The Department for Education is being urged to examine how support for pupils with special and educational needs and disabilities is being taught in initial teacher training (ITT), as new data reveals how unprepared many teachers feel in meeting pupils’ needs.

Only one in 10 primary school teachers and leaders say their training has prepared them to be able to meet the social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs of pupils, Tes can reveal.

And the data from Teacher Tapp also shows that around two-thirds of teachers across both primary and secondary say their training did not prepare them to be able to meet the needs of pupils in any of the main areas of SEND.

SEND support in mainstream schools

The findings come as the government is making a major push for mainstream schools to be able to meet the needs of more pupils with SEND.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that schools will need to support “a much wider range of often more complex needs than they might have experienced in the past”.

Headteachers’ leaders say that to fulfil this ambition the government needs to set an expectation for SEND and inclusion to feature more prominently in ITT.

However, ITT leaders have warned it is not possible for providers to prepare new teachers to feel able to meet the range of needs of pupils with SEND. They insist that the focus should be on ensuring that early career teachers have a network of support once in the job.

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The data from a Teacher Tapp survey, commissioned by Tes, reveals the extent to which teachers in England’s schools today do not feel prepared to meet needs in their classrooms.

Teachers, including middle and senior leaders, were asked whether their initial teaching training or education left them feeling well prepared to meet the needs of students in each of the four areas set out in the SEND Code of Practice:

• For pupils with language and communication needs, only 15 per cent of primary and 17 per cent of secondary school teachers felt well prepared.
• For pupils with SEMH needs, only 10 per cent of primary and 15 per cent of secondary school teachers felt well prepared.
• For pupils with cognition and learning needs, only 26 per cent of primary and 32 per cent of secondary school teachers felt well prepared.
• For pupils with sensory or physical needs, only 10 per cent of primary or secondary teachers felt well prepared.

Overall, 68 per cent of primary school teachers and 61 per cent of secondary said they felt well prepared for none of these areas of need.

These findings have been borne out in warnings from specialist and mainstream school leaders about the preparedness of teachers.

Simon Knight, a special school headteacher who helped the DfE to produce new guidance on the use of specialist placements during ITT, said: “There still seems to be to too much variability in the quantity and quality of SEND coverage within ITT programmes, something which is unfair on teachers entering the classroom and the children that they teach.”

Teacher training and SEND

Mr Knight, who is joint headteacher of Frank Wise School, in Oxfordshire, added: “We need to have an honest discussion about the extent to which our current approaches to ITT, and the frameworks that we are required to operate within, are equipping trainee teachers with sufficient initial knowledge to be able to meet the needs of all of the children they will encounter once they enter the classroom.”

He has called for ”a systematic evaluation of the volume and quality of SEND content across the different route types”, saying that the system needs “a better understanding of what content trainees are being exposed to within ITT”.

Responding to the new data, Margaret Mulholland, the SEND and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We still have a long way to go and there needs to be a much stronger focus on SEND and on inclusive teaching and learning. There cannot be one without the other.

“In order to achieve good teaching, good leadership and successful outcomes for all children, we must equip teachers with the skills they need to support those who face the biggest barriers to learning.”

Government SEND plans

She said the DfE’s drive for inclusion should include expectations for SEND and inclusion to feature more prominently in initial teacher training.

“Inclusion must be foundational, rather than an afterthought, and therefore it needs to be fundamental to teacher development,” she added

Ms Mulholland told Tes that inclusion needs to be a key part of both the ITT process and the career development of all teachers.

Academy trust leaders have also highlighted the need and desire among teachers for more training on SEND.

Schools not prepared

Speaking at a Tes Trusts in Education event focused on SEND, Lynsey Holzer, the CEO of Active Learning Trust, said that teachers “are not trained to deal with the level of inclusion we need them to have, and I think that absolutely starts with ITT”.

And Andrea George-Samuels, the executive principal for SEND at Lift Schools, said the trust had seen widespread interest among teachers in pursuing the new National Professional Qualification (NPQ) for Sendcos.

“We have been working with Ambition Institute on the NPQ for SEND, and I am calling it that because while it is the Sendco course, actually what we have found is that lots of our colleagues are responding to that course as something they want to do - regardless of whether they are a Sendco. There is a real appetite to find out more, to learn more,” she said.

The Sendco NPQ

This feeling was echoed this week in Parliament by DfE officials, who said that the NPQ, which launched this year, was also being taken by aspiring school leaders.

Juliet Chua, director-general for the Schools Group at the DfE, told MPs that the course was being taken by “teachers who are in training for leadership, seeing it as an absolutely critical qualification and development path on the way towards leadership”.

A DfE spokesperson said that children and young people with SEND have been let down by a system that is not working, but the government is determined to change this.

They added: “Learning how to support children with SEND is already part of initial teacher training, and more content on this is included in the new Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework, which comes into force in September 2025.

“From September this year it has also become mandatory for Sendcos to take a qualification, so they establish a culture of inclusion in their schools and identify the needs of SEND pupils early on.”

The data from Teacher Tapp provides a breakdown of how well prepared teachers, middle leaders and senior leaders feel to meet the needs of pupils with SEND.

A higher proportion of senior leaders do not feel that their training prepared them to meet any of the main areas of need (76 per cent) compared with middle leaders (65 per cent) or classroom teachers (60 per cent).

The figures suggest that staff who qualified more recently have more confidence in meeting pupils’ needs.

Sam Twiselton, emeritus professor at Sheffield Hallam University and a former adviser to the DfE, said: “Both the frameworks for ITT and the ECF [Early Career Framework] were designed to ensure that a consistency of entitlement was in place for all teachers, and these figures might suggest this approach is starting to have an impact.”

The government’s ITT core content framework says that careful consideration has been given to the needs of trainee teachers in relation to supporting pupils with SEND.

It adds that the framework has been “deliberately designed to emphasise the importance of high-quality teaching”, which it says is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils and those with additional needs. The framework “deliberately does not detail approaches specific to particular additional needs”.

Twiselton also highlighted how ensuring that teachers feel prepared to meet the needs of pupils with SEND can be challenging in a nine month-long course, two-thirds of which is spent on placement. She said that being able to focus on specialist settings is particularly challenging for teachers training in secondary, who have to choose a national curriculum subject.

Support networks

Meanwhile, Emma Hollis, CEO of the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT), said that making teachers more confident in supporting students with SEND should not be about ITT “doing more”.

“It’s about explaining to trainees that this is really complex - that you’re not going to feel, and you shouldn’t expect to feel, confident and able to do all of this from the start. But you should have a network around you in school...It’s the school system that needs to be prepared, rather than the individual teacher.”

Leaders believe part of the solution could be to increase the number of trainee teachers having placements in special schools.

But Twiselton said this has been perceived as a challenge in the past.

“Currently teachers qualify to be able to teach in two consecutive age phases, and it can be challenging to evidence that a teacher has achieved the standards in both if they have done a placement in a special school,” she said.

Special school placements

But there have been attempts to overcome this concern. Last year Mr Knight, Ms Hollis and Ms Mulholland all worked on supporting the launch of new DfE guidance on the use of specialist and alternative provision for training placements.

The guidance says that for every trainee, consideration should be given to ensure that they gain a breadth of classroom experience. It says that if a trainee’s programme includes placement in a special school, then contrasting mainstream placement should also be included in the programme design, unless there is a clear rationale for this not to be the case.

But it adds that it “is possible to facilitate longer special school placements for trainees who wish to teach in a special school once they have qualified”.

Mandating SEND experience

Nic Crossley, CEO of Liberty Academy Trust, which runs four schools for autistic pupils, believes that the SEND element of ITT should be strengthened and changes should include “mandating for a SEND placement as part of teaching practice.”

She also highlighted that some teaching schools and universities have created PGCE courses that include a SEND pathway. “My knowledge of that through Best Practice Network is that they were pretty much oversubscribed for this September, so the interest is there,” she added.

But there is an ongoing debate about whether the system should go further and create a separate specialist teacher training route.

Bespoke training routes

Ms Mulholland believes that “we should be training teachers to be able to teach all children, and then later provide opportunities to deepen knowledge through specialising”. She warned that having two separate pathways from the start would not allow this.

Mr Knight acknowledges, though, that a tension exists between the need for all teachers to have a foundational knowledge of how best to support children identified as SEND and ensuring that specialist schools have all the teachers they need.

“The question of whether knowledge around SEND should be built in rather than bolted on is an important one to answer,” he said.

Mr Knight told Tes that it should be emphasised that the pedagogy associated with teaching children with SEND is not a different pedagogy, but rather the same one delivered differently

But he also believes there is a need for “enhanced routes with a greater proportion of placement time in specialist settings for those who have a strong interest in this area of education”.

“Essentially, we serve the system best if there is a choice of carefully considered training routes that have different levels of emphasis on SEND content. But we can only do this once we have agreement on what the minimum foundational offer is for all trainees,” he said.

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