As I sit writing this evening in front of a crackling fire in the cosy, comforting bar of a traditional Yorkshire Dales B&B, surrounded by excitable tourists, I find myself reflecting on why I'm here.
My night in The Dales is not a holiday. It is simply the latest example, in a very long line, of the scaffolding we build around my neurodivergent daughter to help her navigate the current education system and ensure she can access the learning opportunities many children and their families can often take for granted.
She is currently away enjoying herself (supposedly) on a school residential. The reality is that the autistic part of her brain has been warning her for months that everything will be different from her usual routine and that it may all become too much to manage. She doesn't know that I am five minutes away, waiting for a phone call that I desperately hope won't come, telling me that she isn't coping and needs to come home.
This isn't shared for sympathy, but to highlight what life looks like for many families of neurodivergent children. Every day we make decisions, adjustments and sacrifices to fill the enormous gaps left by a SEND system that is, for far too many families, fundamentally broken.
Our family was launched unceremoniously into that system, two years ago when my daughter experienced what we now understand to have been autistic burnout. Over the course of just a few weeks, she went from being a happy, energetic, sociable and wonderfully curious little girl to a child who was distressed, anxious, unable to sleep, sometimes unable to attend school and, at times, physically aggressive. We had no idea what had happened to our joyful daughter, and for the three months she lived in that state, we feared every day that we might never get her back.
We were fortunate to have a GP who recognised the signs of neurodivergence almost immediately and began talking us through assessment and treatment options and put us in touch with a brilliant local charity support group (thank you to Stripes and the rest of the voluntary and community sector organisations that have been so supportive of our family).
Through this charity we heard from families across the country. Story after story revealed the human cost of a system under immense strain. Families in crisis. Children waiting years for support. Parents exhausted from fighting battles with no clear terms of engagement.
This is why the SEND reforms are not simply welcome for families like ours; it is essential. And getting them right and implemented effectively is imperative. Behind every statistic, waiting list and policy debate are children whose potential is being limited and families who are holding things together with determination, resilience and (diminishing) hope. Without meaningful change, those families will continue to build the scaffolding themselves, because they have no other choice.
In a nutshell, the SEND reforms aim to transform the system from one that provides targeted support to a relatively small number of children into one supported by a more capable education workforce, tasked with ensuring the system is inclusive for all and able to meet the rising demand across the country. The central workforce challenge is whether England has the people, skills, insight, capacity and new ways of working required to make that shift a reality.
While some aspects of the reforms will require new legislation, there is already much that can be done. The proposed model requires more expertise to be available in mainstream settings, rather than concentrated in specialist teams. So local areas will need to consider recruitment, retention and deployment jointly across education and health. While there is likely to be more competition for specialist roles like educational psychologists, the changes may also drive retention issues for mainstream teachers, as expectations grow and the role of a teacher shifts and expands.
For local authorities specifically, one challenge will be ensuring SEND leaders have the capacity and capability to manage today's statutory system while simultaneously building the workforce, partnerships and operating model needed for the post-reform landscape.
Solace recently led the recruitment process for a head of SEND in an ambitious London council. The brief was clear: identify a leader who can thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly evolving environment, navigate ambiguity and provide family-centred leadership across the wider system. The search and assessment process focused heavily on service improvement and transformation, alongside partnership working across health, social care and education. In the reformed system, multidisciplinary teams will be a fundamental mechanism for building capacity and delivering more effective support. The successful candidate demonstrated a clear child-first approach, underpinned by the leadership skills needed to embed this across the system, building capability and capacity within and across teams to deliver better outcomes for children and families.
Experts at Hand is a key component of SEND reforms and was formally launched in September. The Government's guidance explicitly encourages local areas to develop new workforce models and strengthen joint working between professions. This reinforces the growing importance of recruiting leaders who can operate across organisational boundaries, build effective multidisciplinary teams and drive system-wide change, while maintaining a relentless focus on improving outcomes for children and young people.
Thankfully, my daughter now manages well at school and in most other settings, but the time, determination, patience and learning that have brought us to this point are immeasurable, and not forgetting the journey is ongoing.
A friend in a similar position recently asked me to name the one thing we have done that has had the most profound impact on our daughter's ability to cope. The answer was easy: the education and therapeutic support we have undertaken as parents.
Equipping ourselves with an understanding of how our daughter experiences the world, how that affects her, and in turn how it affects us, has been transformational.
More importantly, it has changed the impact we have on her. Our reactions, our understanding and our recognition of her individual needs all shape her ability to cope and, more often than not, to thrive.
That's why the SEND reforms fill me with hope. At its heart is the ambition to build a system, and a workforce within that system, that understands each child and their individual needs. It is not an easy task, but with skilled, empowered and compassionate leaders across education, social care and health, I am confident that, as a sector, we can achieve it.
Jessica Mullinger is executive director of sector support at Solace
