The government’s National Conversation on proposed SEND reforms last December was “performative” and gave only a “symbolic” nod to the views of children and young people, a new report has found.
The study, carried out by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University examined the language, purpose and timing of the series of events, which were held in person and online supposedly to gather views and experiences of SEND families.
The exercise, billed by the government as ‘the biggest conversation in a generation’ began last December and lasted several weeks.
It was held before Ministers announced the SEND reforms as part of the Schools White Paper at the end of February, and at a time when the government had likely already decided on their direction of travel.
At the time, Lorraine Petersen OBE, an independent SEND consultant and former headteacher, wrote about her experience of the National Conversation for SENDsationalfutures.com, having attended two of the sessions, and cast doubt on the purpose of the events.
There was limited opportunity for the kind of back-and-forth dialogue that is expected in a conversation
Writing for Special Needs Jungle, the authors of the Sheffield Hallam report said the timing and language used throughout the National Conversation “often framed reform as both necessary and inevitable, narrowing the space for participants to question fundamental assumptions or propose alternative directions”.
“Our work raises important questions about what people were being invited to do, and whether this was an invitation to shape policy from the ground up, or to comment on a journey where the destination has already been decided,” the authors said.
Was it really a conversation?
The report found that the National Conservation was “constructed more as a metaphorical conversation than a reciprocal one”.
There was “limited opportunity for the kind of back-and-forth dialogue that is expected in a conversation” because the government set the agenda and had decided already how contributions would be collected.
This was likely to damage trust if participants later discovered that their influence was limited.
“This poses quite a risk when parental trust in the SEND system is already fragile,” the authors, Emma Sadler an educator, researcher, and PhD candidate, Gill O’Connor a researcher and PhD candidate, and Jill Pluquailec a senior lecturer in autism in the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University, said.
The inclusion of young people
While the language used in the National Conversation suggested the input of young people would be vital in shaping reforms, the report found there was an absence of information on how they could take part.
The authors said: “The ‘Explainer for children and young people’ didn’t contain any hyperlinks or specific routes beyond the rather nebulous invitation to share views online and talk to their school or community.
“The only place those receiving responses to the initiative would have known a young person was participating was through a box that could be ticked on the online survey declaring that the respondent was under 18.
“Given the absence of pathways for young people to actually get involved in the conversation, and the absence of data collected by the government on which responses actually came from young people, the invitation to participate remains performative.”
The authors concluded that the government needed to be clear what participation means, and how far contributors could be confident that they were influencing policy, at a time when trust in the system was already low.
