Mainstream schools will not be ready to take on more children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) without further investment in teaching assistants and training, headteachers have warned.
Though the Government has promised £1.6bn for SEND budgets at mainstream schools, leaders accused ministers of underestimating the funding needed for a key area of the workforce: teaching assistants.
Labour’s major shake-up of the SEND system will include introducing a new four-tier system of support in mainstream schools, to reduce the reliance on costly private schools.
“What really concerns me, and they’ve [Labour] dodged these considerations and questions, is the lack of focus on teaching assistants,” said Matthew Jessop, headteacher of Crosthwaite Primary School in Cumbria.
“Their pay is woeful. They don’t seem to be considered in this wonderful new SEND training budget, which seems more for PR and tick box than anything else, and they’re the actual lifeblood of schools. They do amazing jobs.”
While the “direction is right” for some of the reforms, such as ambitions around inclusion, Jessop said the plans were still “significantly underfunded”.
Teaching assistants – there are more than 288,000 in England – perform a variety of tasks to help pupils, including the provision of direct support for children with additional needs. Salaries range from around £19,000 to £26,000 depending on qualifications, experience and location.
A 2025 report by education charity NCFE found almost three quarters of the 150 teaching assistants who were asked had thought about changing careers, with a quarter actively looking for a new job.
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The Government has announced its reforms will be delivered through a £4bn funding package over the next three years, which includes £1.8bn for more SEND specialists such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists.
It has pledged to create 60,000 specialist places in mainstream schools via inclusion bases by 2030, backed by £3.7bn in funding.
Under the reforms, some children with conditions that present on a spectrum, such as autism and ADHD, are at risk of losing specialist support as stricter criteria for education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – legal documents unlocking extra help – will be introduced.
Budget is a ‘drop in the ocean’
“It seems a drop in the ocean from a budgetary point of view,” said Bryan McConnell, a science teacher at St Augustine of Canterbury Academy in St Helens, Merseyside.
The budget for SEND provision at mainstream schools “does not equate to very much”, added McConnell, who isa nati onal executive member and chair of the national SEND panel at teachers’ union NASUWT.
He described the Government’s proposals as “the worst of all worlds”, adding: “I’m concerned that the Government are trying to do this big upheaval and this change without funding it adequately.”
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One of McConnell’s major concerns is that teaching staff who are already under “immense workload pressures” from the day-to-day demands of the job will be placed under even more pressure to fulfil expectations over the additional SEND support outlined in the proposals.
“We already have a massive recruitment and retention crisis in teaching. The biggest driver we find of staff leaving the profession now is workload,” he said.
Between 10 and 15 per cent of teachers have left the state-funded sector in their first year teaching, according to Government figures.
McConnell said: “For me, that attrition rate is only going to increase due to the fact that if you’re piling even more workload onto staff, onto my members when they’re already under the cosh.
“I think they will just vote with their feet and they will leave and they will find a job that doesn’t have the workload pressures that are currently rife within teaching.”
Matt Wrack, general secretary of NASUWT, said that a plan to boost teaching assistants was “the big thing that’s missing” in the reforms.
The £1.6bn funding for mainstream inclusion equates to “just a few thousand pounds per setting”, he added, and it was “absolutely ridiculous to suggest that SEND provision can be adequately overhauled with this low level of funding”.
Kulvarn Atwal, executive headteacher at Highlands Primary School in Essex, said adequate funding would be crucial to deliver ambitious goals, although he welcomed plans around early intervention to give children the support they need in a timely manner.
“I think schools should be more inclusive, so more children with special needs should be going to their local mainstream schools, but schools need to be given the resources, funding and provision to be able to meet those children’s needs,” he said.
Special schools ‘must not’ be sidelined
Specialist educators have also highlighted potential problems with expanding expert SEND provision in mainstream schools if it comes at the cost of access to, and expansion of, specialist schools.
They suggested there was a need for reassurance that special schools would not be negatively affected or sidelined.
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The Smith Foundation, which provides specialist education to children and young people via a school, college and children’s home, said a truly inclusive system depended on mainstream and specialist settings working together, not a narrowing of options.
Sue Ackroyd, chief executive of the foundation, said: “We strongly support improving genuine, lived inclusion across the system, but this must not come at the expense of specialist expertise or reduce children’s entitlement to personalised support. Specialist schools are not an alternative to inclusion; they are part of it.”
Thousands of children and young people are still on the waiting list for special schools across England – an issue that will not necessarily be solved by increasing places in mainstream settings, added Emily Hopkins-Hayes, executive leader of education of the Macintyre Academies, a multi-academy trust for specialist provision based in Milton Keynes.
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