Teachers have spoken out passionately about the plight of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), as they backed their union’s call to lobby for more spending.

NEU teaching union members backed a motion at the union’s annual conference today which also calls for any incidents of schools off-rolling pupils with SEND to be publicised in the media - as well as action, up to and including strike action, to defend SEND staff jobs and conditions of service.

Leigh Seedhouse, from the Oxfordshire branch of the NEU, said pupils with SEND were vulnerable to being taken of schools “on tenuous grounds,” including for academic reasons.

The motion also calls for research into how many students with SEND do not receive the legal amount of educational hours.

Emma Parker, from Durham NEU, said she was “appalled by the level of red tape” around schools giving SEND students the help they needed.

She said: “Our children are in crisis and need to be in schools and we need to ensure that all children have access to the full curriculum and we need this research.”