Campaigns The SEND Review: New hope or a further segregation story?

By Amelia McLoughlan, ALLFIE's Campaigns and Policy Coordinator

It has been an agonisingly long journey since ALLFIE released our consultation submission for the SEND Review Green Paper in 2020. Three years ago, we made it clear that the mainstream education clause in the Children’s and Families Act does not sufficiently protect Disabled students’ right to mainstream education.

This includes with the presumption of that right having been undermined by withdrawing ‘Inclusive Schooling Guidance’ and the concept of “incompatibility of efficient education of other pupils”. This is one of many policy clauses, including COVID-19 ruling which suspended and rendered the Act affectively null and void, which have blocked the practical implementation of inclusive mainstream education in the UK.

ALLFIE’s Chairperson Navin Kikabhai summarised ALLFIE’s SEND Review submission with his aptly titled article: Wrong Support, wrong Place, wrong time and wrong direction

While we reiterated that the SEND Review claims to be centred around education reform for those labelled with ‘Special Educational Needs and Disabilities’, we need to further examine how mainstream education legislation and policies are undermining the core principle of the inclusive mainstream education, and its sequential pathway to segregation, especially in this current environment of increasing exclusion. The release of the SEND Review itself has been subject to a catastrophic number of delays, due in part to political turmoil, funding crisis, and a call for further consultation. However, various reports published at the end of 2022 give us an insight into the minds of policymakers and the emergence of a concerning narrative.

For example the Children’s Commissioner Report, based on case studies of only 55 children within state care and 650 EHCPs from only two local authorities, was deemed enough to build a national picture. Rather than pursuing inclusive education strategy in line with Article 24 of the United Nations Convention (UNCRPD), which ratifies inclusive education for all Disabled people as a human right. This report deeply conflated care and education, by using terms interchangeably, to erase individual rights to education, healthcare and independent living, alongside recommending that ability-led “interventions” begin as young as 2 years old. The impact of this could potentially assign a child to segregated provision years before ever entering an educational environment. It also largely assumes that all disabilities would be present in early childhood and not that disability can emerge at any age.