Four duties, one term, and one person's memory

Somebody will ask you in December to describe a year you did not have time to write down. That is the shape of this autumn term. Four separate duties are asking for the same thing at once, and none says so out loud.

Start with the one with a date on it. Schools receiving the inclusive mainstream fund have to publish an inclusion strategy on the school website by 31 December. The guidance asks for four things: the barriers to learning and participation identified across your cohort, the activity invested in to alleviate them, the intended outcomes, and a review of the previous academic year, with budgeted costs.

Three of those four are a record of a year that has already happened. Only the intended outcomes are new writing. A school that logged provision as it went can assemble that in an afternoon. A school that did not will spend December reconstructing it from memory and old emails.

Then the one that arrived last week, almost unnoticed. The high needs place change process for 2027 to 2028 opened on 7 October, with workbooks due by 11.59pm on Friday 6 November. Local authorities submit them, not schools. A school with a special educational needs unit, resourced provision or a sixth form has to get its case to the authority before that workbook goes, so the deadline that matters to the school is earlier than 6 November and nobody has published it.

The guidance says determinations should consider the number of placements made in recent years, the number of children and young people currently placed, and anticipated changes to those numbers. All three look backwards. And then it says, in writing, that commissioning evidence and final decision evidence should be retained locally to avoid future disputes.

Read that sentence again.

The department has described a records problem, agreed that the record decides the dispute, and declined to say whose job it is.

Third, the revised statutory guidance on relationships, sex and health education, in force since 1 September. Paragraph 75 asks that teaching be accessible for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, in both mainstream and special schools. Paragraph 76 gives the reason: those pupils may be more vulnerable than their peers to harmful sexual behaviour, abuse, exploitation and bullying. So the duty is not to have covered the content. It is to have made it reach a particular child, and to be able to say how. A curriculum map shows a topic was timetabled. The evidence lives in the adaptation.

Fourth, the training. The national SEND continuing professional development framework has a ceiling of 800 million pounds and a confirmed 200 million, with the Department for Education stating plainly that the larger figure is a maximum potential value and does not constitute a commitment to spend. Contracts are due by March 2027. The materials are free and out. What is not funded is the time to run them and the record proving they were run.

Four duties, four different people asked to remember something, one term.

The sector does not agree on the fix. A report by Anthony Seldon and Tim Bunting, published by Public First, wants a governor approved artificial intelligence strategy in every school by September 2027, with Ofsted marking down the ones that fall short, which is the answer as governance machinery. An independent report covered by nasen in September asked how urgency gets decided for children waiting for suitable education, and found that approaches varied considerably, with several local authorities reporting no formal prioritisation process at all. That is not a governance gap. It is care that lived in individuals, where it could not be seen, questioned or handed over.

One diagnosis says write it down and inspect it. The other says the writing down is what nobody has time for, and that the failure happens at handover rather than at diagnosis.

A third position came from an unexpected direction. In September researchers published a paper arguing that keeping a model's inference on your own device is, by itself, insufficient to keep what you typed into it confidential. A useful corrective to anyone, us included, tempted to treat local as a synonym for safe. Local is not automatically safer. It is more inspectable, which a school can check.

What we are working on

The problem Aevum Foundry AI is working on sits underneath all four duties. A school's account of its own SEND provision exists mainly in a person, and every new requirement raises what that person has to recall without changing where the record sits.

So the approach is to work on the record rather than on the writing. Capture provision at the point it happens, as a by-product of the work rather than a separate task for somebody with less time. Hold it on the school's own machines, so what leaves the building is a decision rather than a default. And make it inspectable rather than described.

None of that is finished and none of it is promised by a date. It is the problem we are working on and how we are thinking about it, which is as much as anyone should claim.

The test, when it exists, is simple to state now. In December somebody asks for a year. Does the answer come from a system, or from whoever is still in post.