John Bald: A series of reports highlight the unprecedented pressures on our schools

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

A frustrating week. Each time I thought I was well underway with this article, a new report or development came out that forced me to start again. The original theme, that Bridget Phillipson was talking too much and doing too little, was fair enough. Apart from adding a new inspection grade, which should prevent schools from failing on small faults, neither the curriculum review nor the new Ofsted framework has done much at all. As Laura Trott MP has pointed out, the number of teachers is shrinking rather than growing – 400 fewer than last May – SEND has been kicked down the road, and even the promised breakfasts have been delayed until next year. So far, things are getting worse.

My first reset was caused by Dame Rachel De Souza’s report on educational provision outside mainstream schools. With her earlier census of the system as a whole it provides a level of detail of children’s experience of learning difficulties, and their social context, that shows a system at or close to breaking point, and in some cases broken. The pressures on schools are unprecedented. In 1978, the late Baroness Warnock, author of the first major report on learning difficulties in modern times, estimated that one in five children might experience SEND at some point in their school career. This figure, according to the census, has doubled, and provision has not. The pattern of need has also changed. Currently, one million children have an active referral to mental health services, and thirty per cent of those with SEND are assessed as autistic, a condition that the Warnock committee described itself as being “in the early stages of understanding.”

The census notes 39,000 children not receiving any education at all, and one in five persistently absent. Individual education plans (IEPs) are too often not effective, and some are of “low quality, poorly written, and include interventions that are not underpinned by evidence.” This is true of almost all of those with which I’ve been concerned in my work with parents, including one in which a serious problem with the early stages of maths, stressed by parents and in my evidence, was not even considered by the LA psychologist, or mentioned in their report. “Neil” the pupil I wrote about in June, has now been admitted to an expensive private school at LA expense, whose approach to his dyslexia diagnosis has been to avoid teaching him to read at all. I continue to do so after school.

Learning problems are exacerbated by very high level of mobility among some children, with 164,000 living in temporary accommodation, and 95,000 with a parent in prison. A pupil summed it up as follows:

“I do not feel safe, I feel targeted and they do nothing to protect me and are supposed to have completed an EHCP as instructed by an Educational Psychologist and have not bothered and are hoIt always felt like a tick-box was trying to be achieved with no regard for how it would affect me.”

Boy with SEND, 14 and a school said it was:

“… increasingly having to cover the roles that other services would have previously provided. Whilst schools are capable of providing this support, they do need sufficient funding and financial support from a government level in order to be the profession to offer this wider services to students. Without the additional support and funding, other aspects of school life such as academic standards, behaviour & attendance suffer as a result of stretching our capacity to support children more widely.”

The black hole in funding, and the incredible statistic of spending £2.3 billion just on transport, are well-known, and, as provision for EHCPs is a legal responsibility, largely responsible for inadequacies in other LA services, including repairing roads.

Last week, the government announced £3 billion for new school-based units, a continuation of the policy begun, late in the day, by the last Conservative government, and probably the only approach with any chance of success. It will take time to establish these units, and longer still to staff them properly, particularly as the emphasis on inclusion in SEND , both by inspectors and teacher trainers, has focused too much on having them present in the same class as others, and too little on effective teaching methods.

In the meantime, teachers and some schools are subjected to pressures beyond human endurance, and the anguish expressed on teachers’ social media groups, particularly in reception classes where un-assessed need is rife, and preventing them from teaching other pupils, is truly distressing to read. People are being broken, and the authorities, including some school leaders, are doing nothing about it. If they initiate an IEP, they have to meet part of the cost of extra provision themselves, and have no funds with which to do so. I’ve reposted one example here. Good and experienced staff should not be in tears at the end of the school week.

Small wonder, then, that Sir Alan Wood’s core finding on Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy is “Success, But Not For All.” The school appears to work on the basis that children won’t behave, when in fact some can’t, or don’t know how to, and punishment is the only tool in the box. This is where it differs from that of Katharine Birbalsingh at Michaela. Birbalsingh is strict, but she is not harsh. The school is a happy place. Children are taught to behave, given teaching closely matched to their learning needs, and treated with love, which is the reason they buy into the system and succeed – they know it makes sense. The finding that children at VPA are shouted at as a matter of routine, which I’ve observed elsewhere, creates stress and misery, and is anti-educational. Ofsted found concerns about the school’s approach in 2016 and 2019, but did not follow the issues up in its 2023 inspection, which simply rated the school outstanding. So Ofsted did not do its job properly either.

The reports I’ve listed are important, and should be read by everyone involved in education. They will, I fear, provide no surprises to teachers – or, in the unlikely event of their reading them, to pupils.