The Schools White Paper – Every Child Achieving and Thriving – includes a commitment to provide ‘wraparound’ specialist support for mainstream schools.
The Council for Disabled Children undertook a small-scale project to explore the role of the specialist workforce in enabling this conceptual and pedagogical shift.
The process involved semi-structured interviews with 16 professionals across a variety of roles. These were followed by a roundtable conversation held in February 2026, and an iterative process of confirming with participants the conclusions and recommendations set out in the report.
The Schools White Paper and SEND reform consultation were published the day before our roundtable, so we had the opportunity to reflect on them, and in particular the proposals around ‘Experts at Hand’.
Who are the ‘specialist workforce’ and who did we speak to?
When speaking of the specialist workforce, we refer to allied health professionals including:
- Occupational Therapists
- Speech and Language Therapists
- Educational psychologists
- Hearing impairment and visual impairment specialist teachers
- Autism specialist and advisory teachers
- Specific Learning Difficulty teachers
- Outreach special school and Alternative provision teachers.
This is not intended as an exhaustive list, and we also include others who might be called in to support classroom teachers with specific knowledge and expertise related to SEND from across education, health and social care (e.g. assistive technology specialist teachers, physios, and mental health professionals).
Throughout the project, we spoke with mainstream primary and secondary teachers, educational psychologists, a head of inclusion, head teachers, SENCOs in primary and secondary schools, an occupational therapist, a speech and language therapist, a music service teacher, a teacher of the deaf and those with vision impairments, and a special school teacher.