From lone SENCO to whole-school SEND: a practical guide for 2026

A colleague catches you in the corridor at break, holding a question they have been carrying since registration. A teacher emails at quarter past seven about a pupil's anxiety. A TA who has tried a strategy three different ways comes back, looking for the next thing to try. By Friday afternoon, more than two-thirds of the SEND phone calls, emails, and meetings in the school have, somehow, been routed back to one person.

In the 2022 book The Lone SENDCO, Gary Aubin gave this pattern a name: ‘The Lone SENCO’

A different week, in a smaller number of schools: A smaller number of SENCOs have a different experience. Although it’s one that has developed because they’ve been able work with SLT to prioritise building staff capability across the school, training teachers and TAs to take SEND ownership, and embedding routines that let colleagues find answers without coming to the SENCO for everything. Their distributed SEND expertise works for all. The corridor question often gets answered by a colleague before it reaches the SENCO. The TA returns, but with the next thing she wants to try, not asking for one. SEND emails route to several people, because several people know enough to handle them. These SENCOs are not less busy, but they are using their time where it has the greatest impact, and doing the jobs only the SENCO can genuinely do.

The difference between these schools is rarely about the individual SENCO. It is structural. SEND expertise sits with one person, by design, in most schools. The SENCO role was conceived as coordination, not as clinical specialism, and not as the person solely responsible for SEND. The National Award for SEN Coordination, and the SENCO NPQ that is replacing it, are leadership qualifications.

There are valuable specialist routes for staff who want to deepen their SEND practice in particular areas: ELSA training for emotional literacy, HLTA status with a SEND pathway, Level 5 Specialist Teaching Assistant qualifications, autism education awards and dyslexia diplomas. These pathways are useful and well-evidenced, but were not designed to build distributed, high-quality SEND practice across an entire staff team. They typically develop one or two specialists, while the rest of the staff operate without the foundational SEND understanding the new framework expects.

The schools that have made the shift away from the Lone SENCO model have, in one way or another, redesigned that structure. Not perfectly, and not all at once, but enough that SEND expertise no longer sits with one person.

 

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Two recent policy moves have made this redesign more urgent.

The new Ofsted school inspection toolkit, in force since 10 November 2025, grades inclusion as a standalone evaluation area on the school's report card. Inspectors look explicitly at whether staff "receive suitable training and support to implement" the graduated approach: a whole-staff judgement, not a SENCO one.

Alongside this, the Inclusive Mainstream Fund best practice guidance (March 2026) requires every school to publish an Inclusion Strategy by 31 December 2026, setting out how the school delivers inclusive whole-school approaches and evidence-based support across seven principles of inclusion.

The deadline matters less than the direction of travel: each of the seven principles, from "ambitious leadership and governance that embeds inclusion" to "a safe and respectful culture fostering belonging and attendance", assumes capability across the staff team, not in one person. The schools that have been gradually distributing SEND expertise for years are now also the ones best placed to deliver and evidence what the new framework asks for.

What distributed SEND expertise looks like

Distributed SEND expertise has three layers that work together:

• universal awareness across all staff,
• enhanced skills in a smaller group who work most closely with particular needs,
• specialist depth held by the SENCO and one or two others.

The three layers map cleanly onto the DfE's new four-tier support structure. The universal offer to all pupils depends on universal awareness across all staff. Targeted and targeted plus support depend on staff with enhanced skills in the relevant areas. Specialist support, drawing on the Experts at Hand offer once it is in place, depends on specialist depth in the school to commission, contextualise and follow through on the input.

Universal awareness is the foundation. Every teacher and TA needs enough SEND understanding to deliver high-quality teaching for the full range of pupils in front of them. The EEF's five-a-day approach, set out in their Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools guidance report, is a useful example of what this can look like in practice: five evidence-informed strategies that work for all pupils and especially well for those with SEND. The nasen Whole School SEND Teacher Handbook is a free starting point that maps the universal layer across the major areas of need.

Enhanced skills sit one layer up. A smaller group of staff (typically TAs, year-group or key-stage leads, pastoral staff, and subject leads or heads of year in secondary settings) develop deeper expertise in particular areas. ELSA is the cleanest example: one or two staff complete a six-day training programme, receive ongoing EP supervision, and become the school's named practitioners for emotional literacy support. The same pattern works for autism, speech and language, behaviour, sensory needs and so on, although it takes intentional design rather than only individual interest.

Specialist depth is what the SENCO holds, alongside perhaps a deputy SENCO, a pastoral lead with strategic remit, or a member of the inclusion team. This is the level of expertise that leads on complex casework, formulation, the Inclusion Strategy, links to Experts at Hand, and the strategic shape of the school's SEND offer.

Each layer needs the others to work. Universal awareness without enhanced skills means staff can recognise need but cannot reliably do anything skilled about it. Enhanced skills without universal awareness means a few specialists firefighting in a school where the rest of the staff are not equipped to do the everyday work. Specialist depth without the other two means the SENCO is back to being routed every question.

 

Why most attempts to build it stall

Most SENCOs and SLTs have tried to build whole-school SEND capability at some point. Most of those attempts stall. The reasons are well-known but worth naming.

The most common failure mode is the one-off INSET. A twilight or a half-day, no follow-up, no return to the topic, no opportunity for staff to practise. Staff knowledge briefly rises, then declines over time (‘The Drift’). By the next term, any initial enthusiasm and intentions of individual staff have moved on.

A close second is mistaking awareness for competence. A session on autism leaves staff aware of autism. It does not leave them competent to adapt their teaching when a pupil with autism is struggling in their lesson. Awareness is the floor of the universal layer, not the ceiling.

Another is treating specialist routes as a substitute for distributed expertise. ELSA training for one TA is excellent. It does not give the school distributed SEND expertise in emotional literacy: it gives the school one trained ELSA. The same applies to a single autism education award or a single Level 5 Specialist TA. These routes build enhanced skills in one or two staff. They do not build the universal layer.

Then there is the absence of progression. Staff get patches of training over the years but the patches do not connect. A new teacher arriving at the school has no clear pathway from "I want to develop my SEND practice" to a sequence of learning that actually builds it. There is also no tracking, so leaders cannot answer the simple question of who has done what. When the next training opportunity comes round, the same staff often attend; others have never been invited.

Underneath all of this is the time problem. The EEF's Effective Professional Development guidance identifies four mechanisms for behaviour change in classrooms: building knowledge, motivating staff, developing teaching techniques, and embedding practice. A twilight session can manage the first, partially. The other three need time, structure, and revisiting. They cannot be delivered in forty minutes at the end of a school day.

None of this is the sole responsibility of the SENCO. The structural pull of the job is to fight the current fire and postpone the longer work. Most SENCOs we work with know what good distributed CPD would look like; what they lack is the time and infrastructure to deliver it.

 

What you can do this term

The work of distributing SEND expertise is not done in a term. However, the first steps toward it can be.

Start with an audit. A simple grid will do: SEND areas on one axis, staff or staff groups on the other. Mark, honestly, where universal awareness is genuinely embedded, where enhanced skills exist, and where specialist depth sits. The audit can usually be done in an afternoon or two. The picture it produces tends to be uncomfortable but is the single most useful piece of information for what comes next.

The audit is also the foundation of the Inclusion Strategy your school must publish by 31 December 2026. The DfE will provide a template, but the substance of the strategy is the school's own analysis of need, capability, and plan. The audit gives you the capability picture. Combined with cohort data and the seven principles of inclusion, it tells you where the gaps are and what the strategy needs to commit to.

For SLT, the strategy is the documented account of the school's universal offer; for SENCOs, it is the artefact that makes the structural work visible to the leaders who need to back it. SENCOs without that backing yet often find the audit and a draft strategy the most useful tools for opening that conversation.

From the audit, pick two priority areas where the universal layer needs strengthening. Two is enough. Most SENCOs find that trying to address everything at once means depth is sacrificed for breadth. The two priorities should be the areas where strengthening the universal layer would reduce the most everyday firefighting in your school.

For each priority, plan staged progression rather than a content drop. The EEF's Effective Professional Development guidance is the practical reference here: knowledge first, but also motivation, technique, and embedded practice. A staged plan does not have to be elaborate. It has to be sequenced, returnable, and tracked.

This is the point at which most SENCOs run out of time. The structural design work behind all of this is exactly what gets postponed when the next EHC plan review lands. Platforms designed for tiered whole-school SEND CPD exist to take much of this off the SENCO's plate, and the Inclusive Mainstream Fund best practice guidance explicitly permits IMF spend on this kind of CPD. STEPS is one such option, providing structured progressions across the major areas of need, returnable content, staff engagement tracking, and pre/post assessment that builds part of the evidence the Inclusion Strategy will need. UK schools currently have free access to STEPS until January 2027.

 

What the SENCO is for, when expertise is shared

Distributing SEND expertise changes what the SENCO is for.

The work that only the SENCO can do does not include answering corridor questions about scaffolding decisions, troubleshooting strategies that a trained TA could resolve, or fielding queries that a teacher could handle with the right universal-layer knowledge. That work fills the SENCO's week in the lone-SENCO pattern, but it is not the work the role was designed for.

The work the SENCO role was designed for is strategic. Leading the SEND offer across the school. Holding complex casework where formulation across multiple areas of need is required. Authoring the Inclusion Strategy and accounting for it to governors and inspectors. Linking to Experts at Hand and other external services. Working with families on the most difficult conversations. Holding the SEND ethos of the school in a way that a tiered staff team cannot.

This is the work those SENCOs are doing more of. Not because they are less busy, but because the structural redesign has freed time and attention for the work that matters most.

One step at a time

None of this is the work of a half-term. It is the work of a year, sometimes two. The schools that have built distributed SEND expertise did not do it in a sprint, and they did not do it perfectly first time. They started with an audit, a draft strategy, two priorities, and a willingness to stay with the work before the results became visible.

 

STEPS is a whole-school SEND CPD platform designed to support the structural work this article describes. UK schools have one full term’s free access. No payment details required to register.

 

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