Some parents say that the small SEN environment has saved their child – what would you say to parents who choose special schools?

We would say that the current mainstream model does not work well for any learner – no child or adult can genuinely flourish in classrooms of 30+ students. So we would advocate smaller class sizes and smaller schools and post 16 institutions generally within the mainstream. We have good examples from the ‘Human Scale Education’ Movement of how schools can be restructured to answer this problem, e.g. a large comprehensive school restructured into three different schools with separate head teachers, staff teams etc sharing the same site – none of these however are for separate provision, all three schools are inclusive. We believe a similar approach could also be adopted by post 16 institutions and universities.

We would also advocate initiatives such as ‘quiet’ settings within schools for any child to make use of.