Every parent wants the same thing for their child, expressed in the same simple sentence: I want my child to have a future.
For parents of children with a SEND, that sentence often carries extra weight, not just hope for opportunity, but a determined fight to make sure their child’s genuine capabilities are seen, valued, and given room to grow.
Earlier this year, ViVEDUS surveyed over 1,100 Australian parents for our Future Ready Schools White Paper.
The headline finding: only 38% believe their child’s school is preparing them for the world AI is creating.
Seventy-five percent said they want schools to prioritise skills like critical thinking, creativity and resilience, not instead of academic results, but alongside them.
Those numbers were gathered in Australia, but the tension they describe isn’t a local one.
The World Economic Forum estimates 92 million jobs will disappear to automation and AI by 2030, with 170 million new ones taking their place.
That’s the workforce every child currently in school will walk into including, and arguably especially, children with SEND, who already navigate a harder path into employment and further study than their peers.
That word “especially” deserves unpacking, because it’s where I think this conversation needs to go next.
Two problems, one root cause
The general capabilities – creative thinking, critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration – already appear in most national curricula.
What’s missing isn’t the ambition; it’s the method.
Too often, these capabilities are treated as something students simply “pick up” through general classroom exposure, rather than something explicitly taught, scaffolded and assessed the way literacy and numeracy are.
A single exam, sat under timed conditions, captures a narrow slice of capability
That approach quietly assumes every learner absorbs skills in the same incidental way, an assumption that disadvantages SEND students most of all, since explicit, structured instruction is very often exactly what serves them best.
The second problem sits in how we measure what a young person can actually do.
A single exam, sat under timed conditions, captures a narrow slice of capability.
For many autistic and neurodivergent learners in particular, conventional testing formats can meaningfully underestimate what a young person is genuinely capable of, putting them at risk of being judged by instruments that weren’t built with their cognitive profile in mind.
Researchers and school leaders working on assessment reform have increasingly pointed to learner profiles and portfolio-style evidence as a fairer, more complete alternative to a single test score, one that can capture strengths a narrow exam was never designed to see.
Put those two problems together, and a pattern emerges: the students most likely to be underserved by an implicit, exam-only approach to capability development and assessment are very often the students this publication exists to advocate for.
Building the case
At ViVEDUS, we’ve spent two decades building a pedagogical framework that makes these capabilities explicit, taught deliberately, for every student, rather than left to chance or incidental exposure.
We’re now extending that work into an assessment approach designed to give students a credential recognised by universities internationally: one that captures what a young person can actually demonstrate, built up across their schooling, not just what a single exam says about them on one afternoon.
For a child who has spent much of their school life being told, implicitly, that the way they think or work isn’t quite the expected way, a credential built to recognise a wider range of genuine capability isn’t a nice-to-have.
It’s the difference between a school system that measures a narrow slice of a young person, and one built to see the whole of them.
What this means for school leaders
This isn’t a call to add “future skills” as another subject bolted onto an already full timetable.
It’s a call to rebuild the everyday language of the classroom, for teachers, students and parents alike, so every child’s capability is named, taught and counted, not only the parts that happen to fit a traditional test.
For SEND leaders and Sencos in particular, that reframing matters: it shifts the conversation from “how do we help this student catch up to a narrow standard” to “how do we build a standard broad enough to see what this student can actually do.”
Because in the end, every parent, in every staffroom conversation, every annual review, every kitchen-table worry after the children are in bed, is asking the same thing, in the same six words: I want my child to have a future.
Our job, as school leaders, is to make sure that future is genuinely built for every child who walks through our gates.
