Every September, Sencos across the country walk back into school with the same mixed bag of feelings.
A bit of dread. A bit of hope.
A caseload that’s grown over the summer without anyone asking if we had room for it.
It’s a role that never quite lets you start with a clean slate, no matter how many times you tell yourself this will be the year you get ahead of it.
But this September carries something different.
The SEND White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, landed back in February, setting out the government’s long-term direction for inclusion.
Since then, the Department for Education (DfE) has published its template and best-practice guidance for schools’ own inclusion strategies.
So the groundwork is already there. What has changed is that schools now have a hard deadline.
Hitting the ground running
Every mainstream primary and secondary in England has to publish its own inclusion strategy by 31 December 2026, setting out how it identifies and meets the needs of its cohort, and how it’s spending its share of the new Inclusive Mainstream Fund.
That’s not a small thing. Most SENCos have spent years working within a system that everyone quietly agrees isn’t working — not for children, not for families and not for the staff trying to hold it together with goodwill and spreadsheets.
Whatever your view on the wider reforms, having a properly resourced, published strategy that a school is accountable for is a genuine shift from business as usual.
This strategy shouldn’t be written without the Senco
So, what does that mean for how you start this year?
It means using September to actually sit down with the White Paper’s SEND section and the DfE’s inclusion strategy template, rather than letting them become PDFs nobody has the time to open.
It means being honest about what your school already knows — and doesn’t know — about the needs in its cohort, because that’s the evidence base the strategy has to be built on.
And it means holding onto the parts of the job that don’t change regardless of policy: knowing your caseload, protecting the relationships that make early intervention possible, and giving yourself permission not to have every system perfect by week one.
Get yourself in the room
Here’s the part worth saying plainly: this strategy shouldn’t be written about SEND provision without the Senco helping to write it.
It’s easy to imagine a version of this term where SLT drafts something to tick the compliance box and the Senco finds out what’s in it after it’s published.
Don’t let that happen by default.
Ask now, at the start of the school year, whether there will be a working group, who will be leading it, and what your role in it will be.
You’re the person who actually knows the cohort’s needs, the gaps in current provision, and what “commonly occurring, predictable needs” looks like in your setting — that’s precisely the evidence the strategy is required to report on.
If nobody has asked you yet, then that’s your cue to ask them.
New Sencos starting their first school year, and Sencos like me starting somewhere new after years in the role, are walking into the same deadline this year.
Nobody is pretending December will be busy. But for once, there’s a clear, useful piece of work to walk into — and a good reason to make sure you’re the one shaping it, not just implementing it.
Here’s to a year where “new Senco” doesn’t just mean new caseload and new corridors to learn.
It means having a real say in how your school gets this right.
