Asking without listening
When the government launched the SEND review in 2022, it promised to “restore families’ trust and confidence in an inclusive education system.” Yet for many families of disabled young people, it felt like déjà vu, another consultation that asked for their views but did not seem prepared to hear them.
Our Right to Review project aimed to find out how parents and carers engaged with the consultation, who took part, who did not, and how the process felt from their perspective. What we found challenges how we think about participation, evidence, and voice in education policy. It reminds us that listening is not the same as asking, and that consultation can appear participatory while failing to actually hear those most affected. As one parent told us in our recent study, “I will fill in the consultation, but I very much doubt it will make any difference, because they won’t be asking the right questions, and they won’t be hearing what they need to hear, because they don’t listen. They don’t know, they don’t understand, they won’t hear it. But I will fill it in anyway.”
For many parents, completing the consultation was exhausting. The process was long, technical, and often inaccessible. Parents described the sense that the questions had already decided the answers, and that their knowledge, built through years of navigating a complex and adversarial SEND system, was treated as emotional rather than expert. Perhaps most strikingly, young people themselves were almost entirely absent. Out of 1.6 million children and young people with SEND in England, fewer than 100 under-18s took part. The 104-page consultation document, written in dense policy language, offered little opportunity for meaningful engagement. As one parent put it, “…why can’t my daughter be engaged in this? She is highly articulate, why can’t they engage with her and say it’s your rights, your responsibilities and you are a citizen of this country and it’s all about you? Of course it affects me as a parent, but it affects her a million times more.” Parents also told us how little opportunity there was for real dialogue. They wanted conversations, local discussions, and opportunities to speak directly with policymakers. Instead, they faced an impersonal online form. And yet, parents still showed up. More than half of all 5,683 responses to the SEND Review came from parents or carers, a remarkable level of engagement from people who already invest so much energy into advocating for their children. As one parent told us, “Lots of things I do are about making a difference for other people because that then means our bad experiences have counted for something.”
Our findings also highlight the importance of language in shaping meaningful participation. The words chosen within consultation documents can have a profound effect on consultees’ ability and willingness to contribute. Many parents described the language of the SEND Review as alienating or disempowering, reinforcing the sense that their lived expertise was undervalued. As we argue in another recent the discursive choices made in policy texts are never neutral; they position readers and set the terms of engagement. Together, these analyses make a compelling case for policymakers to attend more closely to the discursive power of their language in all public consultation exercises. While our recommendations are grounded in the SEND context, the principles extend to any policy area engaging with minoritised or marginalised communities.
Whose knowledge counts?
From a research perspective, these experiences highlight a deeper problem about whose knowledge is recognised in education policymaking. The government’s own principles for consultation name young people and disabled participants as key groups, yet they were largely missing from the SEND Review process. This exclusion is not only procedural; it is epistemic, reflective of a hierarchy of expertise in which professional or institutional knowledge is seen as objective, while experiential knowledge, rooted in lived experience, is often dismissed as emotional or anecdotal. The result is that those most affected by policy are least likely to shape it.
Meaningful participation requires dismantling that hierarchy. Families’ lived experiences are evidence. They reveal how policy plays out in practice and where systems fail. Recognising this is key to rebuilding trust and creating education reforms that work in reality, not just in rhetoric.
The problems we found in the SEND Review are not unique to SEND policymaking. Across the sector, consultation is often presented as a form of democratic participation, yet too often it functions as performance:
Consultation on policy development can reinvigorate democratic engagement, but it can also often silence views through a sort of participatory disempowerment whereby the existence of an official consultation exercise closes off further, alternative or subaltern voices that are silenced by the existence of an official depiction of ‘the public’ (Morison, 2017, pp. 657–658)
If policymakers and researchers want to engage meaningfully with communities, consultation needs to be reimagined as collaboration. Accessibility must be central, not an afterthought. Processes should use clear, inclusive language, offer a range of ways to participate, and provide time and space for genuine discussion. Above all, they should be transparent about how responses are used and what influence they have.
As we wait for the imminent White Paper introducing yet further government plans for SEND reforms, Special Needs Jungle had this to say about our findings: ‘We believe that it is important that the government learns from this project, because if we want an education system that actually works for everyone, we need to start by listening to the people who live with its failures every day. And we need to do it properly this time.’
Dr Jill Pluquailec is Senior Lecturer in Autism in the SIOE. Gill O’Connor and Emma Sadler were researchers in the Right to Review team and are both currently working on their PhDs at SHU.
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