Simon Currigan

Have you heard about the new SEND reform paper from the government and wondered what it actually means for SEMH behaviour in your school? Well, my team and I work with over 100 schools on SEMH behaviour, and in this episode I'll break down the key changes the government is proposing and explain what school leaders, SENCOs, and teachers should be thinking about right now so that you're fully prepared for when the changes come in.

Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. Now, before we get into today's topic, I want to ask you a question. What's the worst herb? And I'm not talking about herbs in the herbal medicine sense. What I mean here is herbs that you cook with. Okay, stop thinking, because this isn't subjective. There is one right answer, which is corriander. That's cilantro for our international listeners. Coriander is the worst herb. It's aggressive. It's overpowering. It's a bully. It shows up in a dish, and it's just nasty to every other ingredient on the plate. You can make a perfectly good meal, add coriander, and suddenly it's the only thing you can taste. You might as well put the rest of the ingredients in the bin. It just dominates everything. In the herb world, it doesn't even have friends. It just turns up and ruins the party. Coriander is just the worst, which has nothing to do with today's episode.

So, recently the Department for Education published its new SEND reform consultation paper. Now, it's a long document. It's full of policy language, and understandably, many teachers and SENCOs simply haven't had the time to sit down and read it all the way through. Although I will say that didn't stop a tonne of people on social media immediately posting their response to it, which makes me wonder if they read it at all. But there you go. Because it's so long, in this episode I'm not going to try to explain every single detail of the reforms. For one thing, you might be driving or using heavy machinery, and that would lull you into a gentle coma. Right? Instead, I want to focus on the parts that will matter most for behaviour and social, emotional, and mental health needs in mainstream schools, the parts that will actually affect what happens in classrooms and corridors and staff rooms.

But before I dive into that, I want to say if you find this podcast useful, please do make sure you subscribe. And if you think this episode would help other colleagues or educators or teachers understand more about what's coming down the line and how it will affect them, then do please think about sharing it on social media so more school leaders and teachers can benefit from this information and the discussion we're having around SEND and SEMH.

Right, so let's start with the big picture. In reality, the truth is, the truth from your Uncle Simon here is mainstream schools for about five years have already been supporting more and more SEND in their classrooms. Right? So when I talk about SEND, I'm thinking here about more pupils with complex needs, but also the complexity of those needs has increased. The main difference following the reforms is that the Department for Education now kind of accepts that reality, and it makes the expectation that mainstream schools will be working with those higher numbers of children official. It's like a reality.

So over the past three or four years, you may have noticed a pattern. You're seeing more pupils with additional needs, longer waiting time for assessments from medical practitioners, longer waiting times for specialist support teams, all of which puts increasing pressure on mainstream schools to support those pupils, not least because of the shortage of special school places as well. So while needs have gone up, the support in place for mainstream schools just hasn't kept pace, meaning for many school leaders and SENCOs that these numbers, they're not like a theoretical or a statistical issue. It's changed the daily reality of running a school or being in a classroom.

What the SEND reform proposals do is they kind of accept that that's the case, and they focus on meeting those needs in mainstream rather than looking at an approach of expanding the special school sector. So again, mainstream schools will be increasingly expected to meet a wider range of needs, a greater complexity of needs before an EHCP, an education, health, and care plan, is even considered. More will have to be done at earlier stages.

And that kind of brings us to one of the central ideas in the reform paper, which is a new layered system of how support is provided in schools. It kind of re-jigs the way we use things like IEPs and EHCPs. The reform talks about four levels of provision. So let's just talk through them quickly and think about what they mean for everyday practice.

The first level is called Universal Provision, and this is the support that should be available for all pupils in mainstream classrooms. It includes things like adaptive teaching, the teacher having clear routines, consistent expectations, and classroom strategies that help all pupils regulate their behaviour and emotions, all of the stuff that can realistically be done by the adults in the classroom to support their kids while still working with a room of 30 children. For pupils with SEMH needs, this has always been and always will be incredibly important because many pupils who struggle with anxiety or emotional regulation or focusing their attention, they don't necessarily need a placement in a special school. What they need is a classroom where their teacher and their teaching assistant understand their needs and how to make adaptations to support them effectively.

The second level of support is called Targeted Provision. So this is where pupils are going to receive additional support beyond what happens in the classroom every day. And this already happens every day in schools across the country. So we might be talking about small group interventions, mentoring programmes, or structured work on emotional regulation or maybe social skills. The aim here is to put in place early support, identifying needs early on, and putting something in place before the child's difficulties escalate. So that was targeted support.

The third level is what the reforms describe as Targeted Plus. And this is where that support becomes more intensive. So it might involve specialist staff or outside agencies, people like me and my team who go into support schools, who do observations and give advice and help schools set up systems, or some other structured support during the school day that's more intensive. And this is where another interesting development appears in the reform proposals, the idea of inclusion bases or support bases within mainstream schools. In simple terms, these are spaces or provision within schools where pupils can receive additional support during the day without leaving the mainstream setting entirely. And many schools have been moving towards this model already.

The proposals do do one interesting thing. They standardise language and terminology, which I think is a good thing because we have different schools and different authorities using different language for the same thing. And it helps us when we use the same words to describe the same things that are happening in school. So let's look at some of those terminology changes. There's only two of them, really.

The first is the term Support Base. Now, if you are using a group in school that's kind of informal, extra provision for students, it might look like a nurture room where children go. They don't need an EHCP. This isn't funded by the local authority. This is some provision that your school has put in place by itself to support your pupils. And these things have often been referred to as hubs. These are now going to be called Support Bases. Okay, Support Bases.

If your school has a more formal local authority funded provision for children with EHCPs who might come from your school, but might also come originally from other schools, and that's their placement. In the past, they've certainly been called things like Resource Bases. In the future, they're going to be called Specialist Bases. So Support Bases are school's own informal provision, not funded by the local authority. Specialist Bases are for children with EHCPs, and that's a more formal process.

And then we've got another term, which is kind of an umbrella term for both of those. So Support Bases and Specialist Bases, the umbrella term for them will now be called Inclusion Bases. So a Support Base is a kind of Inclusion Base, and a Specialist Base is a kind of Inclusion Base.

So now we've got that terminology change out of the way. Let's go back to Support Bases, the hubs that many schools have already been putting in place, things like regulation rooms or inclusion rooms or mentoring spaces or small workrooms where pupils can have some time to regulate outside the classroom and they can get help when they're struggling, usually with a higher adult pupil ratio, usually a group of 6 to 10. The reform proposal suggests that these kinds of provision will become more common, particularly in secondary schools. And it says the aim is for every secondary school to have one of these kind of provisions. It also mentions primary schools as well, but it's kind of less clear what the expectations are there. It talks about a similar ratio for pupil numbers, but it's not quite clear what the official expectation will be for that.

Now, the idea of these provisions is to provide a high-quality space that helps prevent pupils' needs escalating. So we don't see the number of dysregulated children we do now. So that results in less exclusion, less reliance on alternative provision, or referral for specialist placements in special schools. So we're doing what we can at mainstream level to avoid the child having to seek provision out of the mainstream school. And by the way, call me an old cynic, but Targeted Provision and Targeted Provision Plus do look and sound awfully like School Action and School Action Plus from about 20 years ago. But you know I'll put that to one side.

So we've got those three levels of provision. We've got Universal, Targeted, Targeted Plus. Finally, the fourth level is called Specialist Provision. And this is where we see pupils being given specialised support through EHCPs, which will be delivered through specialist provision packages, which I'm not going to go into now. And it also looks like there's a lot of flesh on the bones that needs to be added from the government in terms of what specialist provision packages will actually be.

So the overall direction of the reform suggests that fewer pupils will reach this level, fewer pupils will have EHCPs compared to the past. And the reforms actually make this a specific aim. They say before the end of the decade, what will happen to the number of children being awarded EHCPs is that it will go up for a bit. But then before the end of the decade, it will start dropping back down again because more support will happen earlier and more support will happen within the mainstream school with the hope that the child then doesn't need that level of support moving forwards, that their needs are being met well within mainstream.

Another interesting shift from the reform paper kind of links to what happens with diagnoses and categories of need. Historically, access to specialist services from the local authority and whether a child can move forward with an assessment for an EHCP, that's often been tied to things like a formal diagnosis or a formal assessment. And that's often done by the medical profession. Local authorities have prioritised those elements when deciding which cases progressed through the system will gain access to specialist teams.

So maybe you have a child who is on the pathway towards a diagnosis of autism, but because they don't have the diagnosis yet, that doesn't mean you can access support from the local authorities' autism support team. You have to have that diagnosis first. Sometimes EHCPs have relied on a child having a diagnosis in some local authorities before you can move forward with the application. Now, that is problematic because in many authorities, there are very long waiting lists to even see a consultant, let alone get a diagnosis. In many local authorities now, you can wait two to three years before you see a consultant.

So that's one of the reasons why the reforms are shifting away from diagnosis-driven provision. Instead, the focus is moving towards understanding the barriers that pupils are experiencing in school and identifying the support early on needed to help them learn and participate in schools. And the report identifies five categories of SEND, which are going to be grouped around executive function, motor and physical, speech, language and communication, social and emotional needs, and sensory needs.

And you can see already there when we think about children with social, emotional, and mental health needs and behaviour needs, executive function can drive dysregulation. Sensory needs can drive dysregulation. Social and emotional needs, well, the clue's in the title, isn't it? But also speech, language, and communication impacts on how well pupils are regulated in school. So all of this is really important in how we support pupils with SEMH needs in school.

So those changes mean schools will increasingly be expected to respond to a needs-based model around those categories based on what they observe in school, rather than waiting for a formal label or a diagnosis from a medical professional. And I think for the pupils that we work with, for pupils with social, emotional, mental health needs, that's a really important shift because it unlocks support. Instead of having to wait years for a diagnosis to get the practical support a school needs to help meet the child's needs, now we can move more quickly because whether the child has a label or not, their needs are still very real and they still need support in school.

So what do these changes mean in practice for schools? Well, if mainstream schools are expected to meet more SEND needs earlier, three things become absolutely critical. And the first is around adaptive teaching. Teachers need the knowledge and confidence, they need both of those things to adjust how they teach so that pupils with additional needs can access the curriculum. So that might mean adapting the way they give instructions or adjusting expectations or providing additional scaffolding or building in opportunities for regulation and support during the lesson.

The second is staff training. If we want teachers and support staff to support a wider range of pupil needs, the staff need training that helps them understand SEMH and trauma and anxiety and neurodiversity and regulation and executive function and so on. And by the way, from our experience, again, working with hundreds of schools over 18 years, what we found is training by itself isn't enough. What's needed is an ongoing coaching programme, but that's a side issue and I'll come back to that in another episode.

That need for a deeper understanding is also one of the reasons I'm currently writing a book on pupil dysregulation. Along with Emma, co-host of this podcast, we have a book deal with Routledge. And the purpose of that book is to help teachers and school leaders really understand SEMH needs and how to put together coordinated regulation plans and practical strategies linked to those needs so that effective provision can be put in place. The only problem is, I'll be honest, I'm writing it backwards right now. I had 18,500 words at the end of last week. This week I've got 16,500 words because I keep taking stuff out. So if I keep going at this rate, in a couple of months I'll have zero words and I'll be back where I was before Christmas. But that's a Simon problem, not a you problem.

Right, so we had adaptive teaching, staff training. The third element I think is crucial, certainly according to my list of bullet points, is whole school consistency. Support for pupils with SEMH needs works best when the whole school shares a consistent approach, which is actively monitored and supported by the school's leadership team. There's a programme in place to make sure what should be happening is happening. We want expectations for the kids that are predictable. We want routines that are clear. We want staff that respond to behaviour in ways that support regulation rather than escalate distress.

This also links to another theme that's emerging across education policy at the moment, the growing emphasis on how we structure professional development for staff. And Ofsted's evolving framework actually highlights, alongside the quality of teaching, staff development and leaders' ability to support staff in adapting their teaching for pupils with additional needs. So when Ofsted come in under the new framework, they will be actively looking for schools to have in place a professional development curriculum, which is the term they use, that's focused on inclusion, that on all of this stuff, that's not only delivered, it's not just a tick box exercise to say we had trauma training in the autumn term, but has demonstrable outcomes and results that are good for the kids. So the short version of that is that the adults in the classroom matter more than ever.

And by the way, if you're listening to this episode and thinking about how to strengthen SEMH in your school, I've got a free resource on our website, Beacon School Support, that might be able to help you. It's called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. And it brings together practical classroom strategies for supporting pupils with social, emotional, mental health needs in mainstream classrooms, alongside ways of identifying and looking at what might be driving the behaviours you're seeing in the classroom so you can get those early intervention strategies in place. You can download it for free, and it's been downloaded by over, I think, over 100,000 schools now. Many schools use it as a starting point for conversations about what's happening with pupil behaviour, what's happening with inclusion, and how you structure classroom support. I'll put the link in the show notes. But if you want to go there directly, you can go to the website, beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources, and you'll see other free resources to download there as well.

So let's sum up by coming back to the big idea behind today's episode and the reforms. Mainstream schools, the reality is they have been supporting more and more SEND needs now for several years. And the new SEND reform proposals, what they're doing is they're saying this is the truth now, this is the new normal. And instead of trying to approach that by increasing specialist provision, they're saying we need to build a new system around it that's focused on mainstream, that increasingly requires strong classroom practice, well-trained staff, and consistent whole school approaches to behaviour and SEMH support. It is mainstream first.

If we can get strong classroom practice, well-trained staff, and consistent whole school approaches to SEND in place, what that does is it means we can support those pupils earlier, we can prevent their needs and difficulties from escalating, and we can create schools where more children feel able to learn and succeed.

If you found today's episode helpful, please consider sharing it with a colleague in your school or with your SENCO or your leadership team so that you can kickstart a conversation about what these changes might mean in your setting. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. And if you would, leave us a review because that prompts the algorithm to share school behaviour secrets with other school leaders and teachers just like you who would find this information useful. Thank you for listening today. I hope you found that useful. I hope you found pulling out the key parts of the SEND reforms as they apply to SEMH useful in your work. Have a great week, and I'll see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.