Baroness Spielman (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

11 min read3 hr

For many parents and teachers, the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is clearly one of provision.

The government’s recent promise of £3bn over four years in extra funding for SEND was welcomed by those groups as an important step in addressing shortfalls and bottlenecks. They are nervous, however, about upcoming reforms by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson who has warned that she “won’t shy away” from “difficult” changes, which could mean limiting the education, health and care plans (EHCPs) that mandate extra support for children who secure them.

Because there is another side of this vexed debate: those for whom the SEND crisis is instead one of overdiagnosis. For them, a generation raised online has been shaped by a new culture in which such struggles are glamourised, infused with identity politics, and vulnerable to social contagion. The effect has been dangerous, they argue, both to children’s outcomes and the public purse.

Amanda (now Baroness) Spielman, who chaired exam regulator Ofqual from 2011 to 2016 and then education, training and childcare inspectorate Ofsted from 2017 to 2023, says it is a crisis of both provision and overdiagnosis.

“There’s a lot of encouragement coming to the young, from many directions, to see themselves as fragile; as damaged. You want to be interesting in adolescence. You want to be different,” Spielman tells The House.

“We wanted, understandably and rightly, to remove some of the stigma that historically has surrounded mental illness, and we’ve possibly overcompensated a bit, to the point that it’s become glamorous, in some contexts, for teenagers to boast about their mental problems. It makes them interesting, it gets them attention, it gets them special accommodations.”

In this country and around the world, the trend has been “to label a great deal more than we once would have done” and yet, she argues, that “isn’t always a good idea”.

“It gives the child themselves the sense of being less capable than others,” she says. “It lowers parents’ expectations of what their children can achieve, and it lowers teachers’ expectations of what children can achieve.”

“We can’t take all the effort out of learning,” Spielman warns. “We need to take care that we’re not characterising having to make an effort as proof of a special need.”

The ex-Ofsted chair also suggests students might be labelled as dyscalculic if they were taught maths badly, for example. “It’s very important not to locate problems in a child that are actually down to bad curriculum or bad teaching,” she adds. “We’ve got a SEND system that tends to jump over that: is there something wrong with the teaching the child’s had?”

Does that mean she believes a poor quality of teaching or the curriculum has led to the increase in SEND?

“We have, at the moment, pretty good curriculum and teaching, but it hasn’t always been the case,” Spielman replies. “We, like a lot of other countries, went down some blind alleys teaching reading between roughly the 1960s and the 1990s/early 2000s, where we thought that we could largely bypass the actual nuts and bolts of reading.

“Here, as in every country that tried this approach, far more children started to struggle when they weren’t explicitly taught the nuts and bolts, and far larger numbers of children were labelled dyslexic.

“Now, a proportion of those children would always have found learning to read particularly difficult. But many of them, if they’d been taught with properly evidence-based curriculum and teaching from the beginning, would never have needed to struggle.

“If you try and talk about this, sometimes people will say that you’re denying that special needs exist. You’re not – I’m not.”

She points to recent reports that the number of students registering disabilities at elite US universities has shot up, reaching 38 per cent of Stanford undergrads this year according to The Atlantic.

“There does need to be a bit of stigma around the parent who doesn’t prepare their child for school”

“What exactly is the point of putting the label on if there isn’t really any special treatment that they need to learn well?” Spielman asks. “It’s atomisation of education that probably, overall, is degrading the education system, if we have to put a lot of time into trying to make special arrangements around children who won’t actually get very much out of it.”

She has concluded, for instance, that there is often not enough evidence to show the benefits of full-time one-to-one teaching assistants – an expensive accommodation often requested by parents and recommended by educational psychologists.

Rather than do away with them altogether – she acknowledges some children with profound disabilities need them – Spielman says she advised successive ministers to create the educational equivalent of NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidelines that schools could point to.

“It’s very difficult at the moment for a head to say no,” she explains. And yet none of the eight Tory education secretaries she served under followed her advice, which she suspects was due to the “political toxicity around this subject”. “I actually really, really hope that this government has some success in tackling it,” she adds.

It sometimes looks as though there is widespread rebellion in our schools – not from students but their parents – against homework; attendance; permitted holiday times. Has she seen a shift in attitudes?

“It’s more difficult than it was to have all parents buy into and accept the constraints of a school that has to work for several hundred or 1,000 children,” she says. “It does feel as though there’s been an erosion of school authority, and perhaps authority in other public services and systems, and that makes the job of running schools really, really hard at the moment.”

The Conservative peer has been critical in the past of delayed potty training; primary school teachers often say children are being sent to school still in nappies. This, Spielman puts down to wealth: “Virtually every parent in Britain, as in most developed countries, can afford disposable nappies indefinitely.” And her solution? Embarrass the parents.

“There does need to be a bit of stigma around the parent who doesn’t prepare their child for school in this way,” she says.

“When you’ve lost that push factor on parents to potty train from the unpleasantness of non-disposable nappies, you need a strong cultural expectation to replace it, in order to counteract the convenience of just leaving the child in disposables.

“That’s a hard thing to do, to establish cultural norms that never really needed to exist before… Is it public health campaigns? Is it school admission rules? I don’t know. It’s probably a combination of all of the above, but it needs a brave minister to tackle it.”

She gives short shrift to gentle parenting – the child-rearing philosophy, popular among millennials, that urges parents to offer choices and validate their child’s feelings rather than punish them.

“Giving children choices all the time is exhausting for the parent and exhausting for the child,” Spielman says. “It burdens the adults, and it sets up unrealistic expectations for the child of always being able to have everything the way they want.”

Many will know of Spielman from when she hit the headlines in 2023 over Ofsted’s inspection of Caversham Primary School, after which long-standing head teacher Ruth Perry took her own life. The school’s rating was downgraded from outstanding to inadequate on the basis of safeguarding measures not taken.

Friends and family have blamed the regulator for Perry’s suicide. A coroner ruled at the end of 2023 that the inspection was a contributing factor and an independent review in 2024 found that Ofsted’s response to the suicide was “defensive and complacent”. Changes were subsequently made to inspection processes. 

How does Spielman reflect on it now?

“It was a very, very difficult experience. I’m coming back to some of the themes we’ve touched on. We are in a world where we’re dangerously close to an expectation that nobody should ever have to hear anything that they don’t want to hear.

“That, sadly, was a case where an inspector had to give very difficult feedback to somebody about some really enormous failures on their watch. And very sadly, two months later, after a further investigation that confirmed all of the failings, Ruth Perry did sadly kill herself.

“It’s the last thing anybody would have wanted. Yet, the only thing that could have, I think, changed the outcome would be if the inspector had covered up the failures and not reported them to governors or the local authority.”

The former chair of Ofsted stands by the particular lead inspector and his judgment, saying “he would have been leaving children at risk” had he come to a different conclusion.

“How do you report on serious failures in public services if you can’t say anything that could upset the person at the receiving end? I think that’s a nettle that nobody has been willing to grasp. I’m confident that the inspector did everything he could in really difficult conversations.”

But teachers do complain that Ofsted inspectors can be overly harsh in the way they deliver news, The House points out, and the coroner said the lead inspector in this case had been “at times rude and intimidating”.

“There was a claim that in one meeting, his tone wasn’t nice, right? And it was the meeting in which he was put under extreme pressure to change his judgment,” Spielman replies.

“It’s a desperately sad case, but I don’t think anybody has yet addressed the real difficulties here that reporting openly and honestly on the quality of public services is sometimes going to be difficult for the people at the receiving end.”

“We don’t expect the prisons inspectorate to make everybody happy”

Spielman, 64, was educated at state and private schools including St Paul’s Girls’ in Hammersmith before going to Clare College, Cambridge and working in the city. She then gained a master’s in comparative education and entered the sector, becoming research and policy director for the Ark academy chain. Her lack of teaching experience was cited by the Education Select Committee when it rejected her nomination to chair Ofsted (their objection was overridden by then education secretary Nicky Morgan).

In her youth, Spielman reveals, she was a Liberal Democrat and went to a National Union of Students conference under that banner but stopped being active in politics in her mid-20s – until now.

After she shared the stage with MP Richard Tice at a recent Policy Exchange event, there has been speculation in the education sector that she is being lined up to be Reform’s education secretary. The Conservative peer tells The House it is a “bizarre rumour”.

Would she rule out ever joining Reform or its cabinet? “I am a Conservative. Kemi Badenoch nominated me to the House of Lords – I am there absolutely embracing the party I’ve joined. I have not previously been in politics, but I take seriously what I’ve undertaken. No, I’m not a floating voter looking for another flag.”

She is not close to Badenoch, having only dealt with her on schools guidance for gender-questioning children when the now Tory leader was equalities minister, and says she doesn’t know how her nomination to the Lords came about: “I nearly fell off my chair in surprise!”

Having taken her seat as a new peer in May last year, she is looking forward to life as a legislator.

“For somebody like me, of course it’s exciting. It’s a serious responsibility. I loved the Ofsted job – I really, really enjoyed it, notwithstanding the difficulties of the Ruth Perry case in my last year. I know that what we did there really made an enormous difference,” she says.

“There is nothing that you could ever do to have a meaningful regulatory mechanism that would simultaneously make everybody happy. Ofsted, more than any other inspectorate, seems to have this expectation placed on it that it should be able to make everybody happy. We don’t expect the prisons inspectorate to make everybody happy.”

If her critics hoped the Ofsted years would teach Spielman to soften her edges, they will be disappointed: it seems she enters politics convinced not that she was too hard but that the country is becoming too soft.