Inclusion on a Shoestring: Building SEND with the Right Staff
The ambition is admirable. The government wants more children with special educational needs and disabilities to be supported in mainstream schools, closer to their communities, alongside their peers. In principle, few would argue against that. In practice, the people being asked to deliver it every single day are sounding the alarm.
And this time, the numbers back them up.
What the Survey Actually Found
Ahead of its annual conference in Brighton, the National Education Union surveyed over 10,000 teachers and nearly 3,000 support staff working in English state schools. The results were stark. The most significant barriers to inclusion identified by teachers were a lack of support staff, cited by 83 percent of teachers, high workload at 74 percent, and a shortage of support services at 69 percent. Only 2 percent of teachers said they had no issue with the number of support staff working in their school.
Read that last figure again. Two percent.
Class sizes were also flagged as a major concern, with 89 percent of teachers saying that oversized classes hamper their school's ability to be properly inclusive. In secondary schools the problem is even more pronounced, with the issue cited more frequently than in primaries.
This is not a picture of a workforce resistant to change. It is a workforce telling the government, clearly and consistently, that the conditions needed to make inclusion work simply do not exist yet.
The Funding Gap Nobody Can Ignore
The government has committed significant money to SEND reform on paper. An extra £4 billion has been pledged between now and 2029 to prepare schools before the main changes begin to come into force, with £1.6 billion going directly to early years, schools and colleges as part of an inclusion fund.
But when you break that down to school level, the picture changes. Under current funding plans, the inclusion grant would amount to £13,000 for an average primary school, equivalent to one part-time teaching assistant. For a secondary school, it equates to roughly two teaching assistants. In a system where the majority of teachers say insufficient staffing is their single biggest barrier to inclusion, that is not a solution. It is a gesture.
Daniel Kebede, NEU General Secretary, has pointed to Office for Budget Responsibility figures showing the gap between what councils spend on SEND and what the government allocates was set to reach £6.3 billion within three years, with £14 billion of accumulated debt. The debt write-off announced by the government does not make that structural shortfall disappear. It lands instead on schools already operating with depleted resources.
The Support Staff Crisis Within the Crisis
What often gets lost in the broader SEND debate is the specific and worsening crisis around support staff. Teaching assistants are the people most directly responsible for day-to-day inclusion in mainstream classrooms. They are the ones sitting alongside pupils with complex needs, adapting resources, managing behaviour, building the trust that makes learning possible.
Recent research suggests that around one in five support staff left the school system between 2023/24 and 2024/25. That is an extraordinary rate of attrition for a workforce that is already stretched. And it is happening precisely at the moment the government is asking mainstream schools to take on significantly more responsibility for SEND provision.
Kebede has described classrooms as increasingly becoming the frontline for challenges such as poverty, mental health difficulties and unmet special educational needs, with teachers and support staff being asked to manage issues that extend far beyond education, often without the resources or support required. That is not an overstatement. It is the daily reality in schools across the country.
Reform Without Resource Is Just Paperwork
Under the reforms announced by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, mainstream schools will be tasked with assessing pupils with special needs and developing individual support plans, with the changes scheduled to take full effect by the 2029 to 2030 academic year. That additional workload falls on teachers and support staff who are already at capacity.
What genuine inclusion requires is more specialists working directly in schools, rapid access to educational psychologists and therapists, strong partnerships with special schools, and fair admissions that prevent the clustering of pupils with the greatest needs in the same settings. These are not unreasonable asks. They are the baseline conditions for making inclusion actually work rather than simply exist on paper.
The government's direction of travel is right. Inclusion matters. Every child deserves to be educated in an environment where their needs are properly understood and met. But intention without infrastructure is just policy. And right now, the infrastructure is not there.
Schools need more staff, better trained and properly supported. Until that changes, the gap between what the government is promising families and what schools can realistically deliver will continue to grow.
At Link3 Recruitment, we specialise in placing experienced teaching assistants, SEND support staff and cover supervisors in schools across the Midlands. If your school is navigating increased SEND demand and needs reliable, skilled support staff, we are here to help.
