SEND in Northern Ireland: The Facts and Figures

In 2023/24, 89% of young people with SEN (all stages) were educated in a mainstream school, as were 74% of those with a statement. SEND provision and system pressures have been at the forefront of the news recently and some honest conversations need to happen around targeting need and adequate funding, alongside workforce planning and effective teacher training.

According to official data published by the Department of Education (DE), NISRA and data presented to the Education Committee’s Director of Inclusion, a total of 17,837 children had a statement of SEN in 2017-18. This had risen to 26,964 in 2023-24. This marks an overall rise of 46% in the five years to 2023/24. In total, 19% of the school population in Northern Ireland had some level of Special Educational Need. Of these, 40% had a statement.

Presently, 23.2% of secondary pupils are Stage 1-3 when compared to 7% in grammar. When it comes to newcomers, secondary schools have the lion’s share with 4.8% which is almost five times the amount when compared to 1% in grammar schools. When we frame this figure in a FSME context, grammar schools (12.0%) have the lowest proportions of free school meal entitled pupils, whereas non-grammar have (34.0%) with special schools having the highest proportion (54.4%).

Chronic Underfunding: A healthcare analogy

Imagine a hospital that had 17,837 patients with chronic conditions in 2017-18. By 2023-24, this number had increased to 26,964 patients. This represents a 51% increase over six years.

To put this into perspective, it’s like a hospital that was originally built to handle a certain number of patients suddenly having to accommodate significantly more, with more acute needs, and without a proportional increase in resources, staff, or infrastructure. This surge in patient numbers would strain the hospital’s capacity, leading to longer wait times, overworked staff, and potentially compromised care quality.

This is the reality for many hospitals across Northern Ireland and the health system at large – and education isn’t far behind. We are at a turning point and we need to find better ways to ‘triage’ our young people and offer pathways to meet their pastoral and academic needs.

Educational support for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged has far reaching consequences that will ultimately have a significant future impact on our other ‘wrap around’ social care systems, post education. Therefore, we ought to look at education with the same regard as healthcare. The two are explicitly linked to our economy and public services.

We can build a ‘prevention first’ approach with tried and tested models, supported by evidence, and that are scalable across a range of settings, namely secondary. I won’t talk about selection because we have enough reports and research out there to advance the case for change – unfortunately, I do not see this transforming soon, so we have to deal with the demands on the secondary system in its current form.

The Human Cost of Poor Literacy.

Poor literacy can lead to limited job prospects, poor health, low self-esteem, and even reduced life expectancy. Report on UK adult literacy levels will provide context. Slightly more (17.9%) adults in Northern Ireland have very low literacy.

The report concludes that: ‘a large percentage of adults have low literacy skills. These individuals experience negative impacts on personal relationships, well-being and health, as well as a greater risk of unemployment or being in low paid work. If more action is not taken to tackle low literacy in adults, we risk perpetuating and reinforcing an inter-generational cycle of disadvantage.’

So, the question is, how can we break these cycles, and do we have models or examples of good practice? The answer is yes. I was fortunate enough to be part of the Signature Project in my first teaching post and witnessed the positive impact that it had. It made my teaching more adaptive, flexible and child centred, and gave me a new appreciation for effective use of data, spurring my interest in how I could meaningfully use data to guide my classroom practice.

The aims of Signature were to:

1. increase the number of pupils in primary schools, particularly those entitled to free school meals, achieving at the expected level or above at the end of Key Stage 2 in both Literacy and Numeracy.
2. increase the number of young people in post-primary schools, particularly those entitled to free school meals, achieving at least a grade C or above in GCSE English and GCSE Mathematics by the time they leave school.
3. provide, through positive action measures, employment opportunities for 230 newly/ recently graduated teachers.

A total of 18,653 pupils received support in the two years of the programme and 310 individual teachers were appointed, with 76% of respondents to the exit survey securing a post of at least one year in duration. The project helped to focus minds and reduce the ‘silo thinking’ that happens both inside and outside our schools, and what the Learning Leaders Strategy explicitly references (see page 8). But the cost of something like this will have increased; for teaching staff alone, it would cost around an estimated £18m for salaries of M2 teachers for two years.

The combined DSC and DE funding provided for the three financial years and two academic years of the programme cost a total of £15,662,000. Read Year 2 Final Report and ETI report to see the positive impact and potential for a new model and scalability. RAISE will hopefully include some elements of Signature and Transition.

RAISE funding: An opportunity to build on past success.

Recently, the Minister for Education, Paul Givan, launched the ‘RAISE’ programme as ‘part of a wider funding package, representing an investment of £20million over the next two years, with potential for further funding.’ Quite rightly, there were some genuine concerns about criteria for funding and how this money would be used to target need, but the intent and the will is clearly there to create space for change. Thankfully, DE have subsequently produced the following seven indicators:

1. GCSEs – % of leavers that did not achieve 5+ GCSEs at grades A*- C including English & Maths.

2. Pupil Absence from Years 1 to 12.

3. Special Educational Needs – SEN Stages 2-3.

4. Free School Meals Entitlement (FSME).

5. Income Deprivation affecting Children – a Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation measure.

6. Health Deprivation & Disability – a Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation measure. 

7. Crime/Anti-Social Behaviour Incidents.

You can read more about the methodology here.

The overarching issue is the GCSE outcomes-based approach that dictates how money is spent – see ‘RAISE’ indicator one. I believe that a discussion around curriculum and assessment needs to happen soon whilst these changes are being made and public money is available. There is clear evidence that schools are using funds to contend with ever increasing needs within their respective contexts, cohorts and sectors.

Another stream of funding is TSN. From reading the reports on TSN 2023-24, it is evident that there are opportunities to streamline the funding, even save money, whilst building capacity across the teaching workforce and school leadership. Schools identified a total of 979 areas for improvement. The most common area was “Literacy across the curriculum” which was selected by 123 schools, closely followed by “Numeracy across the curriculum” selected by 104 schools. “Barriers to learning” were also a strong focus for schools with 86 schools targeting this area. If we dug a little deeper, would we find reading age levels and perhaps SEND as contributing factors?

Conversely, in the 2023/24 TSN report ‘Expanding the curriculum’ is dwarfed by the pressures of SEND and pastoral demands in secondary. This could be evidence of how our outcome-focused system has led to secondary schools spending more to meet GCSE demands, rather than using the money for preventative measures in KS2 and KS3. Or, as many school leaders, teachers, doctors and nurses would call this – daily fire-fighting.

As an example, seven primaries and one post primary school selected the target ‘Improve independent reading skills’. Whereas the top three targets overall were ‘Increase the number of pupils reaching their potential’, ‘Raise pupil attainment in Literacy’ and ‘Raise pupil attainment in Numeracy’. But reading is the foundation for all the above and reading age and reading standardised scores can play a part in identifying need or triaging pupils, and can be used to monitor acceptable standards within our system on a regional level. No child should be leaving primary school, transitioning to secondary school, or be leaving twelve years of formal education with a reading age below expected levels. I accept there are SEND barriers involved here and that is another issue, but there are huge gaps and disparities in SEND and reading experiences and support across all sectors. This takes me to my next point about funding and priorities, particularly in secondary schools.

The Paradox of Performative Priorities Versus Equitable Practices:

Principals face a challenging paradox: they must work to ensure equity with limited resources while also meeting performance standards that their leadership is judged by. This ranges from maintaining successful GCSE results, attracting more pupils and staff to the school, whilst simultaneously ensuring that they are meeting the ever changing and complex SEND and pastoral or mental health needs – all with fewer resources. No mean feat.

Having worked in several mainstream schools and now in a SEND/CAMHS setting, I can see how this journey plays out for so many of our young people and parents, especially in relation to school refusal, inability to access the curriculum, reading levels, SEND and the ever-increasing demands on mental health services. It is a combination for a perfect storm, except it is regional and it can be fixed.

The problem: Reading is a significant barrier to learning, curriculum access and overall feelings about school. I have seen this with my own eyes both as a Head of Department and Literacy Coordinator. It is especially prevalent in junior school. A pupil arrives from primary school with a below average reading age. Many have a wide and varied experience in terms of reading and SEND support or assistance. Their confidence is in their boots, not helped by selection. They attend twenty-five one-hour lessons a week, across fifteen subjects. They struggle through most of them, trying to keep up. This happens despite the teacher’s best efforts. The teacher has a class of thirty with one third on the SEND CoP.

Some start to lose hope, withdraw, and sometimes act out because they can’t cope or need specialised support or both. They may have an undiagnosed or unmet need, but that can take a long time to obtain a diagnosis, so they lose motivation and self-belief so their attendance begins to fall until they just don’t turn up for school. Often, parents cannot advocate for their child. They can be in a state of despair. Schools are hamstrung due to lack of time, money, classroom assistants, or just space for the pupil. It’s a story told a thousand times and I have seen it happen in a range of settings and different schools.

I believe that if we were to establish a RAISE style ‘Regional Reading Programme’, perhaps using a combination of Signature criteria/model and some of the seven indicators for RAISE, a targeted literacy and numeracy programme could have a huge system wide impact, provided its focus was on KS3 transition and curriculum enrichment. KS3 has been the poor relation for a long time and, if we are serious about curriculum changes, we need to take stock of what we are dealing with in our schools and use KS3 as an opportunity.

Who? Employing new or recently qualified teachers for these posts to help with reading skills and basic numeracy support would mean a whole swathe of teachers who have a greater awareness or focus on identifying literacy needs, using interventions and experience of barriers for learning. This would complement the curriculum review and encourage new attitudes and approaches to transition in KS3. Attitudinal shifts are required if we really want to ring fence KS3 rather than making it ‘GCSE lite’ which so often happens. On a pastoral level, if teachers had a two-year contract, they could in theory return and take the same cohort into GCSE, having built up working relationships with the pupils they have helped along the way.

How? In 2017, Tackling Educational Underachievement – Sharing Best Practice Conference took place and Queen’s University presented some findings from the EEF Teacher Toolkit. One to one tuition, small group tuition and early years were flagged as effective practice to tackle underachievement.

So already have the evidence-based studies to guide our decision making and we have a highly successful template from the Signature Projects and Engage that have proven to produce positive outcomes. We know we can save money and have proper policy led targeted intervention specifically for FSM and SEND pupils in KS3 because schools are already doing this in some capacity, therefore the frameworks, expertise and the will are already in the system.

We talk about using AI in education; you cannot use it effectively if you cannot read. We hear discussions about knowledge rich curriculum; you cannot access any curriculum if you cannot read at an age-appropriate level nor can you progress or excel to the levels expected. These children are on the outside looking in.

We often discuss ‘The Big Picture’ in KS3, focusing on community, society, and democracy. You cannot fully participate in a democratic society without being able to understand or connect with people, institutions or wider society. You cannot access a knowledge rich curriculum without literacy. The inability to read and engage means the picture becomes small, narrow, and rather bleak. But remember, we have the capacity to develop this snapshot into a vibrant, full-colour image of understanding and participation. We just need to sharpen the focus.