The Ontario system: Are politicians considering a Canadian province’s SEND structure for England?

By Matt Keer and Dr Sharon Smith

Contents

Before we get into today’s post, over the weekend it was announced that Schools/SEND Minister, Catherine McKinnell has resigned. Her replacement is Georgia Gould MP, scion of New Labour moderniser, Phillip Gould. Ms Gould was previously leader of Camden council.

Is this good news? Well, under her regime, Camden used infamous law firm Baker Small on an industrial scale. Then, while other LAs deserted the firm in the wake of Small’s social media diatribe, Camden doubled its annual spend. So you be the judge. She’s said nothing about SEND since, so we shall see how she clutches the poisoned chalice…

The English SEND system has been under review for nearly six years now. In their efforts to find a system that actually works, both the Department for Education and the House of Commons Education Select Committee have been looking at how other parts of the world do SEND.

One of the places that they seem most interested in is the system in Ontario, Canada’s southernmost province. When proposals for SEND reform are unveiled in the next few months, we’re anticipating a lot of references to ‘The Ontario Model’ as a potential way forward.

We’ve taken a close look at the model and have found some big differences in how they do SEND in Ontario compared to England—but some grimly familiar aspects too.

The Ontario System

By population, Ontario is Canada’s biggest province. In 2024, Ontario had around two million school pupils: England currently has around nine million.

In all, 17% of Ontario pupils (around 360,000 of them) are categorised as ‘exceptional’, the term that Ontario uses to describe both gifted pupils and those with special educational needs. Strip out the gifted pupils, and the SEN-equivalent cohort is around 16% – a few perce n tage points less than in England.

Ontario operates SEND very differently from England in three important respects.

No local government role

Firstly, there’s no role for local government here. Instead, the Ontario provincial government farms out most of its statutory SEN duties to 72 school boards.These school boards operate geographically. Like England, that means a patchwork of urban, suburban, and rural areas that are very different from each other in population, prosperity, and prevalence of need.

Who is Responsible for SEND?

The school boards are responsible for ensuring that special educational needs are identified and broadly met. They make decisions about SEND identification and placement, and they allocate the educational funding that’s provided by the Ontario provincial government to schools.

Some school boards explicitly offer vocational pathways to special education, as well as standard academic pathways.

Most in mainstream

Secondly, the vast majority of ‘exceptional’ pupils in Ontario are educated in mainstream schools. There are only a handful of centrally-run state special schools (educating only a few hundred pupils in total) and many of them nearly closed in 2016. A few school boards, mostly in cities, run small state special schools. There are also several private special schools, but without a state funding route available.

A single support route

Thirdly, Ontario has one support route for state school pupils with special educational needs: the Individual Education Plan (IEP). Their system doesn’t divide between SEN Support and an EHCP, like England does; there’s just the IEP. Within this process, another major difference is that it’s the student’s school that writes the IEP, not an outside body.

The IEP lists:

the student’s needs and strengths,
the subjects and courses that the IEP applies to,
the student’s attainment,
the accommodations (adjustments) that the student requires,
the provision they get (such as teaching strategies or human resources),
the goals to be achieved, and,
the steps to enable the student to achieve those goals.

You can find an IEP template here.

Securing Support in Ontario

There are two routes to an IEP: the school or by asking the school board.

If a school believes that a student needs special educational support, then the school can trigger, create and maintain an IEP themselves. Most Ontario students with an IEP get a plan through this route.

Alternatively, the other pathway to an IEP runs through the school board—a pathway with more legal force. If a parent carer or the school believes a pupil would benefit from being identified as ‘exceptional,’ or if they believe the pupil requires a specific type of placement, they can approach the school board and request a meeting of an Identification, Placement and Review Committee (IPRC).

This process is run by the school board. The IPRC reviews the available information, decides whether the pupil should be categorised as ‘exceptional,’ decides on the type of placement the pupil should have, and outlines requirements for special educational support that the school should provide. As with English EHCPs, there’s an annual review process.

The definition of ‘exceptionality’ in Ontario law is very similar to the English definition of special educational needs. If the IPRC decides that the pupil should be classed as ‘exceptional,’ there are five flavours of placement that an IPRC can decide on. They range from indirect support in a regular classroom, through to full-time withdrawal into a special education class for the entire school day. In almost all cases, placement is at a mainstream school.

Decision-making and Routes of Appeal

The role of parental preference in the Ontario system is similar to the English system, but generally weaker. The IPRC has to consider parental preference when considering a vanilla mainstream school placement, and it has to provide written reasons for its decisions, but that’s it.

It’s also important to note that in law, the IPRC decides on just two things:

exceptionality (from a rigid list of categories)
type of placement

In its decision notice, the IPRC also “outlines” the type of SEN provision that must be included when the school writes the student’s IEP, but this means ‘outline in general terms.’ It’s very different from the duty to precisely specify and quantify SEN provision in the English EHCP process.

If a parent carer disagrees with the IPRC’s decision, then there are routes to appeal – including both a local appeal to the school board, and ultimately a Special Education Tribunal. Hardly anyone in Ontario appeals to the Tribunal, though. Over the last three years, Ontario’s Special Education Tribunal has dealt with just six appeals. Over the same period, England’s SEND First-Tier Tribunal dealt with nearly 40,000 appeals.

How well does it work?

On paper, the Ontario model is one where almost all pupils with SEND are educated at a local mainstream school, and where government has handed down most of its statutory duties to educational bodies. It’s a model where the influence of parental preference is more limited than in England, yet it seems to be far less adversarial than the English SEND system.

It’s not hard to see why the Ontario model is attractive to English SEND system leaders. But how well does it work on the ground?

We spent a bit of time finding out. And what we’ve found indicates that many of the same things that bedevil the English SEND system are happening in Ontario too.

Let’s take funding. Ontario education is funded at a roughly similar level per pupil to England. Like England, school revenue funding is divided up into several blocks, including a block that’s nominally ring-fenced for special educational needs.

And like England, Ontario educators and parents say that current funding levels are nowhere near adequate to meet need. Around 40% of Ontario’s 72 school boards operated at a deficit last year, and almost all them are expected to run a deficit on their special education funding block this year.

Just as in England, SEND funding in Ontario is doled out to school boards via an outdated and opaque statistical model that bears little relation to actual need, and creates huge postcode lotteries between different boards. And just like England last year, Ontario’s government auditor is investigating whether their SEND funding system is fit for purpose.

Staff shortages

The impact of Ontario’s SEND funding crisis can also be seen in its SEN identification processes. As with England, the most significant variable for SEN identification is at the school level. In Ontario, most of the pupils who get an Individual Education Plan do not have an identified type of need. The categories of need that Ontario uses are defined by a law drafted in the 1990s; they’re arguably outdated now. And like England, Ontario also suffers from a shortage of specialists to carry out special education assessments, particularly psychologists.

Ontario educators also say that staff shortages are becoming an increasingly acute problem for delivering special educational provision. The most recent school staff survey from People for Education (an Ontario policy pressure group) reported that in 2023, almost half of Ontario’s schools were experiencing shortages of educational assistants (TAs) on a daily basis, with special education teaching staff often expected to cover for mainstream teacher absences too.

It’s also common and, it seems, surprisingly acceptable, for Ontario students to be asked to stay at home if there are problems with their special education provision. Most Ontario principals (headteachers) surveyed by People for Education in autumn 2023 reported they had asked parents of exceptional children to do this for some or all of the school day.

How is the SEND system experienced by Ontario families?

Although appeals to the Ontario Special Education Tribunal are extremely rare, that doesn’t mean that this is a system where no one has to fight.

When surveyed, parent carers reported high levels of conflict with their child’s school, particularly over the appropriateness and delivery of special educational provision, curriculum, bullying, and exclusions.

Only one third of parents of autistic pupils surveyed in 2024 reported that their child’s school provided the accommodations set out in their IEP most or all of the time. In the same survey, nearly 40% of them reported their child did not have an appropriate placement. Most were dissatisfied with the special education support that their child was receiving. Nearly 70% of surveyed parents reported that their child with special educational needs was either not accessing the school curriculum consistently, or not accessing it at all.

Just as in England, Ontario SEND parent carers often end up accompanying their children on school trips, because otherwise, the school won’t let the child participate.

And just like England’s EHCP process, Ontario parent carers report that the Identification, Placement and Review Committee process is slow, highly bureaucratic, and hard to understand. A significant minority of surveyed parent carers reported they felt shut out of the creation of their child’s Individual Education Plan.

The near-total absence of Special Education Tribunal appeals in Ontario can be explained pretty simply: there are few situations where a Tribunal will deliver a remedy that’s worth the effort.

Unlike English parent carers, Ontario families cannot appeal to the Tribunal about the special educational provision school boards outline and schools deliver. In a system where the overwhelming majority of placement options are mainstream education with little variety, there’s often little purpose in fighting for specific placement. In a system that focuses on individual solutions, the most affluent and well-connected parents turn to private options when state schools fail their children, whether this is private tutors or private special schools.

Is this the future for SEND in England?

We don’t know what precise shape the upcoming English SEND reforms will take. It’s perfectly reasonable for the government to look broadly at how other places have designed their SEND systems for inspiration. There’s no sensible reason to assume yet, the Department for Education plans to import a foreign system wholesale.

But on paper, there are parts of the Ontario SEND system that English SEND system leaders will definitely find attractive:

the devolution of the bureaucratic burden to schools and education bodies,
the weaker role of parental preference,
the greater emphasis on mainstream education, and
the narrower remit of the tribunal

These are all likely to be seen as plus points. Ontario’s heavy use of specialist provision within mainstream settings is also likely to be attractive to government reformers in England, who seem very interested in mainstream units and resource bases as a solution to England’s woes.

Promoted

Looks can be deceptive

It’s unclear how deep any examination of the Ontario system went. A leadership PowerPoint session and a carefully orchestrated tour would make it appear that Ontario is much more ‘inclusive’ (in a mainstream education sense) and much less adversarial than the English system.

But the English system also looks good on paper—it’s the implementation that’s failed. Peel back the surface in Ontario, and its system isn’t working well either; the conflict is just pushed down deeper, where it doesn’t bother people at the top of the shop. Ontario parents say many of their kids do not appear to be meaningfully included at all in their mainstream settings. They are fighting, but the fight is almost entirely confined to the school level.

The Ontario system is underfunded, and it pushes almost all the bureaucracy and conflict to the front line. Most of the time, Ontario’s SEND frontliners are simply given no practical choice but to suck it up. The province’s politicians and education policymakers seem to have appallingly little data to tell them whether things are working well or working badly.

In practice, there’s one big difference between SEND in England and SEND in Ontario. In Ontario, the problems with special education do not cause major problems for other policy areas. In England, problems with SEND are very much are causing problems for Things That Matter More. That’s probably why SEND in England is headed for major reform, and why the Ontario model looks like such an attractive alternative.

Five-point summary

Here’s a five-bullet summary of the article (AI generated, human checked):

Ontario’s SEND structure: Unlike England, Ontario’s system has no local government role. Responsibility for identification, placement, and funding lies with 72 school boards, and almost all pupils with special educational needs (SEN) are educated in mainstream schools.
Support system: Ontario uses a single pathway—the Individual Education Plan (IEP)—rather than England’s split between SEN Support and EHCPs. Schools typically create IEPs, though a more formal Identification, Placement and Review Committee (IPRC) process exists with limited scope for appeal.
Parental influence and appeals: Parents’ preferences play a weaker role than in England, and tribunal appeals are rare and largely ineffective since Ontario tribunals cannot challenge the content of provision. Conflict still exists, but mainly at school level rather than through legal channels.
Systemic challenges: Ontario faces many of the same problems as England—underfunding, outdated need categories, staff shortages, and inequities across school boards. Parents often report inadequate provision, poor inclusion, and being shut out of decision-making.
Implications for England: English policymakers may find Ontario’s model attractive due to its streamlined bureaucracy, emphasis on mainstream schooling, weaker parental rights, and reduced tribunal burden. However, beneath the surface, Ontario’s system is underfunded, opaque, and conflict-ridden—issues that risk being overlooked if adopted as a model for SEND reform in England.

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Special Needs Jungle was founded in 2008 as a personal SEN blog by Tania Tirraoro. It is now a multi-author, award-winning site covering special needs, disability, mental health and rare conditions in children & young people birth-25 years.

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