Students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England are educated in mainstream schools amid rising demand, funding cuts, and staff turnover. While prior research has highlighted teacher workload and lack of training as barriers to inclusion, less attention has been paid to how national policy and accountability structures shape teachers’ perceptions of their capacity to deliver inclusion in practice. This study draws on interviews with 11 mainstream secondary school teachers to examine the systemic and policy-level barriers they face in supporting students with SEND. Thematic analysis revealed three interconnected challenges: the distortive pressures of accountability culture; the mismatch between supply and demand in provision; and teachers’ limited confidence due to insufficient training. Teachers’ accounts illuminate the contradictions between political rhetoric on inclusion and the structures that undermine it. By situating their experiences within the broader context of a shifting policy discourse, this study provides original evidence to suggest that persistent barriers are not simply practical or pedagogical, but symptomatic of long-standing, centrally made choices about funding, training, and accountability. We conclude that proposed reforms to the SEND system provide a generational opportunity to confront these entrenched contradictions, but only if it goes beyond rhetorical commitments to deliver substantive reforms.
Lin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.