(England) 'ALL TEACHERS TO BE SEND TEACHERS'; "major education shake-up"

June 29, 2025, The i Paper: ‘All teachers to be SEND teachers’ in major education shake-up

All teachers will be SEND teachers under a reformed special educational needs system, England’s schools minister has pledged in an attempt to allay growing fears about the shake-up.

Catherine McKinnell told The i Paper that teachers would get support on SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) as part of their initial teacher training and professional development so that they could meet all the needs of pupils.

But some parents are worried that a reliance on mainstream teachers for SEND will be “too much” for the staff and could deny their children the support they need.

Rethink for ‘financially unsustainable’ system

The Government wants more pupils with SEND taught in mainstream schools. An increase in demand for SEND education has filled up state special schools, forcing local authorities to pay for places in private alternatives that can cost nearly three times as much.

The Department for Education (DfE) has said it will “protect provision currently in place” but wants to reform a SEND system judged by auditors to have become “financially unsustainable”.

Now, McKinnell, the minister leading on SEND, has revealed that the DfE is “making sure that all teachers are teachers of special educational needs, that teachers have the training and support and the professional development to be able to meet all the needs of children within their classroom”.

She also said that the DfE was already “very focused on supporting schools to create that inclusive, mainstream experience” and pointed to £740m in capital funding to create more “mainstream school places for children with special educational needs”.

‘We won’t take away support – we want to improve it’

The minister added that there was a focus on the early years and identifying need “at the earliest opportunity” through a “whole variety of early speech and language interventions”, “neurodiversity initiatives” and “phonics screening”.

“We’re not looking at taking away any support that’s in place at the moment,” she said. “We just want to improve the support so that fewer parents have to fight for what should be their child’s education.”

But her comments have worried teachers. Matt Wrack, Acting General Secretary of the NASUWT union, said that as the proportion of pupils with SEND increased, schools’ support staff and resources needed to increase as well.

“It is difficult to imagine how every teacher can become a SEND teacher – a teacher who can meet all those complex needs – within our current educational system,” he said.

Parents’ anxiety has been increasing as they wait for full details of the SEND changes, which it is understood were originally due to be consulted on this Spring.

Sources have told The i Paper that the reason the unveiling of the SEND White Paper has been delayed until the Autumn is because of Downing Street’s nervousness about it coming out as controversy rages over separate plans to cut disabled people’s benefits.

No 10 ‘feared changes going down like a lead balloon’

A local government source said Number 10 had got “cold feet” about the optics of the SEND plan, which will be key to the future of many local councils that fund special educational needs.

The source said Downing Street had been “hesitant about publishing any sort of White Paper that could easily be framed as ‘disabled kids lose rights’, ‘disabled kids lose access to support’, and how that will go down like an absolute lead balloon given the cuts to welfare spending down really badly”.