As a new report highlights gaps in how we prepare new teachers to meet the needs of pupils with SEND, Margaret Mulholland explains what can be done to improve things.
Every trainee completing their initial teacher training should feel equipped to teach pupils who face barriers to learning.
Unfortunately, this currently isn’t the case. A 2025 survey, commissioned by the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT), found that 65 per cent of providers do not believe new teachers are equipped to meet increasingly complex SEND in mainstream classrooms, and only 39 per cent feel their organisation is adequately prepared to develop trainees in this area.
This is concerning, especially given the government’s recent push for more young people with SEND to be educated in mainstream schools.
Gaps in current SEND training
NASBTT’s new report, Bridging the SEND practice gap, identifies some key gaps in current provision, including the need for trainees to have opportunities to connect what they learn about inclusive practice with the decisions they make in the everyday reality of diverse classrooms.
This was highlighted in feedback from the expert panels run by NASBTT. Trainee teachers and ECTs shared their frustration at not having more time to stand at the crossroads of an action and explore the variety of decisions they might make based on available evidence.
For example, access to learning can be lost in the language of an explanation, the pace of a transition, the demands of a task or the assumptions made about what pupils already know. Teachers make choices in each of these moments. Trainees need to see those choices, understand them and practise making them for themselves, with mentor support to emphasise this.
Updated guidance from the DfE on Intensive Training and Practice (ITAP) offers a useful opportunity here. To qualify for ITAP grants, accredited ITT providers must ensure that the majority of their ITAP content directly supports trainees in adaptive teaching and meeting the needs of pupils with SEND.
This has tremendous value if applied correctly. ITAP creates time to study one element of teaching closely: to examine the evidence, see it modelled, practise it and receive feedback.
Importance of challenging preconceptions
The NASBTT report also highlights the importance of challenging preconceptions around children with a diagnosis and navigating the contradictions of a system that has previously worked on a “most and some” approach – doing something different for children who struggle, instead of teaching to all.
This requires close observation and attention to individual responses. Take the moment when pupils begin independent work. There is a sequence here that is familiar to most teachers: explain the task, check understanding and give pupils time to start. Yet within that short sequence there is a great deal to notice.
Who has understood the task but cannot decide where to begin? Who has heard the instruction but cannot hold the steps in mind? Who is sitting quietly because they need more processing time? Who has begun writing but is repeating the model without any sense of what they are trying to do?
An experienced teacher will often spot these things without fanfare. They may make the first step clearer, return to a pupil with a brief prompt or use a worked example to help the pupil enter the task.
They may wait. They may alter their next explanation because the pupils’ responses have shown them something important.
These actions are not the preserve of specialists. They are central to teaching. Yet much of this professional judgement remains tacit. It is held in the pause before an adult intervenes, in the question asked at the right moment, in the decision to change the task before a pupil gives up.
The objective is to make that thinking visible for trainee teachers. ITAP is well suited to this work because it allows a familiar classroom moment to be slowed down, examined and rehearsed.
Noticing barriers to learning
NASBTT also calls for a stronger focus on trainee capability to notice barriers to learning, use evidence of pupils’ responses and adapt teaching with purpose.
For example, a trainee might observe an expert teacher introduce independent work, with a clear focus on how pupils are enabled to start and sustain the task. The observation should go beyond whether the teacher was clear or whether pupils were compliant. It should ask what pupils did in response: Did they know what to do? Could they begin without waiting for help? What did the teacher notice when a pupil did not engage? What did the teacher do next?
The trainee can then rehearse the same part of the lesson, and feedback can attend to the pupils’ experience as well as the trainee’s delivery. Did the task make sense? Did the explanation reduce uncertainty? Did the support promote independence? What evidence suggests that the pupil was able to access the learning?
That is a different kind of feedback from “be more confident” or “move around the room”. Those observations may have their place, but they do not always help a novice teacher understand why a pupil is struggling. Training needs to connect teacher action with pupil response.
Adaptation should not be treated as something trainees encounter once they have secured the basics. The idea that a novice teacher must first learn a standard version of teaching, then acquire the capacity to flex has become deeply embedded in parts of the system, but this risks creating a false separation.
Secure routines matter. Clear explanations matter. Consistency matters. But a routine that leaves a pupil unable to participate is not yet secure. An explanation that cannot be understood by part of the class has not done its job. Teaching all children requires attention to difference from the outset.
The most useful question for trainees may be simple: who might find this difficult, what may be getting in the way, and what could I change?
That question should not lead trainees towards diagnosis. Their task is not to become experts in labels.
Their task is to become experts in the pupils they teach: to notice barriers, use assessment as evidence and test thoughtful adaptations. Over time, this develops something more important than a collection of strategies. It develops confidence that they can make a difference.
Developing skills for inclusive teaching
Bridging the SEND practice gap sets out a wider agenda for ITT, including stronger alignment between providers and placement schools, development for mentors, and a greater focus on teacher self-efficacy.
It’s good that updated ITAP guidance gives providers permission and funding to place SEND within this work. The opportunity now is to use it alongside other tools, for example, placements within special settings, to develop the professional judgement that makes inclusive teaching possible.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders and project director at Whole School SEND.