The training gap
I remember when the phrase “every teacher is a teacher of SEND” first entered the training lexicon. It landed with the optimism of something that felt true and radical at the same time. Of course every teacher should be equipped to teach every child in front of them. Yet, here we are, decades on, and the white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, published at the end of February, reiterates that statement. It tells you something important, not about ambition, but about how far we’ve failed to close the gap between the aspiration and the reality of what teachers are actually trained and supported to do.
I’ve spent twenty years working in and around alternative provision. I know what it looks like when a child lands in a PRU not because they’re defiant, but because nobody in their mainstream school had the knowledge, or the confidence, or the scaffolding, to support them. Behaviour as communication is a phrase we’ve been using for years but you can’t read the message if you haven’t been taught the language.
The white paper commits £200 million to SEND CPD for all school staff, available from September 2026. It talks about a new national training programme to build more inclusive cultures and classrooms. It promises an updated Code of Practice that will, for the first time, make SEND training a requirement for all staff. In addition, there’s a new Teaching Training Entitlement, a broader professional development offer that will eventually reach experienced teachers and leaders, not just those that are new to the profession.
But that feels like vague aims, so let’s sit with the detail for a moment, because the detail is where these reforms will either take root or wither and die. Didau’s work on intelligent accountability is a helpful underpinning, as it asks the right questions about what conditions have to exist before training can actually change anything.
Didau draws a distinction between two models of school improvement: the deficit model, which assumes that when things go wrong it is somebody’s fault, and the surplus model, which assumes that problems are more often the result of unintended systemic flaws. The history of SEND training in this country has been predominantly deficit in its orientation. Teachers who didn’t know enough were seen as the problem to be fixed, rather than as professionals operating in a system that had never adequately equipped them. Mandatory training delivered from above, logged on a spreadsheet, and largely forgotten by Wednesday is the natural product of that mindset.
The white paper’s vision rests on the idea that most children’s needs can and should be met through a universal offer in mainstream settings. That inclusion isn’t the exception; it’s the design. To make that real, teachers need more than a training day on the four broad areas of need. They need sustained, embedded professional development that changes not just their knowledge but their practice. They need to be trusted to do that work properly, not monitored for compliance with it.
Didau is clear that trust and accountability are not opposites. We thrive when we are trusted, but we also need someone to care about and hold us to account for what we do. What intelligent accountability resists is the version of accountability that treats every teacher as equally suspect regardless of what they’ve demonstrated. If the new SEND training entitlement is delivered through that lens, it will reproduce exactly the same patterns we’ve seen before. If instead it’s designed within a surplus model, one that assumes teachers want to do this well and that the system’s job is to genuinely equip them, it has a real chance of landing differently.
The four broad areas of need themselves are being replaced under the proposed reforms, redrawn around key aspects of child development. That’s actually a more interesting shift than it’s been given credit for. The current categories have always been a simplification: communication and interaction, cognition and learning, social, emotional and mental health, sensory and physical needs. Children don’t exist in clean categories. The child with SEMH difficulties is often the child with unidentified learning needs, or the child carrying trauma that looks like non-compliance on a good day and crisis on a bad one. A training offer built around developmental understanding has more chance of capturing that complexity than one built around administrative labels.
What I’ll be watching for is whether the new training programme is built with and for the teachers who are already stretched, or whether it becomes another set of resources deposited onto a shared drive, opened once and quietly forgotten. The history of SEND training in this country is littered with exactly that. Well-intentioned frameworks that never made it from the INSET session into the Tuesday afternoon lesson with a child who is dysregulated and a class of thirty watching. Didau’s point about freeing teachers from unnecessary workload so they can focus on the core job feels directly relevant here. You cannot ask teachers to build genuinely inclusive practice while simultaneously burying them in administrative compliance.
