Simon Uttley
For as long as I have been in school leadership, “every teacher is a teacher of SEND” has been an aspiration rather than consistently lived out in classrooms. Last week the Department for Education took a concrete step towards changing that. It deserves a welcome, and it also deserves some hard questions.
What has been announced
On 25 September the DfE published free, adaptable training materials for schools and post-16 settings, developed by Ambition Institute, which settings can use throughout the year or on existing training days. The content is deliberately practical: breaking instructions into manageable steps, pre-teaching specialist vocabulary, and building in time for pupils to practise it. Early years staff will get online training from the charity Dingley’s Promise, covering approaches such as visual timetables and reducing unnecessary noise in the environment.
This is the first phase of a wider programme. Further resources are due in January and April, with fully funded courses for teachers, leaders and support staff to follow from September 2027. The whole package sits within the Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, which commits more than £200 million over three years to the DfE’s SEND CPD programme.
Clear strengths
It locates inclusion in ordinary teaching. The strongest aspect of this offer is its starting point. The materials are informed by the Education Endowment Foundation’s inclusive teaching guidance, and the EEF’s earlier review of SEND in mainstream schools reached a conclusion that has stood up well: high-quality teaching for all pupils is the foundation, and targeted interventions should complement it, not replace it (EEF, 2020). Chunked instructions, explicit vocabulary teaching and deliberate practice help the pupil with a diagnosed need, and they also help the child who is simply tired, anxious or new to English. That is sound pedagogy, and it resists the drift towards treating SEND as a separate specialism that sits outside the classroom teacher’s remit.
It includes the people who are often left out. Teaching assistants spend more time with pupils with SEND than almost anyone else in a school, yet their training has long been patchy. The DfE’s own figures acknowledge this: a quarter of teaching assistants surveyed said insufficient training was a barrier to supporting these pupils, while one in three teachers wanted more SEND training. The EEF’s work on deploying teaching assistants has shown for years that how TAs are prepared and used matters as much as how many a school employs (EEF, 2018). Including early years and further education is also welcome. The phase where needs are first spotted and the phase where young people prepare for adulthood have too often been treated as afterthoughts.
It trusts schools to adapt it. The sessions are designed to be run by an in-house facilitator, mostly take around an hour, and can be used individually or combined into a training day. That flexibility respects the reality that a small rural primary and a large urban secondary have different starting points.
The stakes are high enough to justify it. The government cites research showing that young people with SEND are around 80 per cent more likely than average to be NEET. Earlier and better support in the classroom is one of the few levers that works at scale.
Where the challenges lie
Materials are not the same as professional development. The evidence on teacher CPD is fairly consistent: change in practice comes from sustained programmes with modelling, rehearsal, feedback and follow-up, not from one-off sessions (Cordingley et al., 2015; Sims et al., 2021). An hour-long session delivered on an INSET day, then left to fade, will change little. The quality of the programme will depend heavily on the in-house facilitator, and many schools, particularly smaller ones, will struggle to release someone with the expertise and time to lead it well. The funded courses from 2027 may help, but for the next year the burden sits with schools.
Time is the real currency. Schools are being asked to adopt this training while also preparing for the wider reforms. Commentators have pointed to a double-running period between 2026 and 2030, when schools maintain the current system while building the new one. Directed time is already fully spoken for in most schools. Unless leaders are willing to stop doing something else, SEND training will be squeezed into the margins.
Adaptive teaching has limits. Better classroom practice will help a great many pupils, but it cannot substitute for specialist assessment and therapy. Educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists remain in short supply, and the National Audit Office has documented a system under severe financial and operational strain (NAO, 2024). The White Paper’s £1.8 billion for Experts at Hand is intended to address this, but the training will only succeed if the specialist support behind it arrives on time.
Parental trust is fragile. Families who have fought for support will read this announcement alongside proposals that, in one analysis, would move support closer to the classroom and reduce reliance on formal statutory plans. Some will worry that “every teacher is trained” becomes a reason to say fewer children need a plan. Special Needs Jungle has already questioned how the DfE will ensure implementation money is spent well, noting that most of an earlier implementation grant between 2014 and 2018 went on agency staff and consultants with no discernible impact. The government will need to show, with evidence, that training adds to entitlement rather than eroding it.
Scale and measurement. £200 million over three years, spread across every nursery, school and college in England, is significant but not lavish per member of staff. We also do not yet know how impact will be judged. If the measure is the number of sessions delivered, the programme will look successful whatever happens to children.
What school leaders can do now?
Treat the materials as the start of a sustained programme, not a single training day. Plan them across the year with time for staff to try approaches, observe each other and review what happened. Train teachers and teaching assistants together, so that planning and deployment improve alongside technique. Choose the facilitator with care and protect their time. Talk openly with parents about what is changing and what is not. And decide in advance how you will know whether pupils’ experience of learning has improved, rather than relying on staff confidence surveys alone.
Whether it becomes the “biggest ever overhaul” or another folder on the shared drive will depend on the time, specialist support and honest evaluation that accompany it, and on how seriously we as leaders take it.
Simon Uttley
References
Cordingley, P. et al. (2015) Developing Great Teaching: Lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development. London: Teacher Development Trust.
Department for Education (2026) Every Child Achieving and Thriving (Schools White Paper). London: DfE.
Department for Education (2026) ‘Biggest ever overhaul of SEND teacher training begins’, press release, 25 September. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-ever-overhaul-of-send-teacher-training-begins
Department for Education (2026) SEND and inclusion training for mainstream schools. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/send-and-inclusion-training-for-mainstream-schools
Education Endowment Foundation (2018) Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants. London: EEF.
Education Endowment Foundation (2020) Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools. London: EEF.
National Audit Office (2024) Support for children and young people with special educational needs. London: NAO.
Schools Week (2026) ‘Promised SEND training courses set to start in autumn 2027’, 23 July.
Sims, S. et al. (2021) What are the characteristics of effective teacher professional development? A systematic review and meta-analysis. London: Education Endowment Foundation.
Special Needs Jungle (2026) ‘Schools White Paper: What do we know so far about funding for SEND?’, 23 February.