Baroness Warnock has today described how services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) still need to change – 40 years after her seminal report on the issue.

Speaking to MPs on the Commons Education Select Committee, Lady Warnock gave her ideas on how headteachers, local authorities and Ofsted could improve outcomes for children with SEND.

She called for:

1. Smaller secondary schools

   These may prevent children with SEND having their difficulties compounded in a large, impersonal environment. “A lot of children flourish in large schools, but a lot don’t and these children might turn out, if they were only in a small school, really not to have any special educational needs," she said. "The needs, if not created, are compounded by the size and impersonality of the environment." She added that headteachers should take more interest in how pupils were coping in Year 7.

2. Local authorities to be more transparent about the reasons for refusing an education, health and care plan (EHCP) assessment

   “I don’t think parents often know why they have been refused," she said. "This seems to me to be, potentially an arbitrary failure to intervene on the part of local authorities. They don’t seem to me to be clear about why they refuse a request and that seems to me to be actually quite important.”

3. More joint working

   Lady Warnock said that trying to find a way for teachers, social workers and doctors to talk to each other was hard in the 1970s and “has remained a problem ever since”. She said that although getting health services involved was important, the emphasis should be on getting teachers and social workers together, But she is not optimistic. “I believe even that would be little short of a miracle, should it happen,” she told MPs.

4. Improvements to teacher training

   Lady Warnock said her impression was there was still a “great deficiency” in teacher training in introducing the basic concept that there will be children with special needs in every class. “After all these years, as far as I know, teachers are still introduced to this idea as a kind of extra, it’s not really central to teacher training,” she said. She said that with in-school training there was an opportunity for a school’s Sendco to insist that teachers take account of children with SEND. But Lady Warnock feared that the Sendco would not have the authority to do this.

5. For Ofsted to “take a look at itself” and be aware of what it’s really inspecting

   Lady Warnock said: “Ofsted is playing a contradictory role because they are looking for academic excellence and yet, officially, they ought to be giving acknowledgement to those schools which are genuinely inclusive and take real pride in what they do for children with special needs.” She added that she thinks Ofsted very often does not take the inclusivity of schools into account at all. “Schools are described as failing or needing improvement when actually they are doing very well by children who they take seriously.”

Lady Warnock was giving evidence along with Brian Lamb, chair of the Lamb Inquiry into special educational needs, and Stephen Kingdom, now campaign manager for the Disabled Children’s Partnership but previously the civil servant in the Department for Education who led on the SEND reform programme.