Staff and parents share their experience as number of pupils with special educational needs spirals

• Send provision in ‘vicious downward spiral’, says former children’s commissioner

“The Send [Special educational needs and disabilities] system is broken: completely and irrevocably,” said David Wilson, a deputy headteacher at an inner-city Manchester primary school where there were between six and 10 children with Send in each classroom. “This impacts everyone – children with and without special needs.”

Wilson, who spent eight years of his career as a Senco [special educational needs coordinator], was among hundreds of people who shared their experience of SEN provision in the UK. Parents, teachers and Send specialists from across the country overwhelmingly agreed that things had become the worst they had ever been.