“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.”

Those words from then Children and Families Minister Edward Timpson back in 2014 accompanied the launch of a new system for supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or SEND for short.

A significant part of this new system was Education, Health and Care Plans, or EHCPs, which would identify any additional needs of children and young people aged up to 25 and set out the extra support that they are legally entitled to receive.

Just over a decade later in 2025, and the SEND system is widely regarded to be complex, fragmented and facing financial ruin. What’s more, the current government’s planned reforms to SEND, which were scheduled for this autumn, have been delayed until the New Year.

In October, IPPR, a progressive think tank, published a new report called ‘BREAKING THE CYCLE: A BLUEPRINT FOR SEND REFORM’, which set out their proposals for putting special needs provision on a better and more sustainable path.

So what did this new report identify as the main problems facing the SEND system? Does SEND provision need major investment, major reform or both? And when the financial pressures on local and national government are so acute, can EHCPs survive in their current form for much longer?

My guests are Geoff Barton CBE, chair of the IPPR Inclusion Taskforce that fed into this new report and also a former headteacher and union leader, and Eleanor Harris, co-author of this new report and also the Director of Policy, Impact, Research and Communications at The Difference, a charity focused on inclusion.

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The goal was evolution, not revolution, and when the final report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was published on November 5th, that is precisely what was delivered.

Across primary and secondary education in England, the Review proposed changes to the system as a whole as well as individual subjects, with all the changes firmly rooted in the evidence that the Review’s expert panel had received.

The Government has accepted a large number of recommendations from the Review but, rather unexpectedly, ministers have also decided to ignore some of the Review’s evidence-based recommendations and instead announce their own reforms.

So what were the main proposals in the Review’s final report? Was the Government right or wrong to reject some of the Review’s proposals? And does the goal of evolution not revolution mean that debates over some controversial topics are far from over?

My guests are the same two experts who joined me to digest the interim report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review back in April - Mary Myatt, an education adviser, writer and speaker, and Dale Bassett, the director of curriculum and assessment at United Learning, a group of over 100 schools.

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It is entirely normal for a Government to announce plans to reform either Higher Education (HE) or Further Education (FE). What is much less normal is a Government announcing a plan to reform HE and FE at the same time.

The Post 16 Education and Skills White Paper, published on the 20th of October, sought to do precisely that, as it set out the Government’s plan “to educate and train the workforce of the future and give people the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.”

So what are the main proposals in this White Paper? How much control do ministers even have over universities, colleges and other local and regional stakeholders? And will the plans in the White Paper bring HE and FE closer together or merely reinforce the status quo?

My guests are Shane Chowen, the editor of FE Week, and Nick Hillman OBE, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer generated plenty of headlines at the Labour Party conference in late September when he set a new target of two-thirds of young people completing some form of higher level learning beyond school or college.

Rather than hitting this target purely by expanding university degrees, the government has set an extra sub-target of ensuring that by 2040 at least 10% of young people pursue higher technical education or apprenticeships by age 25, a near doubling of today’s figure.

However, as two new reports from the Edge Foundation explained earlier in September, young people can face many barriers when trying to access apprenticeships, while employers can face many barriers when trying to recruit young apprentices, particularly small and medium-sized companies - often known as SMEs.

So what are the barriers facing young people and employers? Should tackling these barriers be a local, regional or national responsibility? And is more funding the key to unlocking more apprenticeships for young people, or are there better solutions out there?

My guests are Anna Ambrose, the Chief Executive of the charity Workwhile, and Katy Dorman, the Apprenticeship Strategy Manager at Norfolk County Council.

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If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle.

The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was swallowed up by the simultaneous increase in National Insurance costs for employers, including HE providers, while this summer’s Spending Review across all government departments offered no solutions to the sector’s funding woes.

In contrast, this academic year has started with HE in the news for a more positive reason, with the announcement on September 10th that the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent intended to “formally collaborate” to create a new “super-university”, provisionally titled the London and South East University Group.

So what is this new university group, and what is it trying to achieve? Could other universities be tempted to follow suit by setting up their own group-like structures? And is the notion of university groups the future of HE in this country or merely a distraction?

My guests are David Kernohan, the Deputy Editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site - and Rachel Hewitt, the Chief Executive at MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities.

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When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning.

That’s not to say that an inspection system is ever likely to be universally loved, but Ofsted’s original plans – which we discussed on this podcast back in February – created a huge backlash.

So Ofsted went away and had another go, culminating in their new set of proposals for conducting inspections, released on September 9th. Unfortunately for Ofsted, the response from all the major unions has been just as critical at the second time of asking.

So what changes has Ofsted announced to their upcoming inspection framework? Are these changes the ones that critics wanted to see? And which parts of future Ofsted inspections are likely to prove controversial for many months to come?

My guests are Helena Marsh, the principal of Linton Village College, a comprehensive secondary school in South Cambridgeshire, and Mark Enser, a writer and columnist and also a former Ofsted inspector.

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Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you all had a great summer.

For many people working in politics, the summer break offers a gentler pace of life while most MPs and government ministers are away from Westminster. However, one former MP and minister decided that instead of putting his feet up, he should publish a new book that was almost destined to attract plenty of attention.

At the start of August, former schools minister Sir Nick Gibb and his co-author Robert Peal launched ‘Reforming Lessons: Why English Schools have improved since 2010 and how this was achieved’. 

As you would expect from someone who was not afraid to take on his critics as a government minister, Nick Gibb puts forward a range of arguments and evidence to explain the major changes that he oversaw during his time in government.

I’m delighted to be joined today by Sir Nick, whose career includes 27 years as an MP, five years as Shadow Schools Minister and over 10 years as Schools Minister, for which he received a knighthood earlier this year.

So, what drove Nick Gibb’s thinking about how to improve schools in England? Is there anything he would have done differently with the benefit of hindsight? And where does Nick Gibb agree and disagree with the Labour Party - both past and present - when it comes to raising school standards?

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Since T-levels were introduced in 2020 as new technical qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds, they have rarely been out of the spotlight.

In the last two years alone we have had major reports on T-levels from the Education Select Committee in Parliament, Ofsted and the National Audit Office – none of which painted a particularly rosy picture of how these qualifications have fared so far. 

The latest in this long line of inquiries came on the 27th of June, when the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament, which monitors government spending, published its verdict on how T-levels have been designed and implemented.

So what concerns did the Public Accounts Committee raise about T-levels? Why has this new brand of qualifications struggled to deliver the ambitions set out for them when they were launched five years ago? And are things likely to get better or worse for T-levels over the rest of this Parliament? 

My guests are Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow from 2010 to 2024 who was twice Minister for Skills and Apprenticeships at the Department for Education, and Sorah Gluck, a Senior Policy Advisor at the Edge Foundation.

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On Thursday 4th July 2024, the Labour Party won a resounding victory in the UK General Election.

In their election-winning manifesto, Labour’s number one pledge within their mission to ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ was to recruit 6,500 new teachers.

This pledge for 6,500 teachers has been repeated many times by government ministers in the 12 months since the election, but we’ve hardly heard anything about how the pledge will be delivered, or what it means in practice for schools and colleges.

So, what exactly was the original pledge that Labour made in their election manifesto? Why is it proving so difficult for the government to even define their pledge, let alone deliver it? And what risks lie ahead as the Government tries to attract more people into the teaching profession?

My guests are James Zuccollo, the director for school workforce at the Education Policy Institute, and Jack Worth, an education economist and school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research.

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On June 11th, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the result of the Government’s Spending Review, which confirmed the budgets that each government department will have until 2028.

The Department for Education, or DfE’s budget will rise from £101 billion to £109 billion over this period – an increase of 0.8% after adjusting for inflation.

So, is the Spending Review outcome a good or bad result for the DfE? How did schools, colleges and universities fare in relation to each other within the DfE’s spending plans? And what question marks remain about how the DfE will prioritise its spending going forward? 

My guests are Katie Carr, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First, and Dani Payne, Senior Researcher at the Social Market Foundation think tank.

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