Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to ensure the recruitment of adequate numbers of Special Educational Needs Coordinators.

Every mainstream school and academy must have a Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENCO) who is a qualified teacher. The recruitment of SENCOs is the responsibility of individual schools.

On 28 January 2019, we published the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy and launched the Early Career Framework, which provides the starting point for a review of Initial Teacher Training content.

In addition, the Whole Schools’ SEND consortium, led by nasen, are delivering a 2 year programme of work. The aim is to embed special educational need and disability within the school led system of school improvement in order to equip the workforce to deliver high quality teaching across all types of special educational needs (SEN). Part of that work is to undertake a review of the learning outcomes of the mandatory Masters level National Award in SEN Coordination to ensure that the qualification reflects the changing needs of the educational system. A report is due in the spring.