Inside Your Ed

• Everyone agrees the SEND system is broken, but how do you fix it?

  “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.CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUEFOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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• What final grade does the Curriculum and Assessment Review deserve?

  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.CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUEFOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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• Does the Post 16 White Paper have the right answers, or even the right questions?

  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.CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUEFOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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• How do you get more young apprentices into small businesses?

  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.CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUEFOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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• Does the Higher Education system need more 'super universities'?

  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.CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUEFOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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