Joining the dots: part 2: SEND and AP: creating a second schooling system

In the first part of this article published in FORUM 66, 1 (2024), we noted that the English mass state education system, developing over 150 years, had created subsystems for (predominantly disadvantaged) children and/or young people who would not or could not function in mainstream schools. 1 This followed the development of mass elementary schooling in the 1870s. It seemed then, as it often does now, that many teachers in mainstream schools ‐ working in the six-standard age-related classes ‐ increasingly struggled with the business of equipping children and/or young people to pass required tests while so called ‘disruptive, disabled or defective children’ were present. The expansion and associated costs of alternative (education) provisions (APs) for those labelled as having special needs or disabilities (SEND) ‐ either in separate spaces, and/or offsite settings such as pupil referral units (PRUs) ‐ always worried government and local authorities. At different points, and by different government agencies, concerns were raised about the quality of these provisions ‐ especially applied to the extra funding given for those pupils of school age in APs. 2 By 2022 the Conservative government, apparently appalled at the debt local authorities were accumulating to deal with expanding numbers of children and young people in these educational subsystems, decided to join SEND, PRUs and a growing array of APs together for planning and funding purposes, and to address official and unregulated forms of schooling. 3 This second article examines, in more detail, how these subsystems have developed, the laments from politicians and the media that ‘the SEND system is broken’, especially through debt, and whether and how the efforts to link SEND and seemingly endless forms of AP more closely are working (or intended to work) under a recently elected Labour government. It concludes that although current policy suggests that there will be more ‘inclusion’ of children and young people regarded as concerns or disadvantaged by the education system, the organisation, funding and curriculum in separate spaces may mean that SEND and AP are a separate schooling system and will continue to be treated as such.