Best Practice

SEND reforms: Still no real culture change

It is now more than two years since schools were required to implement the new SEND Code of Practice. Now the Scott Report and local authority inspections have thrown more light on current practice. Are the changes really delivering for our SEND children?

It was with great optimism, if some haste, that the SEND Code of Practice was launched in 2014. This was a government reform that placed collaboration between services and communication with pupils and parents at its core.

Children and young people with SEND and their parents would have more of a say than ever before in the shape that support should take. Schools would have more freedom to craft a system that worked for them.

Now Lee Scott – a former government SEN tsar – has written a report based on the reflections of more than 200 parents and young people about their experience of the new system. He is quite generous in his conclusions, but it is still clear that some of the main foundations and aspirations of the code of practice are not being realised, at least on a consistent basis.

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