Beyond the Label: What the SEND Transition Collective taught us

Practitioners, leaders, researchers and advocates gathered in London to do something the sector urgently needed: not just name the problem, but co-design the route out of it. Here is what they found, and what it means for every corner of further education (FE) and skills.

On 24 April, a room full of people who work with, advocate for, and teach young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) gathered for a day that felt different from the usual sector event. Not because the challenges set out for all of us were new. The reality was that many in the room had been naming them for years. It was because the intention was different. This was not a talking shop. It was a working group with a deadline and a focus.

Convened by the Education Training Foundation (ETF) and FE News, the Bridging the SEND Transition Collective brought together practitioners, college leaders, researchers, employers and advocates to map the current reality, articulate where the sector wants to get to, and agree the practical asks it wants to put to policymakers as the Government’s 2026 Schools White Paper consultation closes.

The timing matters enormously. The White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, places transition and inclusion at the heart of its vision for post-16 reform. Yet the gap between that policy ambition and the lived experience of learners with SEND remains, in the words of the Collective, “stubbornly wide.”

FE and skills providers also occupy a uniquely important position within the system. Their flexibility, vocational focus, employer connections and capacity to personalise progression routes often make colleges the place where learners successfully re-engage with education for the first time. That places FE and skills not simply at the receiving end of reform, but at the centre of making it work. In many respects, FE and skills providers are where the wider system’s successes and failures become most visible. Colleges are often the point at which fragmented transitions, unmet needs and delayed intervention converge, but also where learners begin to rebuild confidence, identity and progression.

“Inclusion is not a bolt-on function delivered by specialists alone. It is a hallmark of professionalism across the whole FE and skills workforce.”

ETF and FE News SEND Transition Collective, April 2026

What the Collective heard first

Before a single solution was proposed, the room named the reality. Many learners arrive in post-16 settings carrying the weight of a school experience that did not serve them well: exclusion, repeated failure, unmet needs, and the often unnamed and under recognised exhaustion that comes from being asked, year after year, to succeed in a system not designed for the way they think.

The Collective was candid about what this means in practice: FE and skills providers are often not anticipating learner needs during transition despite knowing when transitions will occur. This oftens results in guessing rather than planning. That is not a failure of individual practitioners. It is a structural problem that leaves learners exposed at exactly the moment they are most vulnerable.

Out of the day’s discussions, ten headline findings emerged with striking consistency across every session.

1. Transition is a lifelong skill, not a single event. Current practice treats it as a point in time. It should be built into everything.
2. FE and skills providers are still guessing, not anticipating. Poor information sharing means colleges begin each relationship reactively.
3. Assessment must become needs-led and non-diagnostic. Support should be triggered by what a learner needs, not by what the system has labelled them.
4. Educator development must be a continuous, lifelong professional cycle. Training that happens once and disappears does not change practice.
5. Inclusive practices are cultural, not a service. They require community-wide ownership: families, carers, employers and learners themselves.
6. Education should be a motorway with different lanes, not a cul-de-sac. Assessments are the service stations along the journey — never the destination.
7. GCSE and Level 2 resit requirements are blocking progression. Functional capability and examination performance are not the same thing.
8. Funding architecture is getting in the way. Administrative layers between resource and learner mean opportunities are consistently missed.
9. The employer gap is unresolved. The FE sector has developed real expertise; most employers have not, and handover fails as a result.
10. Technology must reduce the administrative load, not create it. The goal is more educator time with learners, not less.

Three conversations that shaped the day

The Collective worked across three interconnected themes: transition, lifelong learning and neuro-inclusion, and workforce development. Each conversation reinforced the others, and together they represent a coherent, sector-led position on what needs to change.

1. Anticipating learner needs through transition

Transition planning, participants agreed, needs to begin far earlier. It was discussed that this needs to be as early as Year 9, and no later than Year 10, for learners likely to need supported pathways into FE, apprenticeships or supported employment. The current approach, which concentrates planning in Year 11, leaves too little time and too little room for the kind of co-designed, person-centred work that makes a genuine difference. It puts pressure on everyone rather than paced development and progression.

The Collective’s vision for excellent transition practice is both ambitious and achievable: clear accountability at every stage, information that travels with the learner rather than requiring them to tell their story again and again, and specialist pathways designed specifically for post-16 settings — not school models repurposed and expected to fit.

Participants also stressed that transition does not end at enrolment into FE. For many learners, the most fragile transition remains the move into employment, where inclusive practice is often less developed and employer confidence remains uneven.

“FE and skills environments understand the needs of students with SEND well, but more work is needed nationally through the policy lens to help employers bridge the gap between education and work settings.”

Collective participant, April 2026

2. Lifelong learning and neuro-inclusion

A powerful reframing ran through this session: the sector has spent too long defining problems and not long enough redesigning systems around solutions.

A memorable image offered by one facilitator was that education should be a motorway, not a cul-de-sac and captured the mood precisely. Assessments are the service stations along the way; they are there to support the journey, and not to end it. They mean nothing unless they translate into the next pathway to proceed on.

Participants were clear-eyed about the current system’s limitations. The post-18 and post-25 “cliff edge,” where support reduces sharply despite need not ending at an age threshold, was raised repeatedly. So was the dominance of a medical model that incentivises diagnosis as the route to support, rather than positioning needs-based, strengths-focused practice as the norm. This has been a focus for education and employment and often creates a barrier or hurdle rather than responding to the actual needs.

The Collective pushed back on an overly narrow policy narrative that defines success only as rapid entry into employment. Inclusion must be evaluated through its downstream impact on lives and society: reduced exclusion, improved health and wellbeing, stronger communities and greater independence.

Three practical routes to closing the gap were identified: treating transition as a skill to be developed throughout life rather than a destination; trusting and empowering educators to make contextual judgements rather than deferring to examinations; and moving resources as close as possible to the front line, removing the layers of administration that sit between funding and learner.

3. Workforce development for inclusive practice

The third conversation was perhaps the most urgent. Participants were unambiguous: workforce development is the critical enabling mechanism for everything else. Without a coherent, quality-assured national development offer for the FE and skills workforce, inclusive practice will remain uneven and dependent on local capacity.

The current picture is patchy: training is inconsistent across providers, difficult to scale, and insufficiently tailored to the diverse experience levels across the workforce. Staff entering directly from industry may have deep occupational expertise but little grounding in SEND or inclusive pedagogy. High turnover and persistent vacancies mean development cannot be designed as a one-off intervention.

“The FE and skills workforce is not resistant to change. They are already managing increasing complexity with innovation and creativity. The challenge is not motivation, but capacity and confidence.”

ETF and FE News SEND Transition Collective, April 2026

A strong consensus emerged around universal design principles as the professional baseline. This reflected an educational model built around inclusive practice for all learners, rather than support designed only for a labelled minority. Inclusive practice was increasingly framed not as an optional specialism, but as part of the core professional standard for the FE and skills workforce.

The cross-cutting themes that held everything together

Across all three conversations, four points of focus surfaced consistently. They are worth naming because they reveal the shape of the challenge.

The system is still reactive, not anticipatory

Whether in transition, assessment or workforce development, the sector consistently finds itself responding after the fact. Information, development, support and resources arrive too late. Anticipation requires investment in early systems, shared data, and proactive professional development.

Funding architecture is obstructing the learner

The funding exists. The will exists. What gets in the way is the administrative and structural distance between resource and learner — there are post-19 funding cliffs, restricted pots, compliance layers that consume time better spent with learners.

Technology must be a tool, not a burden

Digital enablement is a genuine opportunity but only if it reduces administrative load and returns time to educators. Technology that adds compliance layers is not the answer.

Inclusive practices are cultural, not a service

Inclusion cannot be delivered by a policy or a compliance framework. It must be chosen by communities, families, educators, employers, and the wider networks around each learner. A shift from managing difference to valuing it.

Across everything, there was a clear call for co-design and co-production: learners, parents, carers, communities and employers as active partners in shaping provision. Co-production is not consultation after decisions are made; it is designing services with those who experience them. Participants argued that co-production should be treated not as an engagement exercise, but as core infrastructure for effective policy and service design.

What the sector is asking policymakers to do

These are not aspirational wishes. They are the practical, implementable asks of a sector that understands the problem, has the expertise to address it, and is calling for the structural conditions to do so.

The sector’s ten asks of policymakers

1. Mandate early, evidence-informed, non-diagnostic assessment at every stage of the post-16 learner journey — triggered by need, not diagnosis.
2. Require technology providers to carry administrative load, not create it. The test: does this give educators more time with learners?
3. Build national transition accountability — a shared framework from Year 10 through FE and into employment, with clear ownership at each stage.
4. Introduce standardised, quality-assured, post-16 specific mandatory professional development for the FE and skills workforce, grounded in universal design principles.
5. Trust practitioners. Reform the funding architecture to remove the layers between resource and learner, and empower tutors and inclusion leads to make learner-level decisions.
6. Engage directly with the lived experience of navigating the FE system — those designing policy should understand the realities of further education from the inside.
7. Establish professional standards for Local Authority SEND casework, ensuring consistent knowledge of policy, post-16 pathways and transition practice across the country.
8. Build employer readiness into SEND reform, with guidance and workforce development that supports inclusive apprenticeships and workplaces.
9. Develop a cross-government common language for SEND and neuro-inclusion, shared across education, health, justice and employment to reduce fragmentation.
10. Invest in professional development and supply pipelines for specialist roles — including occupational health and speech and language therapy — so provision can meet the real complexity of need.

What to carry forward

The Collective’s message was clear: the system must move beyond repeated diagnosis of the problem. Reform must be designed so that the sector is not having the same conversation in five years’ time — but can instead point to sustained improvements in learner experience, workforce confidence, and long-term outcomes.

The FE and skills sector possess something genuinely distinctive: flexibility, creativity and a deep responsiveness to the people in front of it. If policy creates the conditions for professional trust and genuine collaboration, the sector can innovate rapidly and sustainably. What it cannot do is continue to absorb the consequences of a system still built for everyone except the learners who need it most.

Workforce development was repeatedly described throughout the day not as a supporting activity, but as critical national infrastructure for successful SEND reform. Universal design principles, i.e. designing for all, not adjusting for some, should be the baseline. Inclusive practice is not a specialism. It is a professional norm.

“Education should not be a cul-de-sac with an examination as its destination. It should be more like a motorway, where assessment is a service station along the way, and the focus is always the whole journey of the person.”

ETF and FE News SEND Transition Collective, April 2026

The White Paper consultation may have closed, but the real test of SEND reform is only beginning. The question now is whether the system can move fast enough, and coherently enough, to match the ambition it has set for learners.

By Professor Amanda Kirby, Founder of Do-IT Solutions and Dr Vikki Smith, Chief Professionalism Officer, at the Education Training Foundation

This article draws on the full report of the ETF and FE News Bridging the SEND Transition Collective, April 2026. Policy context includes the Government’s 2026 Schools White Paper Every Child Achieving and Thriving, the post-16 Education and Skills White Paper (October 2025), and the Education Select Committee inquiry Making Further Education Fit for the Future (2025).