by Justina Asafu-Adjaye, Education Consultant and Parent Advocate
As the conversation about SEND reform continues, it’s important to keep in mind the children whose needs remain the least visible or formally recognised.
With over 35 years’ experience as a headteacher, SEND specialist and advocate, Justina Asafu-Adjaye has supported many pupils whose needs were undiagnosed and unmet, until their distress became impossible to ignore.
In this article, she highlights the gap between inclusion on paper and inclusion in practice, warning that without meaningful cultural change as a fundamental aspect of SEND reform, there is a significant risk that even more children will be held in mainstream only to be pushed out later.
The SEND reforms must not miss the “forgotten” children, Justina Asafu-Adjaye
From my experience leading an independent alternative provision with a specialist social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) focus, the Schools White Paper raises significant unaddressed concerns. Every day, I worked with children who had reached us because mainstream settings could not (or would not) hold them. Many of these pupils had undiagnosed special educational needs and most also had complex mental health needs. Almost all had experienced exclusion.
The government says its proposed SEND reforms will improve inclusion through earlier identification and more consistent support. But that promise will ring hollow for the children who are most often forgotten in these debates: those whose needs are still unidentified, still unmet, and who are frequently punished for “bad behaviour”. These children are already struggling, and being failed. Too often, their fate is to be suspended, excluded, or quietly removed from school life.
The reforms aim to keep more children in mainstream school instead of in specialist settings. But these plans will not deliver inclusion without also changing an increasingly punitive culture, ending workforce shortages, or solving profound misunderstanding around neurodivergent presentation, these plans will not deliver inclusion. They will simply widen the cohort of children exposed to exclusion and, ultimately, the school-to-prison pipeline.
The children that SEND policy keeps missing
Much of the current SEND reform debate focuses on systems, structures and efficiency. Far less attention is paid to the children whose needs are not picked up until they are in crisis: for example, the child repeatedly sanctioned for calling out, the autistic pupil punished for feeling overwhelmed, the child with ADHD who has been labelled defiant, or the traumatised child who is seen only through the lens of disruption.
This is the forgotten group who should be at the centre of any serious reform agenda.
Special Needs Jungle has already explored how undiagnosed SEND can drive children towards the school-to-prison pipeline, and how ADHD, autism and other neurodivergent differences are too often criminalised instead of understood. The key question raised by the government’s plans is simple: what happens to this group of children when more children are kept in mainstream, but the conditions that produce exclusion remain intact?
“Any honest assessment of SEND reform must begin with the system as it exists now, not the one being imagined in policy language.”
Exclusion is already telling us where the system fails
Any honest assessment of SEND reform must begin with the system as it exists now, not the one being imagined in policy language. Department for Education annual statistics on suspensions and permanent exclusions show suspensions hit almost 955,000 in 2023/24, a 21% rise on the previous year. Permanent exclusions rose to almost 10,900, a 16% increase. Compared to before the pandemic, autumn-term suspensions have increased from 178,400 in 2019/20 to 335,700 in 2024/25, an approximate rise of 75%, according to DfE data.
The numbers are not distributed evenly; the figures reveal children on SEN Support are around five times more likely to be permanently excluded than pupils without identified SEN. Children with social, emotional and mental health needs face suspension rates more than eight times the national average. Disadvantage plays a role too, with children living in poverty are also disproportionately excluded. This is not so much a behaviour story, as unrelenting patterns of unmet need.
The most common recorded reason for suspension is “persistent disruptive behaviour”. But for many children with unidentified or unsupported SEND, what schools record as ‘disruption’ may actually be dysregulation, distress, sensory overload, communication difficulty, or survival behaviour in an environment that is not set up to meet their needs. The current system already mistakes unmet need for misconduct. Reforms that rely on mainstream inclusion without changing that culture risk making these children more, not less, vulnerable.
Inclusion on paper is not inclusion in practice
Improving the ability to identify emerging need isn’t enough. A child whose needs are noticed but who is left waiting for a referral and assessment, or who is formally identified but not meaningfully supported, is not being included. They are being left in limbo until behaviour deteriorates, and suspension or exclusion, the system’s pressure valve, follow.
There is nothing wrong with the ambition that more children should be educated successfully in mainstream schools. The problem is the growing gap between rhetorical inclusion and material reality. Mainstream schools cannot safely include children with a wider range of needs if specialist support remains delayed, fragmented or simply unavailable. This is where the government’s proposals begin to look dangerously optimistic.
The reforms assume the professionals needed to identify and support a growing cohort of children in mainstream will somehow be found, trained, and deployed quickly enough to make the policy work. And of course, that doesn’t just mean boosting existing specialists, but enough to replace experience lost from retirement and those leaving their profession. There is no credible route to genuine early intervention if educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, CAMHS clinicians, specialist teachers and trained pastoral staff are already unable to meet the needs of the current cohort.
The missing mindset shift
The deepest flaw in the current debate is not only lack of resources, but lack of understanding. There has been no serious reckoning with the punitive culture that shapes how many schools interpret behaviour, nor with the way zero-tolerance approaches can punish children whose presentation is neurodivergent, traumatised or otherwise atypical.
Evidence given to the House of Commons Education Committee in 2018 highlighted concerns that so‑called “zero‑tolerance” behaviour policies exclude more vulnerable children, including those with SEND and mental health needs. Yet there is still too little challenge to the assumption that stricter discipline is a neutral good. It is not neutral for a child whose unmet needs are expressed through movement, shutdown, impulsivity, refusal, emotional dysregulation or sensory distress.
This is why a mindset shift is essential.
Schools and policymakers must move away from seeing behaviour as a moral failing or compliance problem and towards understanding it, in many cases, as a form of communication. Without that shift, early intervention will remain little more than a slogan. If professionals and school leaders see need as naughtiness, there is very little incentive to seek specialist assessment or early support. Allowing schools to hold exclusive authority over action and oversight, without legislated accountability, creates conditions that will continue to fail the very children who most need protection.
Neurodivergent children are especially exposed
The lack of understanding around neurodivergent presentation is one of the most serious gaps in the current system. Children with autism or ADHD are often punished before they are understood, especially if they do not fit narrow stereotypes of how those conditions are supposed to present.
This matters particularly for children whose needs are less visible. Girls may be under-identified because their presentation does not match dominant assumptions about autism or ADHD, while Black children and other minoritised pupils may face behaviour responses shaped by racism as well as ableism. Children living in poverty may have less access to advocacy, longer waits for assessment and higher exposure to chronic stress, all of which can further increase exclusion risk.
In that context, the reforms could easily entrench a cruel pattern. The child remains in mainstream because inclusion is the policy goal, but the school still does not recognise the need, cannot access specialist help in time, and continues to respond through sanction and removal. Inclusion then becomes a paper exercise, while the child experiences only deeper misunderstanding and escalating punishment.
When behaviour policy becomes blame
This wider political context cannot be ignored. Public discussion about attendance, standards and behaviour has too often drifted towards blaming children and families for system failure rather than asking why schools still miss, misread or fail to meet neurodivergent needs. This is important because government rhetoric shapes school culture. If the message from the top suggests that difficult behaviour reflects poor discipline rather than unmet need, then schools are less likely to invest scarce time and energy in understanding what sits underneath.
This context is what makes current claims about early intervention sound so thin. If a child’s presentation is treated primarily as wilful defiance, what real incentive is there to seek professional input? Why would a school choose the slower, more complex work of assessment and adjustment over the immediate control offered by sanctions, internal isolation or suspension?
This contradiction sits at the heart of the reforms. You cannot claim to believe in early intervention while tolerating a culture that still interprets many signs of unmet SEND as a behaviour problem to be stamped out.
The school-to-prison pipeline is the real test
The link between exclusion and later justice involvement is no longer speculative. Analysis by the Office for National Statistics, linking the National Pupil Database to Ministry of Justice records, found that nearly 80% of people who went on to receive a custodial sentence had been identified with special educational needs at some point during their schooling, and that they were almost five times more likely to have had a formal (pre-EHCP) SEN statement than people with no criminal convictions. Around 13.5% attended a pupil referral unit, compared with just 0.4% of those with no criminal convictions.
The most rigorous causal estimates come from a Behavioural Insights Team study funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which used linked administrative data on English secondary school leavers. That research found that permanent exclusion was associated with a 33% increase in the probability of a student being in youth custody by age 18, against a baseline custody rate of around 0.1%, and that even a suspension was associated with a 1.3% increase. Nearly 50% of young people observed in custody aged 15 to 17 had experienced a school exclusion in Year 10, compared with about 6% of those who did not end up in custody.
That doesn’t mean exclusion “causes” imprisonment. But it does mean exclusion is one of the clearest warning signs that a child is being failed across multiple systems. If the same children with unidentified and unmet needs continue to be suspended, excluded and pushed out under a new SEND framework, then the reforms will have helped feed the pipeline, not starve it.
And this is where the forgotten group must remain central. The children most at risk are often not those with the clearest paperwork, the strongest advocacy or the fastest access to diagnosis. They are the ones whose needs are still disputed, still minimised or still invisible until their distress becomes impossible to ignore.
What a serious reform agenda would ask
A serious reform programme would begin by asking much harder questions than the current debate currently allows.
→ Will suspension and permanent exclusion rates for children with SEND and especially those on SEN Support actually fall?
→ Will schools be required to evidence what adjustments were made before a child with emerging or suspected SEND was sanctioned or removed?
→ Will families retain enforceable rights when disability-related behaviour is treated as misconduct?
→ Will the government address the role of punitive behaviour policies in driving exclusion?
→ Most importantly, will policymakers finally confront the fact that there is already a cohort of children being failed in plain sight?
These children do not need another promise of inclusion that exists only on paper. They need schools that understand neurodivergence, systems that treat behaviour as communication, specialist support that exists in reality rather than rhetoric, and legal protections strong enough to matter when a child is on the brink of exclusion.
Until that happens, the danger is clear. More children with unmet and unidentified SEND will remain in mainstream settings that cannot meet their needs, be blamed for the consequences, and be removed once their distress becomes too inconvenient to contain. That is not reform. It is the same failure, redistributed across a larger group of children.
About the author
Justina Asafu-Adjaye is a Parent Advocate and Education Consultant with over 35 years’ experience working with children, young people, and families in the UK and West Africa.
Previously a headteacher and SEND professional, Justina has over 20 years’ experience within the area of inclusion. She delivers impactful training for educators, school leaders, and organisations on inclusive practice, and partners with institutions to create neuro-affirming learning environments across Africa.
Justina is a passionate advocate for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), providing direct support to families in the UK and Ghana to help them navigate diverse education systems, secure appropriate provision, and access the resources their children need to thrive. Justina uses global platforms to raise awareness about inclusion, challenge misconceptions, and remove stigma, inspiring communities to embrace every learner’s potential.
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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”
- What might the SEND reform proposals mean for specialist tutors, alternative provision and EOTAS?
- SEND reforms and the forgotten children at risk of exclusion
- Research shows children in special schools report higher self-esteem than those with SEN in mainstream
- No inclusion without tackling the “serious fault-line” of exclusions, says children’s legal charity, launching a “roadmap for change”
- Part 2: The Testimonies. Children died; the system looked away. Will government SEND reforms make this scandal even worse?
- Children died. The system looked away. Today, the Government is calling the human cost of cutting rights, “reform” [Part 1]
- Inclusion doesn’t just happen in mainstream school: being included in education and in life should be the goal
- Boost support for children not in school, develop EOTAS guidance, and fund schools to be needs-led, say Ofsted and CQC inspectors
- Jen’s Acorn: Offering vital school support to prevent more unnecessary tragedies like my daughter’s
- ADHD and Autism Right To Choose referrals paused as at least nine NHS areas tell providers to stop booking assessments
- “It’s not a compliance issue—it’s a design failure” Psychologists call for action on mental health and “harmful” school policies
- Are behaviour-tracking apps harming SEND children and their families?
What kind of government is “bold” enough to scrap statutory EHCPs from vulnerable children?May 16, 2025
The SEND reforms in the Schools White Paper reveal rights given, and rights stripped awayFebruary 24, 2026
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Don’t miss any posts from SNJ – simply add your email address below. You must click the link in the confirmation email you’ll receive to activate your free subscription.
You can also keep up with us by following our
Want more? Be an SNJ regular donor!
SNJ is a non-profit and everyone who writes here does so voluntarily. We need your support to help us with costs by donating once or as a regular patron. Find out more here
- 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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