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In the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy. About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”
Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years, no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.
Back in 2020, amid the chaos sown by the pandemic, my son James began his first day at another of the West Country’s state autism schools, 13 miles from where we live. From its small class sizes to soothingly curved walls – not to mention the calm expertise of many of the staff – it was a thoroughly modern place, offering inspired answers to what is now known about the needs of autistic people. Within months, he had made his third proper friend and had played a set of Beatles songs to an appreciative crowd of kids gathered outside their classrooms on an idyllic spring afternoon: Yellow Submarine, unsurprisingly, was the standout.
Just over five years later, as Keir Starmer’s government tipped into being a directionless wreck, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, launched her department’s schools white paper with an impressive speech in Peterborough. It was focused on England’s system of support for kids such as my son, and reforms to provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), some of which had already attracted noisy and righteous opposition, not least from thousands of parents (including me).
There were predictions of a Labour revolt, but Phillipson had done the requisite work with her more anxious colleagues. She was also helped by the endless distractions of the unfolding Peter Mandelson scandal. But the key appeal was how proudly Labour-ish most of it sounded. One of her clearest messages was that, more than 15 years after David Cameron had pledged to end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream settings, Labour was set on a 180-degree turn, so that ordinary local schools would be the first option for most Send kids: a welcome change on paper, given the exodus from mainstream schools that took root in the coalition years, and the large number of Send kids being excluded from schools.
About £4bn, Phillipson said, was to go on making sure that regular schools would have innovations such as “inclusion bases”. The vision was almost utopian: a picture of many more children “educated at a great local mainstream school, with their friends, close to their family, part of their local community”. And then, the kicker: “That’s what’s best for them.”
All this and more is now to be included in the “education for all” bill, which will soon begin its passage through parliament (it’s easy to forget, perhaps, that this completely broken government still has some semblance of a policy agenda). To many, its emphasis on maximising inclusion may look like nothing but a good thing for an array of reasons, from the eye-watering fees charged to councils by special schools owned by profit-making interests, to considerations that are very rarely mentioned: successful inclusion, for instance, should also be about non-disabled and neurotypical kids appreciating human difference as an everyday reality.
But the prospect of legislation also prompts an inevitable question: what of England’s 1,100-ish specialist schools, brimming with expertise and care, which educate about 180,000 children and young people? A palpable sense of trepidation has rippled through many of them, but no one in a position of power or influence has really seemed to notice: the scent of anti-Tory egalitarianism and increased spending, it seems, is seductively sweet.
The education secretary has paid tribute to “wonderful special schools for children with the most complex needs” that will be “right at the heart of our plans”. But read a passage in a speech she gave to school leaders in the spring: a pitiful portrait of an imaginary boy who goes to a specialist school and lives two doors down from a girl at the local comprehensive. He has, Phillipson said, “to get in a taxi every morning, off to a school far away to have his needs met. He doesn’t know that girl from his street, nor the other kids in his neighbourhood … During the weekends and at holidays, he has no local friends to play with … [and] he achieves far below what we all know he’s capable of.”
This dismal picture surely doesn’t chime with thousands of families with experience of specialist schools, and the close communities of children and parents that form around them. It ignores studies showing that Send kids achieve higher self-esteem in specialist settings, which should not be a surprise. By comparison, there is an argument that the borderline delusions of much mainstream education – in essence, that you can stick 30-odd wildly diverse kids in the same classroom and expect them all to successfully learn – look callous and old-fashioned. But what Phillipson says vividly shows where education policy is headed.
Tellingly, despite the fact that many special schools are running way beyond their capacity, the Send reforms were trailed by announcements of the cancellation of planned new special schools. In March, Schools Week revealed that as part of the government’s plans to sign off local Send reform plans, and to achieve top marks from the Department for Education, councils have to show “strong evidence” that they have “little to no plans to increase special school or AP [alternative provision] capacity”. The message is not exactly subtle, and it flies in the face of countless children’s lived experience: time spent in cacophonous mainstream schools that are a sensory nightmare, bullying, the fact that some disabilities require the kind of hi-tech support in which the best special schools are expert.
I asked Whitcombe a final question: does she think enough people in government understand the importance of schools like hers? She let out a laugh. “Our doors are open for anyone to come and see the work we do because we’re really proud of it,” she told me. “Just having a conversation with our young people tells you so much about their lived experience and what they need.”
What she said brought to mind one of my clearest memories of shopping around for a school for my son when he was about to turn 14. We went to one mainstream place renowned for its inclusive autism provision, with a dedicated hub presumably not dissimilar from the new generation of “inclusion bases”. It was housed in a sad-looking outbuilding and there was not much inside: if we chose this school, we quickly concluded, his life would be lonely beyond words. His special school, by contrast, was not only tailor-made for autistic people but full of life and human warmth too. As one of this mangled government’s few coherent policy drives continues, people at the top surely ought to bear such stories in mind.
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John Harris is a Guardian columnist
