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The to improve the special educational needs and disabilities system will not succeed unless more detail is provided on funding, staffing and accountability, MPs have been told.

Giving evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee today, teaching union leaders said the government was moving in the right direction on mainstream inclusion and early intervention with SEND, but warned there were major risks in the reforms as they stand.

The government’s and accompanying SEND reforms, published in February, set out sweeping changes to the SEND system, and these proposed changes are now being consulted on.

Today’s committee evidence session was held to help MPs scrutinise the government’s plans. Here are the main points raised:

1. Treasury ‘has to match ambition’

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said the current SEND system is “adversarial” and “chronically underfunded”, and warned that good intentions alone would not improve outcomes.

He said many of the planned reforms reflected a longstanding sector consensus, but risked “rationing support and shifting blame on to schools rather than fixing a system” without proper funding and staffing.

Mr Kebede added that the Treasury “absolutely has to match the ambition” of the plans by increasing funding.

2. Developmental language disorder ‘ignored’

Jane Harris, chief executive of Speech and Language UK, said there are around 1.3 million children and young people with developmental language disorder, and they were “not mentioned once in the White Paper” or in the SEND consultation.

This was despite the fact that children with the disorder are more likely to fall behind at school, be punished and have mental health difficulties, she said.

Ms Harris warned: “It seems that we’re designing their needs out.”

3. School leaders want an implementation plan

Margaret Mulholland, head of SEND and inclusion policy at the Association of School and College Leaders, said the school sector welcomes the government’s ambition for a “fairer, more equitable system”.

However, she questioned whether the government had yet laid the foundations for a 10-year reform programme to work.

Ms Mulholland said the sector needed to hear “soon” about an implementation plan and the government’s wider “theory of change”.

4. Behaviour policies clash with inclusion

Ms Harris said the reforms could have a positive effect, depending on new teacher training and standards being developed.

SEND policies also need to align with behaviour and curriculum policies, she cautioned.

“Zero-tolerance behaviour policies, by definition, are not inclusive”, she said, because zero-tolerance systems are rigid, while inclusion depends on flexibility.

Ms Harris added that some pupils with speech and language challenges were being unfairly punished in schools, and warned that the Department for Education was trying to run “two policies at the same time that are fundamentally incompatible”.

5. Risk that ISPs will worsen parent frustration

Asked about the proposed individual support plans (ISPs), Mr Kebede said teachers had “significant concerns” about schools’ ability to deliver them consistently to a high standard.

He said the plans represented “a new statutory duty on schools that are already at capacity”, and warned that producing high-quality plans would require funded time to assess needs, write plans, liaise with families and review support.

Without this, he added, there is a danger that ISPs will become a tick-box exercise and that headteachers and Sendcos will become “the lightning rods for parental frustration”.

This is not because of school-level failings, but rather due to “systemic underfunding”, Mr Kebede said.

The panellists also raised concerns about the proposed complaints process for ISPs.

Ms Mulholland said schools were uneasy about being expected to handle complaints through their own governance structures, warning that they feared being asked to “mark their own homework”.

The reforms risk shifting attention away from classroom support and towards bureaucracy and dispute resolution, she added.

6. ‘Don’t create tiers of children’

Ms Mulholland raised concerns about how the new support system was being described.

She said the government had tried to talk about “layers” of provision rather than “tiers”, but that leaders were already slipping back into thinking of three different tiers of support.

The White Paper states that schools will have a duty to produce an ISP, which will contain one of two layers of support: “targeted” or “targeted plus”. There will also be a layer of specialist support created.

Ms Mulholland warned that this risked taking the system backwards by relabelling pupils, when the focus should instead be on the provision provided within each of these layers.

Mr Kebede said the proposed nationally-defined specialist provision packages could help to end the “postcode lottery” of provision, but warned there is a risk they could become “a rationing tool rather than a quality framework”.

Ms Harris said the system did not yet have a strong enough evidence base to support rigid national packages for pupils with SEND.

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