Alice Reeves, parent
It’s clear the Government is trying to push more children, particularly neurodivergent ones, away from specialist settings to mainstream schools or units, where thousands have already been failed. The idea that units/resourced provision will be a quick panacea is optimistic in the extreme—especially in the short-term, without finding and funding the right specialist staff.
The recent Autism Act Inquiry found that many autistic children are unhappy at school, if they’re there at all. Today’s article is about thinking differently—if we want neurodivergent children to thrive in education, their environment is key. This should be the starting point, says SEND parent carer, Alice Reeves.
Alice’s 17-year-old son is autistic and has ADHD. She works for the Nuffield Foundation, an independent charitable trust that funds research to improve people’s lives, where she manages several projects on SEND but writes here in a personal capacity.
Inclusion is about being included in education and life, not shoehorned in the same building. By Alice Reeves
My son Will left school at 14, one term into year nine. He is autistic with ADHD. After trying several schools, my husband and I finally concluded he wasn’t going to thrive in any sort of mainstream setting. The special schools in our area were chronically over-subscribed, and we were unsure they’d work for him either.
Will is intelligent and soft-hearted, with a fabulous bone-dry wit. He’s also highly sensitive to noise, heat and bright light, and flinches at the slightest touch. Corridor changeovers between lessons were custom-designed to torture him. And kids can be breathtakingly mean: by 10, he was acutely aware of his perceived weirdness and had yet to make a close friend. At home, he cried almost nightly, railing at being the way he was. Sometimes he talked about wanting to die.
Plenty of children in England are really unhappy at school
The latest statistics showing continued high levels of school absence, children out of education, and families ‘electing’ to home educate reinforce what we’ve long known: a lot of children in England are really unhappy at school.
It’s got worse in recent years, but to some extent, it was ever thus. Can you even count the number of adults who’ve told you that school “wasn’t for them” and they “couldn’t wait to leave”?
And yet we tolerate the status quo, tweaking around the edges of the system as if there’s a consensus that the fundamentals are fine.
As parents of struggling kids, we plead with them just to wait till they’re 16 or 18, when they’ll finally be able to choose a college or workplace that suits them better, where they’ll fit in and find their tribe. We urge them, implicitly, to discount their childhoods, like those long years of sadness and anxiety and alienation don’t matter, just so long as they make it to the point where life can start. Never mind that, by the time they reach that point, their confidence and self-esteem may be all but beyond repair.
Greater diversification, customisation and choice is needed
The government’s announcement in December of a £3bn investment to create 50,000 new places for children with SEND in mainstream schools is aimed at their central focus of improving inclusion. Concerns have already been raised, however, about the potential diversion of funds from planned specialist schools, reflecting a rarely-asked but rather fundamental question: alongside inclusion, shouldn’t we also be pursuing greater educational diversification, customisation and choice?
Online schools offer a lifeline, but there are pitfalls
From year nine, Will attended an online school and took GCSEs with them earlier this year. It was by no means a panacea. It was hard for the teachers to get to know the pupils (most of whom refused to use their webcams), ensure engagement, or build community. All the parents on the class WhatsApp group were providing supplementary support, and some were doing a lot, even giving up work. But with our collected horror stories of our kids’ struggles in “B&M” (bricks and mortar) schools, we were grateful for the chance to keep them progressing academically – albeit slowly in some cases – while safeguarding their mental health.
There was a danger, of course, of social isolation, so as a family, we went on a mission to find ways for Will to spend time with peers in person. After a few mistakes and false starts, we were extremely lucky to find a local drama centre, The Garage in Norwich, that offers classes for kids with SEND and has a wonderfully warm and inclusive ethos. The supportive environment and shorter sessions gave Will access to peer interactions that were leagues more positive than any he’d ever experienced in school. Finally, he started to make friends.
How do we provide every child with a positive educational experience that sets them up to thrive?
If I’m honest, I find it hard to imagine an on-site school that would have worked for Will. Maybe there’s some form of resource base or special unit that would have got him through.
But imagine for a moment we asked a different question: not ‘how do we make schools inclusive for all children?’ but ‘how do we provide every child with a positive educational experience that sets them up to thrive in later life?’.
The second question might open our minds to a world of possibilities, including online teaching, well-regulated home schooling and family co-operatives, expanded specialist and alternative provision, college courses for under-16s… the list goes on. And the rapid expansion of EdTech, including AI tools for personalised tutoring, could offer opportunities too. Plausibly, if we really invested in these non-mainstream segments of our education system, every family could pick and choose from this much richer menu to assemble the optimal combination for their unique child, akin to the pairing of online school and in-person drama we cobbled together for Will.
Let’s not forget—one in eight 16-24 year olds in the UK are neither learning nor earning
Such a mixed system would be radical for sure, and present an array of challenges related to logistics, safeguarding, standards, fairness, and more. It would also need investment, although an honest cost-benefit analysis would have to measure the expense against the true costs of our current educational failures. One in eight 16-24 year olds in the UK today are neither learning nor earning, and those with SEND are especially likely to fall into this group.
Regardless, practical concerns shouldn’t preclude discussion of the principle. We need to be bold and courageous, and open to all possible solutions without being unduly tethered to old ways of doing things.
We could start by shifting the debate from how to get more children into mainstream, to how the system itself might need to change to better serve our children.
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Also read:
- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
- The Unacceptable Truth: 20 SEND legal rights at risk from the Government’s SEND reforms
- How health and family support systems are failing children starting school
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals
- When things go right: Shining a light on SEND Practitioners making a positive impact [Giveaway!]
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people
- Unison voices major concerns over SEND reform health plans for sick and disabled children out of school in the EOTAS consultation
- Top Tips for the EOTAS & EHCP consultation: Protect your child’s rights to statutory SEND support
- Navigating constraints: Why a former PCF chair thinks the current model is missing the mark for families
- Dear Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell: an Open Letter from Special Needs Jungle and SEND legal charity SOS!SEN
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them”
- Without detailed plans for its planned “Inclusion Dashboards”, the DfE is navigating towards an Inclusion Illusion
- Why nurture groups and effective nurture practice are vital for whole school inclusion
- Who benefits from inclusive education – and how?
- When Home-to-School Transport Doesn’t Fit: The Reality of Section 19 EOTAS
- What’s a PRU to you? Busting the myths about alternative provision
- What the evidence says about the 13 crucial areas for quality in Alternative Provision
- What might the SEND reform proposals mean for specialist tutors, alternative provision and EOTAS?
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals
- Unison voices major concerns over SEND reform health plans for sick and disabled children out of school in the EOTAS consultation
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- Beyond EHCPs: Why Inclusion Needs More Than a Document
- Research: Disabled young people define inclusive education as “learning in the place that’s right for them”
- Philippa Stobbs OBE: Reform plans must have a clear line of sight from children and young people with SEND to better outcomes.
- WEBINAR RECORDING! The implications for children’s legal rights to EHCPs and EOTAS of the Government’s SEND proposals - September 3, 2026
- From suspicion to support: why the Government’s child protection reforms matter for disabled children - August 28, 2026
- Have your say on the future of transport for disabled children and young people - August 25, 2026
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This is exactly what I was writing about in my book with Professor Garry Hornby, Inclusion at the Crossroads, published in 2023. It is such a relief to finally see that there is increasingly broad agreement that inclusion is not about forcing all children under one roof or classroom space but about ensuring everyone can be included in a relevant and appropriate educational setting for their needs. In this way their potential will be harnessed and maximized. We should not see special needs schools or units as discriminatory or running counter to the ideal of inclusion but as much needed targeted provision to be flexibly made widely available to all as early as the need is identified. In this way it can maximise the chances of being successful, diminishing experience of failure and more quickly outgrowing the need for it.
Essentially, this is the model that was so successful in Finland in the early 2000s but has more recently been hampered by political ressure to adopt more strictly ‘inclusive’ policies within mainstream schools. Philippa Gordon-Gould