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£4bn SEND package won’t solve decade of under-resourcing
Dr TROY PAGE, Founder and Director of Queen’s Online School, discusses the SEND overhaul and warns that without scaling specialist recruitment and ensuring better accountability, families could still face long waits and inconsistent provision.
The announcement of a £4 billion overhaul of special educational needs and disabilities support in English schools represents an important recognition by the Government that the current system is failing too many families. For mainstream schools, the new inclusive mainstream fund and specialist ‘experts at hand’ services should, in theory, bring essential support (such as speech and language therapists and SEND specialists) directly into the classroom where it matters most, rather than locking families into protracted battles for an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). However, while the increased funding and focus on early intervention is welcome, this package alone will not solve the systemic problems that have built up over the last decade. The SEND system has been chronically under-resourced, with rising demand and escalating costs creating real workforce pressures. Early intervention and inclusion are vital, but without significantly scaling specialist recruitment and genuine accountability for delivery on the ground, there is a real risk that families will continue to meet long waits and inconsistent support from school
to school.
Crucially, limiting EHCP eligibility to only the most severe needs - even if offset by broader individual support plans - risks diminishing the legally enforceable rights that families currently rely on. Unless appeal rights and robust safeguards are maintained, children with moderate but still significant needs could lose critical protection. At Queen’s, our approach to supporting students with SEND is fundamentally different from many mainstream settings. We prioritise early, personalised assessment followed by a tailored educational plan that is co-designed with families and specialist professionals from the outset. This means that students are not defined by a label but supported through adaptive teaching, specialist mentoring and a coordinated partnership between home, school and external services.
Inclusion is not an afterthought: it’s embedded in how we design learning environments and staff development. It is this model of proactive readiness, rather than reactive entitlement, that drives better outcomes for pupils with additional needs.
Diversity, AI and our classrooms
CHARLES GOLDING, co-founder of CARGO, shares his thoughts on the possibility that AI could narrow teaching perspectives.
When we started creating and distributing our CARGO Classroom suite of education resources nearly 10 years ago, the education landscape was very different. At the time, our resources offered a unique insight into narratives and history that wasn’t readily accessible and often hidden. Our aim was to offer teachers and educators the tools to help them teach more diverse and stimulating perspectives in their classrooms. The resources were and are still created with the help of a team of dedicated and experienced educators and creatives.
Now large language models like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s BERT enable teachers to create instant lesson plans with a simple set of prompts. These systems are convenient and help to offset a teacher’s already overloaded workload. However, AI is not impartial and often demonstrates an inherent bias. The interpretations of these digital systems are often skewed and a reflection of long standing institutional and historical power structures. The data that trains AI is shaped by centuries of colonialism, capitalist interests and frameworks, all of which have excluded or misrepresented many communities. Much of the world’s data infrastructure as well as the development of AI systems is also dominated by a small number of powerful organisations with undisclosed agendas.
Using AI as a teaching aid for educators is undoubtedly rising. A Gallup survey from June 2025 found that 60% of US
April 2026
K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. A recent study, however, found when teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques. Every teacher plans lessons for its students, but the way they go about doing it can vary significantly. Some veteran educators, drawing on years of teaching experience, plan out classes in their heads, while many new-to-the-profession educators spend long hours researching and planning each instructional activity. Some rely on purchased prepackaged curriculum materials to guide their plans while others turn to the internet to find resources, activities and assessments. That said, there will never be a substitute for first hand human experience, personal perspectives and insights of an experienced educator. Teachers can try to customise lesson plans to their situation through prompts, but ultimately generative AI tools do not consider any actual students or real classroom settings the way a teacher can. Inevitably, AI systems will go on to touch more and more lives. The question remains: are they designed to uplift, exclude or misconstrue? We should treat AI as the powerful tool it is, but also with scepticism – questioning its motive, prominence and dominance in the classroom.
www.education-today.co.uk 15
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