still left with lack of choice and lack of access to places.

SEND teacher training; the simple statement here Is that we need to offer PGCEs specifically for SEND. It can be very difficult to recruit adequately qualified teachers within SEND; we are relying on individual teachers who have specialised and/or taken additional training throughout their career rather than relying on cohorts of ECTs who have undergone specific specialist SEND teacher training. We need teachers who are experts in therapeutic and adaptive practices, who are experts in trauma informed practice and who are able to implement clinical interventions successfully. Far too often we are training enthusiastic teaching assistants via the Assessment Only Route to QTS (or similar training) in order to fill teaching vacancies; we don’t have a viable pool of expert SEND teachers locally or nationally.

Access to specialists; there are two issues here, lack of access to specialist intervention/consultation, and inability to implement specialist intervention/recommendations effectively. Firstly, most SEND learners will readily access universal offer regarding therapeutic/adaptive approaches and practices, which is adequate but not exceptional, and we often are lacking in clinical colleagues to lead on universal approaches and practices, let alone leading on interventions for those with far greater differences/needs. In my experience, provisions often consider themselves lucky to have the clinical staff that they have (if indeed, they have any at all, which can sometimes be the case); these clinicians will set up interventions, CPD and lead on therapeutic approaches, but all too often teaching teams struggle to implement interventions/actions via CPD/approaches as they were intended, and the clinicians simply do not have enough time to continuously coach, retrain or even monitor implementation, so we are often relying on whatever capacity individual teaching teams possess, which is often not enough (due to their own case loads and lack of time to coach/retrain). The solution, as far as I can see, would be to develop a culture where SEND provisions have much greater access to clinical colleagues, to develop better incentives for clinicians to work in schools/colleges/provisions, and to re-establish a culture of collaboration and therapeutic blended curriculum approach nationally.

Wider systemic barriers; Lastly, we are always striving for consistency with our learners both within provision but also at home. I strongly feel that achieving or establishing consistency and meeting individual differences/needs appropriately at home to be potentially the biggest barrier that we face as practitioners. Clearly, there are a myriad of reasons why working effectively to support learners and their families at home can be difficult, so I will simply lay out which areas are of highest importance and are in most need of reform:

• Local Authority support; public sector funding is far too low to adequately support SEND individuals and families, lack of community provision.
• Social Workers; caseloads are far too high, often unable to work consistently or closely enough with families to make any meaningful impact.
• Housing; families often placed in inappropriate housing, and cannot access safe/secure accommodation.
• SEND support/coaching for families; a large number of our families have little or no understanding of SEND, some family members may even have undiagnosed needs themselves, and as such they are ill-equipped to manage the complexity of need/difference that their children present and are therefore unable to fully understand or implement clinical/educational interventions and recommendations consistently at home.
• Diagnostic consideration for family members; this is a very sensitive area, but I feel that families need to be offered consultation/counselling regarding their own needs, whether they have any (known or unknown) neurological differences or mental health needs or both.
• Better support mechanisms for families; many of our families access Early Help or CAMHS or other similar funded support, but we still experience a significant shortfall regarding what Local Authorities can offer, this is clearly a public sector funding issue which needs to be addressed. I strongly feel that all families/carers should have access to support groups or individual sessions, these types of support are either lacking or non-existent.
• Better systems for families who refuse support; we sometimes work with families who refuse to work with what supports are available via Local Authority. I have personally worked closely with several families who have requested/consented to either Early Help or CAMHS referrals, only to refuse any subsequent and much needed direct support. Sometimes support agreements breakdown due to cultural barriers, sometimes for more complex (often involving Safeguarding) reasons. Ultimately, much of the difficultly here could be addressed with face-to-face consultation with families, rather than our overreliance on phone calls/emails/letters/video calls; we should seek to develop trust with families who refuse support and this can more easily be done face-to-face.

January 2025