(UK) SPED expert question reforms, rates of expelling disabled students

June 15, 2026,  SEND reforms and the forgotten children at risk of exclusion — Special Needs Jungle

As the conversation about SEND reform continues, it’s important to keep in mind the children whose needs remain the least visible or formally recognised.

With over 35 years’ experience as a headteacher, SEND specialist and advocate, Justina Asafu-Adjaye has supported many pupils whose needs were undiagnosed and unmet, until their distress became impossible to ignore.

In this article, she highlights the gap between inclusion on paper and inclusion in practice, warning that without meaningful cultural change as a fundamental aspect of SEND reform, there is a significant risk that even more children will be held in mainstream only to be pushed out later.

From my experience leading an independent alternative provision with a specialist social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) focus, the Schools White Paper raises significant unaddressed concerns. Every day, I worked with children who had reached us because mainstream settings could not (or would not) hold them. Many of these pupils had undiagnosed special educational needs and most also had complex mental health needs. Almost all had experienced exclusion.

The government says its proposed SEND reforms will improve inclusion through earlier identification and more consistent support. But that promise will ring hollow for the children who are most often forgotten in these debates: those whose needs are still unidentified, still unmet, and who are frequently punished for "bad behaviour". These children are already struggling, and being failed. Too often, their fate is to be suspended, excluded, or quietly removed from school life.

The reforms aim to keep more children in mainstream school instead of in specialist settings. But these plans will not deliver inclusion without also changing an increasingly punitive culture, ending workforce shortages, or solving profound misunderstanding around neurodivergent presentation, these plans will not deliver inclusion. They will simply widen the cohort of children exposed to exclusion and, ultimately, the school-to-prison pipeline.

The children that SEND policy keeps missing

Much of the current SEND reform debate focuses on systems, structures and efficiency. Far less attention is paid to the children whose needs are not picked up until they are in crisis: for example, the child repeatedly sanctioned for calling out, the autistic pupil punished for feeling overwhelmed, the child with ADHD who has been labelled defiant, or the traumatised child who is seen only through the lens of disruption.

This is the forgotten group who should be at the centre of any serious reform agenda.

Special Needs Jungle has already explored how undiagnosed SEND can drive children towards the school-to-prison pipeline, and how ADHD, autism and other neurodivergent differences are too often criminalised instead of understood. The key question raised by the government’s plans is simple: what happens to this group of children when more children are kept in mainstream, but the conditions that produce exclusion remain intact? . . .

The numbers are not distributed evenly; the figures reveal children on SEN Support are around five times more likely to be permanently excluded than pupils without identified SEN.

Children with social, emotional and mental health needs face suspension rates more than eight times the national average. Disadvantage plays a role too, with children living in poverty are also disproportionately excluded. This is not so much a behaviour story, as unrelenting patterns of unmet need.

The most common recorded reason for suspension is "persistent disruptive behaviour". But for many children with unidentified or unsupported SEND, what schools record as 'disruption' may actually be dysregulation, distress, sensory overload, communication difficulty, or survival behaviour in an environment that is not set up to meet their needs. The current system already mistakes unmet need for misconduct. Reforms that rely on mainstream inclusion without changing that culture risk making these children more, not less, vulnerable.

Inclusion on paper is not inclusion in practice

Improving the ability to identify emerging need isn't enough. A child whose needs are noticed but who is left waiting for a referral and assessment, or who is formally identified but not meaningfully supported, is not being included. They are being left in limbo until behaviour deteriorates, and suspension or exclusion, the system’s pressure valve, follow.

There is nothing wrong with the ambition that more children should be educated successfully in mainstream schools. The problem is the growing gap between rhetorical inclusion and material reality. Mainstream schools cannot safely include children with a wider range of needs if specialist support remains delayed, fragmented or simply unavailable. This is where the government’s proposals begin to look dangerously optimistic.

The reforms assume the professionals needed to identify and support a growing cohort of children in mainstream will somehow be found, trained, and deployed quickly enough to make the policy work. And of course, that doesn't just mean boosting existing specialists, but enough to replace experience lost from retirement and those leaving their profession. There is no credible route to genuine early intervention if educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, CAMHS clinicians, specialist teachers and trained pastoral staff are already unable to meet the needs of the current cohort.

The missing mindset shift

The deepest flaw in the current debate is not only lack of resources, but lack of understanding. There has been no serious reckoning with the punitive culture that shapes how many schools interpret behaviour, nor with the way zero-tolerance approaches can punish children whose presentation is neurodivergent, traumatised or otherwise atypical.

Evidence given to the House of Commons Education Committee in 2018 highlighted concerns that so‑called “zero‑tolerance” behaviour policies exclude more vulnerable children, including those with SEND and mental health needs. Yet there is still too little challenge to the assumption that stricter discipline is a neutral good. It is not neutral for a child whose unmet needs are expressed through movement, shutdown, impulsivity, refusal, emotional dysregulation or sensory distress.

This is why a mindset shift is essential.

Schools and policymakers must move away from seeing behaviour as a moral failing or compliance problem and towards understanding it, in many cases, as a form of communication. Without that shift, early intervention will remain little more than a slogan. If professionals and school leaders see need as naughtiness, there is very little incentive to seek specialist assessment or early support. Allowing schools to hold exclusive authority over action and oversight, without legislated accountability, creates conditions that will continue to fail the very children who most need protection. . . .

These children do not need another promise of inclusion that exists only on paper. They need schools that understand neurodivergence, systems that treat behaviour as communication, specialist support that exists in reality rather than rhetoric, and legal protections strong enough to matter when a child is on the brink of exclusion.

Until that happens, the danger is clear. More children with unmet and unidentified SEND will remain in mainstream settings that cannot meet their needs, be blamed for the consequences, and be removed once their distress becomes too inconvenient to contain. That is not reform. It is the same failure, redistributed across a larger group of children.