Opinion: SEND Reform is an Employability Imperative

Finito World

Every government says it wants to break down barriers to opportunity. Few areas test that promise more starkly than the SEND system. This week’s Schools White Paper lands in the middle of a crisis that has been years in the making. One in five pupils in England now receives support for special educational needs and disabilities. More than 600,000 young people have Education, Health and Care Plans. Spending has risen sharply. Tribunals are at record highs. Councils are carrying enormous deficits. Parents describe the system as broken. The National Audit Office has called it financially unsustainable.

The instinctive framing is moral: vulnerable children, anxious families, overstretched schools. All of that is true. But if that is where we stop, we miss the larger point. SEND reform is not only a question of compassion. It is a question of employability — and therefore of Britain’s economic future.

When over 1.7 million pupils require additional support, this is not a marginal cohort. It is a structural feature of the system. These children are not an add-on to the workforce of the 2030s; they are the workforce of the 2030s. If inclusion fails at school, exclusion follows in the labour market. Under-supported pupils are more likely to experience absence, exclusion, low attainment and mental health difficulties. Those patterns do not evaporate at 18. They echo forward into reduced employment rates and lower lifetime earnings. The cost does not vanish; it simply migrates — to welfare budgets, to the NHS, to the justice system.

Conversely, get this right and we unlock something Britain badly needs: human capital. The modern economy does not reward sameness. It rewards difference harnessed properly. Pattern recognition. Lateral thinking. Hyperfocus. Creative intensity. Cognitive diversity is not a fashionable slogan; it is an asset. But assets require investment. Head teachers are blunt that the biggest issue is funding — both how much and how it is distributed. Schools want more specialist staff, more training, more flexibility in mainstream settings. Teaching assistants speak of experienced leaders leaving. Parents describe months of wrangling for support that is legally guaranteed.

Ministers talk of billions. The detail matters less than the delivery. Money that disappears into bureaucracy does not change outcomes. Money that builds capability in mainstream classrooms might. If inclusion hubs, specialist outreach and better teacher training become embedded rather than bolted on, reform could prove transformative. If reassessments of Education, Health and Care Plans at transition points become a quiet mechanism for rationing support, trust will collapse. And trust in this system is already fragile.

There remains a persistent suspicion that inclusion and standards are in tension — that accommodating additional needs inevitably lowers the bar. This is a profound misunderstanding. High standards without inclusion create a brittle elite and a resentful periphery. Inclusion without standards creates drift. The only sustainable model is both. In business we understand this instinctively. You do not hire identical minds; you hire for strengths and build systems around them. You insist on outcomes while flexing processes. Education is no different. A SEND system that quietly reduces ambition for certain pupils embeds a ceiling that later employers will struggle to lift. A system that combines realism about need with insistence on potential alters trajectories entirely.

One of the most controversial elements in the current debate concerns reassessing EHCPs after primary school and again after GCSEs. In theory, reassessment ensures relevance. In practice, for many families, it signals precarity. Transition points are fragile enough. Secondary school, post-16 choices, the move into further education or apprenticeships — these are moments when continuity of support matters most. Remove scaffolding at the point of greatest instability and you do not drive efficiency; you drive disengagement. From an employability standpoint, stability is not sentimental; it is strategic.

Britain talks endlessly about productivity — AI, infrastructure, industrial strategy — but rarely links it to SEND. We should. A child whose communication needs are supported early is more likely to participate confidently in adult life. A teenager taught emotional regulation is more employable than one repeatedly excluded. A young person whose differences are recognised as strengths rather than pathologies is more likely to innovate rather than withdraw. The return on investment is long-term but real. The alternative is to continue importing cost into every other system while lamenting stagnant growth.

The most revealing issue is not budgetary but cultural. For decades parts of the system quietly assumed that certain children would not achieve at the same level, and therefore did not design for their success. That is not realism; it is structural pessimism. Expectations shape behaviour. Behaviour shapes outcomes. A SEND reform that changes funding but not mindset will fail. A reform that embeds ambition alongside support might shift life chances more profoundly than any industrial policy white paper.

We can continue to treat SEND as an expanding line on a spreadsheet, a technical headache for local authorities and ministers. Or we can treat it as a generational investment decision. Either we invest early in inclusion that sustains standards, or we pay later for exclusion that erodes employability. There is nothing niche about this. It touches every employer and every region. One in five children in England needs something more from the education system. The question is whether we will provide that “something more” as a reluctant concession, or recognise it for what it is: the foundation of the future workforce. Compassion matters. But so does competitiveness. The two are not in conflict.