I don’t know a SENDCO who thinks the SEND system is helping them to work efficiently, focus on the right things and consistently have impact. I don’t know many parents who speak glowingly of their experience of getting an EHCP. I don’t know any Local Authorities who aren’t consumed and overwhelmed by workload.

So something needs to change. But what is going to change for schools? What does the SEND and AP Improvement Plan tell us change is going to look like, and how might that change the SENDCO role?

Here are 3 ways your role could be affected.

National Standards

Many SENDCOs on Day 1 don’t yet know where to look. They may not know about some of the excellent resources from Whole School SEND, the SENsible SENCO Facebook group or the books that can guide them as they learn the role.

The answer in the Improvement Plan lies in National Standards. It looks like these will echo some of the ‘Ordinarily Available Provision’ documents set out by many local authorities (Portsmouth LA’s document is praised specifically within the Improvement Plan). Although the Improvement Plan itself raises a potential pitfall to this approach – the need to ‘find a balance between national consistency and individual needs’ – the approach at least gives new SENDCOs a starting point.

Will these National Standards be evidence-informed? The hope is certainly that they will be (the word ‘evidence’ is used 71 times in this 101-page document), with some mention of a commitment to building on the existing evidence base – for example within the area of teaching assistants.

It won’t happen quickly though. A ‘significant proportion’ of these will be published by the end of 2025, but a consultation process will follow – so nothing is going to happen quickly.

At best, this will effortlessly bring SENDCOs closer to good evidence-informed strategies and practices, helping them to make good decisions about provision quickly, and to focus on the implementation of provision.

At worst, a book’s worth of strategies will become a stick with which to beat teachers; another reason why meeting the needs of pupils with SEND feels beyond most classroom teachers.

The devil will of course be in the detail of what these end up looking like; of how they are created and what support surrounds their implementation.

A skilled workforce

If this Improvement Plan means the focus of the SENDCO role becomes more about upskilling colleagues, I’m delighted. If it helps SENDCOs to be colleague-facing, supporting colleagues directly and helping them to access high-quality development opportunities, that is a real lever for change.

The Improvement Plan gives several examples of how it sees the workforce being upskilled – through the SENCO NPQ; through a review of the ITT and ECF; through a commitment to SEND within the content of several leadership NPQs; through additional training for colleagues in Early Years; through additional research into the best practices of teaching assistants.

The sizeable hole in this plan may well be for teachers who are neither ITT/ECT nor enrolling in an NPQ. Where the offer from the Universal Services Programme (delivered by NASEN through Whole School SEND) is excellent, the multitude of pressures on teachers and school leaders mean it is still a leap of faith to think that this offer will be accessed by staff in the numbers needed to shift outcomes for many of the 1.5 million children and young people with SEND, unless there is some kind of way to ensure that staff have the time, incentive and sheer duty to do so.

A reduction in EHCPs

It would be naïve to think more requests for EHCNA won’t be rejected. There is an explicit desire within the Improvement Plan for a reduction (‘4. Fewer will therefore need to access support through an Education, Health and Care Plan’; ES15. we expect to reduce the need for EHCPs because the needs of more children and young people will be met without them).

The aspiration behind this may well be correct – that better and earlier identification, alongside a more robust plan of support through ‘ordinarily available provision’ at SEN Support Level, provides the right support quickly – negating in some cases the need for the kinds of intense and longer-term support delivered through an EHCP. It may also mean SENDCOs spend less time making requests for EHCNA and more time working with pupils, families and colleagues.

The flipside (or just the brutal reality) could be more knockbacks from local authorities, who find themselves under pressure to reduce the ‘high needs block deficits’, as is mentioned throughout the Improvement Plan (read what you will into the 12 mentions of a ‘financially sustainable’ system).

The standardisation and digitisation of EHCPs is surely to be welcomed, as any SENDCO working on a county/borough border will testify.

I am broadly in favour of the aims of the Improvement Plan. I am generally positive about many of the ways to achieve these aims. But expect nothing to change quickly. The Improvement Plan contains many references to things being trialed regionally, with pathfinders, trailblazers and pilot projects. While this approach should help to counter the problems of implementation that have plagued the 2014 SEN reforms, they also mean much-needed change may be 2-3 years down the line in many cases. Hopefully such a patient and step-by-step approach can bring good change; it just may not bring immediate change.