Innovating in SEND: Rising to the Challenge

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision is at a crossroads. With demand rising at an unprecedented rate, capacity already stretched to (or beyond) its limits, and a culture often risk-averse to innovation, there’s an increasing urgency to find sustainable ways forward. Whilst there was a welcome development in the Autumn 2024 budget with the pledge of additional funding to SEND services, it's clear that money alone won’t solve the systemic challenges. Nor is AI (Artificial Intelligence) a silver bullet. 

Having worked across several SEND services, I believe that to really make progress, we need to rethink how we do things. Processes need fixing, and we need to find smart, simple solutions that actually help children and young people, their families, and schools.

Context in SEND

At its core, the SEND system is built on a legal duty to identify and meet the needs of children and young people, so that they can do well in education and life. But that promise is increasingly challenging to keep. Rising demand for Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) places significant pressure on local authorities, schools, and associated services such as health and social care. As of June 2024, 18.4% of children in England have some special educational need, up from 17.3% in 2023. ASCL - Summary of June 2024 DfE SEND data

Many services are struggling to keep up, leading to long delays and frustration for families. During the co-production work with families, they described to me their experiences being ‘slow’ and ‘confusing’, with long waits and little information on what was happening or why. This left them feeling frustrated and powerless despite professionals working hard behind the scenes to keep the system moving. Those same professionals often described to me that they felt frustrated and powerless themselves trying to navigate systems which work against them, not for them. As one SEND professional told me, “I feel like a detective trying to find information to create an EHC Plan”. It was only when we mapped out the process and to the end that SENCOs and SEND professionals, who had been involved in the process for years, became aware of the full end-to-end process.

The solution isn’t just about throwing more resources at the problem. The real issue is that the processes are clunky and slow, and we don't have the right digital foundations to really innovate. Yet, in the current climate, innovation isn’t optional; it’s essential.

The parent perspective: where innovation meets real-life

For parents and carers navigating the EHCP process, the experience can often feel like a maze with no clear route out. The journey is rarely straightforward, with bottlenecks at multiple points, including assessment, decision-making, and provision planning. Families are understandably desperate for transparency and progress updates, not just as a matter of convenience but as a way to actively contribute to solutions.

Think about the difference it would make if parents (or young people) could just log in and see exactly what's going on with their case. Who's handling it? What’s causing the delay? How can they help? This level of visibility would empower families to become partners in the process rather than feeling like passive participants. It’s an aspiration that isn’t just about good customer service; it’s about building trust in a system that often feels opaque and impenetrable. It’s not radical innovation, and yet so many parents aren’t empowered this way, leading to additional failure demand-driven contact for already overwhelmed teams. 

AI isn’t the whole answer

Right now, everyone's talking about AI as the fix for everything, including SEND. It’s true AI could help make faster decisions, draft initial plans and even improve the quality of advice submitted, and more - as long as all were reviewed by a ‘human in the loop’. But here’s the thing: until we get the basics right, AI is a high-cost, high-risk option and could be an expensive gamble. It’s the unpopular truth which I’ve encountered time and time again when working with emerging technologies, and SEND is no exception.

Having worked across children’s services in a number of councils, including leading deep dives within SEND services to look for AI and innovation opportunities, it strikes me that right now, many SEND systems are outdated, slow, and hard to navigate. Without good digital foundations, like joined-up digital systems and accurate data, in this context, AI could end up making things worse, not better. Whilst we might be being promised that AI is the way forward, in reality, it’s like hiring a world-class chef to cook in a state-of-the-art kitchen without any ingredients available; you’ll spend a fortune and still end up ordering a takeaway. Instead, we need to focus on making sure the right components for AI are available. 

Building digital foundations

The greatest and most rapid impact can be achieved by focusing on getting the basics in place first. We’re talking about streamlining processes, automating workflows, and improving communication, transparency, consistency, and data insights. Most of all, it's about ensuring processes meet the needs of stakeholders and new ways of working are embedded before layering on AI. 

The good news is that these ‘digital foundations’ aren’t at odds with AI (their an essential enabler for it) and they would also be welcome by families working with SEND services. 

Parents I spoke to told me that having insight into the status of an application and which ‘advices’ for an EHCP were outstanding would have a significant impact. Parents told me that they’d willingly follow progress with the relevant professional, whom they’re often in contact with through routine appointments. Instead, currently, there is no visibility; it is a manual process performed by the SEND service with delays resulting in corresponding delays to finalising plans and high levels of rework. Additionally, parents seeing the information at the first point allows them to take part in the process as partners, ensuring the advice reflects their child’s needs and avoiding lengthy and often expensive challenges (via mediations or tribunals) to the content of plans after they’ve already been written. 

Whilst these digital foundations won’t solve every issue, they have the potential to free up staff time and energy, allowing professionals to focus on higher-value work like supporting families and making nuanced decisions about provision. They would also set the stage for bigger innovations, like AI, to make a real difference when the conditions are both right and ripe.

Supporting inputs from other pressured services

SEND doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Fundamentally, the success of the system relies heavily on the contributions of other services, including health and social care, which are themselves under immense strain. Without high-quality, timely input from these sectors, the EHCP process falters. You can speed up the process of creating an EHC Plan using AI, but if the inputs to the plan don’t meet the needs, the benefits and the quality of that plan will be diminished. 

One of the key opportunities here is taking a systems thinking approach to innovation, which isn’t simple due to funding structures and many different systems used by each service. But this is the core of true innovation and relies on strong partnerships, shared technological infrastructure, and incentives to ensure that health, social care and other professional’s inputs are optimised to to improve outcomes, and the creation of more timely plans, within the EHCP process.

A culture and capacity shift: building trust in innovation

Arguably, the biggest hurdle to innovation isn’t technology or funding; it’s capacity and culture. It’s crucial to recognise the incredible work being done by SEND professionals. They’re the ones holding the system together, often going above and beyond to make sure children get the support they need. But they’re under huge pressure, and without better tools and systems (and their adoption), burnout is a real risk. We need to rethink how things work, make processes easier, and embrace new ways of working that free up staff to do what they do best, helping children and families.

However, SEND services can at times be cautious of change, and with good reason: when dealing with vulnerable children and their families, the stakes are high. But this caution at times can lead to paralysis, with processes that are outdated remaining in place because they’re familiar, or because they are perceived as ‘safe’. At times, too little investment in change management and reinforcement of new ways of working mean new solutions aren’t adopted, inefficient workarounds remain and innovation resources are wasted.

Innovating in this space requires a shift in mindset. It needs a move towards a culture that sees innovation as an opportunity to do better, not a risk to be avoided. It needs investment in capacity dedicated to fixing the plumbing, not just responding to the leaks. It needs change management support and capacity to ensure the successful adoption of new solutions and the embedding of new ways of working.

Innovating in this space requires agility, piloting new ideas, gathering feedback, and iterating based on what works. Co-production partners and families must be part of this journey, with their voices shaping solutions. In a hierarchical, highly governed service, ensuring governance structures which sponsor,  champion and invest in innovation is fundamental. It is also critical to build an Agile culture which allows, facilitates and enables capacity to be invested in Proof of Concepts designed to test technology with no guarantee that outcomes so desperately needed will be achieved. This is not an easy pill to swallow, given the pressures on the service and stakes for families.

The Autumn 2024 budget: a foundation for change

The UK government’s commitment in the Autumn 2024 budget to increase SEND funding provides a much-needed boost. But this funding must be used strategically to unlock sustainable improvements, not just paper over cracks. Investing in technology, training, and capacity-building will be critical to achieving long-term change.

The biggest elephant in the room

We need to stop duplicating effort. When every local authority tries to solve the same problems on their own, it leads to wasted time and resources, something Mark Thompson, Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Exeter, has highlighted for years. A more joined-up, national approach could help councils focus less on reinventing the wheel and more on delivering better support for families.

The opportunity for this in the SEND Education, Health and Care request, assessment, and plan process is significant, given that the statutory requirements and the SEND code of practice are national. Although the Department for Education is working with a number of local authorities to standardise EHCP processes as a part of its Change Partnership Programme (CPP), in reality, these standardisation and efficiency gains are needed by families now.

My three suggestions for SEND services?

1. Digital foundations must be built and embedded into ways of working as a lower risk, lower cost precursor to, and enabler for, AI
2. SEND services and partners should be incentivised and enabled to approach this at a systemic level, truly
3. Authorities need investment and support to innovate at a national level, and quickly

If you want to learn more about rising to the challenge and innovating in SEND, get in touch.