11th June marks the International Day of Play, a chance to celebrate the importance of play in all its forms. Children, particularly in the early years, learn so much through playing, and it is a powerful way to support their development. The children who attend our Dingley’s Promise centres have access to a wide range of opportunities to play in many different ways, boosting their confidence and inspiring creativity every day.
Category: Early Years SEND
-
Early Years Engagement Events
Dingley’s Promise is inviting parents of children with SEND under 8 to share their early years experiences and help shape national policy.
Join us for an online session exploring the government’s new SEND proposals and feeding back directly into the consultation.
Your voice matters! Sign up here: https://dingley.org.uk/send-reform-engagement-events/
If you can’t attend, you can still have your say through the national consultation: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/send-reform-putting-children-and-young-people-first
-
Response to the Government’s SEND reform white paper
We welcome the white paper’s focus on early years and the acknowledgement of this as a vital stage which shapes the educational journey for all children. This is the first time that the early years has been centred within SEND education reform plans, and as such this provides a huge opportunity.
The white paper aims to “strengthen the ability of every educational setting to meet the varying needs of children and young people”. This aspiration, if successful, puts children on a level playing field, regardless of need or disadvantage, finally giving educators the resources needed to be truly inclusive and welcome every child.
The government’s commitment to £47 million funding for inclusion, specifically in the early years, provides an opportunity for quicker response to needs which are identified early. We have long championed early identification of need, however the effectiveness of this will rely on a simple, standardised and effective way of assessing needs and responding to them, which can be communicated across all professionals involved with the child.
There are however clear gaps in detail and a lack of clarity over specific areas relating to children with SEND in the early years , which we are keen to feed into as part of the government consultation, these include:
- The need for tracking of children with SEND clearly in each local authority to enable better awareness of levels of children with SEND and improved sufficiency measures
- The need to ensuring full whole setting, needs-led inclusive practice with the new school-based nurseries.
- Acknowledgment of early years specialist provision as a distinct sector that requires clear guidelines, controls and expectations
- Early years access to medical professionals, currently a significant issue – how will this be address by the Experts at Hand programme.
- Eligibility criteria for SEND support needs to be much clearer and we need to ensure that packages of support are suitable for children in the early years.
- The new Inclusion Standards must take into account materials already created by the Department for Education such as the Early Years Assessment Guidance (2024).
- Local authorities all have different early years SEND offers, and the new BSiL role has to be flexible enough to fit in and compliment other services and professionals.
-
Creating an environment to nurture belonging
Establishing an environment in which children feel welcomed, safe and like they belong is vital to creating provision which meets the needs of the many not just the few. We know that many strategies and adjustments we make for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) can support all children and can enhance the learning of those with and without emerging or identified needs. Therefore, creating inclusive provision in the early years is key to providing opportunities for learning and development for all children.
Why it matters
For all children the environment they learn and grow in can shape their sense of belonging and their aspirations for the future. It’s not just about physical space—it’s about the attitudes, ethos, and values that surround them. When educators and peers embrace inclusion, it sends a powerful message: every child is valued, accepted, and celebrated for who they are.
Supporting inclusion while meeting a child’s needs has a profound impact on their mental health and wellbeing. It shifts the focus from trying to help the child to fit the environment and instead adapting the environment to meet the child’s needs. This mindset opens up possibilities, helping children feel seen and supported rather than isolated or misunderstood.
A whole setting approach
Developing your inclusive provision is most impactful when the whole setting is working toward the same goal. Having the same expectations, attitudes and practice of inclusion will ensure that it becomes embedded every day in the setting. Ensuring all team understand the expectations for the environment and curriculum when in comes to inclusion will support you in working towards the same goals.
- Inclusive Ethos and Leadership
- Leaders champion inclusion as a core value.
- Inclusion is embedded in the setting’s vision, policies, and daily routines.
- Staff are empowered to reflect on and improve inclusive practices.
- Staff Training and Development
- Regular CPD on inclusive pedagogy, SEND, cultural competence, and trauma-informed care.
- Staff are confident in identifying and supporting diverse needs, working together to share knowledge, strategies and ideas.
- Peer support and reflective practice are encouraged, this may be through informal discussions or one-to-one conversations.
- Environment and Resources
- Spaces are physically accessible and sensory-friendly.
- Resources reflect diverse cultures, languages, and abilities.
- Quiet areas and flexible spaces support emotional regulation and different play styles.
- Curriculum and Pedagogy
- The EYFS framework is used flexibly to meet individual needs.
- Activities and experiences are adapted so that all children have the opportunity to participate and engage.
- Stories, songs, and play materials represent a wide range of identities and experiences.
- Family and Community Engagement
- Families are welcomed as partners in learning.
- Communication is inclusive (e.g., translated materials, visual aids).
- Community links enrich the setting and promote belonging.
A Framework for Change
Reflecting on our practice is essential as it enables us to grow, adapt and create more inclusive and responsive environments for the children within our care. It can help us to identify what works well in our settings and can enhance learning for all children. Vitally, it can also highlight how some assumptions, biases or routines may unintentionally exclude children. By uncovering these blind spots we can make adjustments and adaptions to remove these barriers and give every child equal access to learning in a way which is right for them.
Reflecting on your setting may happen in many different ways, you may focus on one question at a time or utilise one-to-one discussions with your team members to gain insight from people across the different roles of your organisation. Creating truly inclusive provision won’t happen overnight, or through asking one golden question of yourself or your team, but by regularly asking the right questions, you can keep inclusion at the forefront of everybody’s minds and make conscious choices to improve your practice.
Asking one reflective question a day can be a powerful way of developing your knowledge and practice as an educator.
*What challenging behaviour did I face today? How did my response support the child? Could I have responded differently?
*How did I meet a child’s emotional and developmental needs today? How could I have approached it differently to achieve better outcomes
*Was my language inclusive and affirming? What alternative language could I have used?
These reflections allow us to notice patterns, behaviours and subtle cues that we may have missed in the moment.
Consider your actions and those of the team around you and establish what you wish to reinforce or change about your practice tomorrow and in the days ahead.
Using a framework of reflective questions regularly, will support you in developing a consistent whole setting approach to inclusion. Focusing you to cover all areas of inclusion and enabling all team members to understand where you are on your reflective journey to inclusion.
Dingley’s Promise have developed a reflection framework to support whole setting inclusion, ensuring continual and honest reflection and adaptation towards inclusion and keeping inclusive practice, ethos and values at the heart of practice.
The framework is designed to highlight key questions to support the embedding strong inclusive practice across your provision, including through your leadership, environments, educators and transition processes. Visit www.dingley.org.uk/reflectiveframework to access our reflective framework and other Dingley’s Promise resources.
Meggie Fisher, Head of Quality for Dingley’s Promise
-
Response to the new Child Poverty Strategy
Dingley’s Promise welcomes the new Child Poverty Strategy, which recognises the urgent need to address the growing numbers of children across the country living in poverty. Families of children with SEND are amongst those most impacted by the ‘double disadvantage’ of higher living and care costs as a result of their child’s needs, as highlighted in recent research from The Sutton Trust linking poverty and SEND.
The strategy recognises that affordable childcare is critical for giving children the best start in life and reducing the impact of child poverty. However, the strategy does not address the fact that access for children with SEND to early years education is a key barrier to equal opportunity. The link between poverty and SEND is clear and therefore any policy aiming to reduce child poverty must also actively consider how to ensure children with SEND have full access to education, health and care services. Without addressing the needs of this group of children, closing the gap cannot become a reality and a large number of children will continue to be left behind.
We welcome the scrapping of the “two-child limit” on benefits (Universal Credit/child elements), which will provide much needed financial support to more families. The strategy also welcomes a number of areas for extended support such as breakfast clubs and holiday and wrap around care. We are however, very aware that unless correct measures of support are put into place to make these sessions fully inclusive, children with SEND often face limited access to these services due to an inability to meet needs effectively, leading to greater inequality.
The Strategy refers to strengthening “local services,” such as health, social care, housing and other support services, which would make a significant difference to families of children with SEND, who regularly have to repeat information within different formats. However greater integration between anti-poverty measures and local SEND services is needed for this to be impactful.
The document demonstrates the intention to remove ‘structural barriers to employment’, which may in some cases, where children are able to access entitlements, help families to work more. However, we know for many families the demands on family life, medical appointments and levels of care and support required in reality make working extremely difficult – something which is not fully recognise or addressed within the strategy.
We stand with our partners in committing to contribute to the Government’s upcoming childcare review and the Schools White Paper, to strengthen the equity in the system, by directly tackling the crisis in access to early education for children with SEND. This will build on what has been outlined in the Poverty Strategy and is critical for ensuring that we do not continue to uphold an inequitable system, in which children with SEND are already more likely to be living in poverty, and have less chance of accessing life-changing early education.
-
Big Give 2025
This Christmas, you can be the missing ingredient in the perfect recipe needed to give children with special educational needs and disabilities the best start in life. We’re raising £70,000 through the Big Give Christmas Challenge to fund our Transitions Support Programme, investing support, resources and time to ensure that children with SEND can start school with confidence and have everything in place to thrive.
For only 7 days between 2nd and the 9th of December, every donation is DOUBLED at no extra cost to you. Your £25 becomes £50. Your £50 becomes £100. That means twice the support for children, parents and educators and twice the impact.
Donations must be made through the Big Give website during this time only to be matched.
Donate now & double your impact: Breaking the Cycle: Supporting Transitions – Big Give
-
Solving the SEND Crisis report – our response
We welcome the ‘House of Commons Education Committee Report’ and were grateful to have been asked to provide evidence for this process, which has clearly been acknowledged within the recommendations. The report recognises that ‘there needs to be that value and recognition of the early years’ and aligns closely with the recommendations Dingley’s Promise made when giving evidence to the Committee to improve funding, access and workforce capacity in the early years. We are pleased to see repeated emphasis on early identification, which is especially vital for the growing numbers of children with SEND.
The report identifies the need to ‘undertake further work to understand where the balance of resource should sit between early years and reception’ and we would strongly recommend the focus on a needs led approach in the early years and increased resource and investment to enable effective and smooth transitions between the two stages of education.
The report addresses the current ineffectiveness of the funding in early years and the ‘inconsistency in the delivery of early years provision and (SENIF)’, and encourages the Department for Education to ‘establish a ‘set of national inclusivity requirements for early years settings’. We welcome this in principle but are clear that funding must be directed to both children with ‘High Needs’ and those with ‘Low and Emerging’ needs. Funding must be sufficient and sustainable to enable educators to respond effectively to meet a range of needs regardless of whether there is an EHCP, diagnosis or specialist input. This requires the ringfencing of the High Needs Block to support children in the early years and for SENIF funding to be available and sufficient for those with low and emerging needs. We also support the recommendation to delink Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Disability Access Funding (DAF).
We are pleased to see the report acknowledge the role of Best Start Family Hubs in ‘presenting a valuable opportunity to engage with families earlier and identify SEND needs at the earliest possible stage’. The need for greater integration of specialist services, early years teams and early years settings to provide holistic early support to families is unquestionable. To be effective, family hubs should support early identification of need and leadership of local support services for families of children with SEND. All staff need to have inclusion training, and the SEND staff should be skilled and experienced in supporting families of children with SEND.
Upskilling the workforce to support inclusive practice is key to the success of any funding measures and we are pleased to see the report acknowledge the opportunity through the Best Start in Life strategy to ‘ensure that there is a ‘strong and consistent framework for building SEND capacity and good practice in early years settings’. It is vital that a whole setting approach to inclusion is taken in every setting, underpinned by high quality inclusive practice, accessible environments and inclusive curriculum. Without mandatory SEND Inclusion training across the sector for new and existing educators, we can not hope to achieve inclusion and give every child an equitable early years education, which improves children’s longer term outcomes and supports the government’s aims to improve child development levels.
We encourage the government to factor in these clear recommendations to the forthcoming White Paper reforms and are keen to work with them to support reforms that ensure necessary system change in the early years and greater opportunity, access, support and funding for children with SEND and their families.
Read the full report here Solving the SEND Crisis
-
Government ‘Best Start in Life’ Strategy – Our Response
Dingley’s Promise welcomes the Government’s ‘Best Start in Life’ Strategy and its vital focus on valuing and investing in early childhood. For too long, children with SEND have not been able to access their early years entitlements in the same way as other children, leaving them further behind their peers, and their families feeling isolated and frustrated.
The Government states that it will “increase access for children with SEND, by investing in the help available to them to support inclusion, and early intervention to prevent the escalation of needs.” We have actively called for changes to the system to improve access and life outcomes for children with SEND, and for a system which puts children and families at the centre and ensures collaboration for the best outcomes of each individual child. We are delighted that the Strategy aligns with many of our recommendations for early years SEND Inclusion.
There was recognition that ‘the early years funding system creates a barrier to delivering provision for children with SEND.’ We are pleased to see increased investment in early years SEND, through a new, easy to access funding stream in early years settings. This is intended to ‘help fund extra resources for providers to invest in inclusion and early intervention and prevent the escalation of needs at a time when additional support can have the biggest impact in a child’s development.’
In addition, we welcome the proposed funded partnership working between early years settings and schools, to allow for smoother transitions for children, seeing first-hand the impact of effective and ineffective transitions on long term educational outcomes for children.
Having developed an outreach service in each of our communities as well as online information sessions and digital resources, we are happy to see the expansion of Family Hubs. Having a dedicated professional in each hub who is trained to support families of children with SEND is absolutely critical. We welcome the drive towards ‘helping to identify children with SEND who may need extra help early on’ as well as building links with early years settings and health services and assisting parents at this early stage. We believe this approach will have significant impacts on families, many of whom have expressed the importance of feeling included and supported at what can be a confusing and isolating time.
The issues raised by families in our recent parent roundtable held in Westminster highlighted the complexity and ineffectiveness of current family support systems and just how critical it is for families to have this kind of support, information and signposting in the early years.
Dingley’s Promise has long called for an inclusive approach to early years education. We were encouraged to see a recognition of the importance of ‘strong inclusive practice’ for all children. The Government has demonstrated their intention to ‘make inclusive practice standard practice in the early years by embedding an inclusive approach in our workforce education, training and leadership opportunities.’ Our own research with providers reflected that 77% believe that inclusion training is a priority for their teams, and when considering inclusion as a whole, 63% of settings felt the best way to improve their support to children is through staff training. We have seen first-hand the impacts on individuals and settings who undertake high quality inclusive practice training, increasing confidence and knowledge to support a broad range of needs and welcome more children into their settings.
Chief Executive Catherine Mole MBE welcomes the proposed Best Start Strategy: “This strategy reflects the Government’s commitment to prioritising early years and children with SEND, and we are delighted that it addresses many of the barriers we have highlighted in recent months. Dingley’s Promise believes that these initiatives will make a significant difference to children with SEND and their families in the early years, opening up more places in early years settings, and driving strong inclusive practice within a skilled and valued workforce, from which all children will benefit. We are committed to working with the Government to bring this strategy to life and recognise that this is the first step in a longer process that we hope will enable every child to thrive in the early years.”
We look forward to hearing more about the direction of the strategy and the specific SEND reforms which will be outlined in the Schools White Paper in the autumn.
-
Dingley’s Promise statement regarding planned reform of EHCP process
We welcome the government’s attention to reform of the SEND system, including the review of Education Health and Care Plans (EHCPs). We strongly advise that if these Plans are to cease, there must be an alternative process in place that does not erode the rights of children, and ensures every child gets the support they need at the earliest possible opportunity.
We fully understand the concerns of families, who at the current time are unsure of what the reform of this process will look like. However as the government is clearly considering possible alternatives, we urge families of children with SEND to continue to contribute to the conversation, alongside sector professionals and organisations, to create a system that works effectively and in which services can be held to account.
From an early years perspective, reform is urgently needed to remove current barriers. There are significant issues in accessing professional support during early years and diagnosing children when they are still developing rapidly can be unhelpful. The process requires families to complete deficit-focused application procedures at the very start of their educational journey, which can be traumatic and exacerbate worries and concerns about their current and future developmental potential. We also have an early years workforce which is struggling to meet heavy demands of an inadequate funding system and processes which place an unnecessarily heavy administrative burden on them. The current systems and processes in early years are not fit for purpose and place increased pressures later in the education system.
We believe that an effective system of support for children with SEND in the early years should be based on needs and not on diagnosis. Changes to the funding process in the early years is required, to remove the current barriers and backlogs in the system which are leaving many children unable to access their next stage of education or without the support in place to thrive. A fully funded, needs-led and easily accessible process is paramount. A wider range of SENIF funding streams should be available to early years providers that enable them to support all children. These should use streamlined application procedures which focus on needs of children and place trust in early years educators to identify those needs in partnership with families.
This approach would allow early years educators to use a graduated approach when identifying and meeting needs, removing the expectation from schools for children to have an EHCP before they can be accepted into the next stage of education. With rising numbers of early years children deferring entry to school because their EHCP is not in place, this change is critical in ensuring that children move on at the same time as their peers and are neither socially nor educationally disadvantaged.
We believe that this will build strong inclusive practice from the beginning of every child’s educational journey, and reduce the over reliance on EHCPs in the early years. It places the emphasis on the individual needs of each child, reduces pressure on families and early years professionals and allows a wide range of children to play and learn together. The EHCP process, or any new process that is created must continue to hold educational settings to account once they have started school, but in the early years the needs led approach gives children the best start without the need to label or diagnose children earlier than is necessary.
Catherine McLeod MBE
CEO Dingley’s Promise
-
“Heads forced to ‘lobby’ for specialist provision in early years” – TES Magazine
In an article for TES Magazine, Dingley’s Promise CEO Catherine McLeod highlights the importance of early years SEND provision amidst the concerns of many in the sector that not enough is being done to support children with complex needs in this crucial stage of development.
Catherine McLeod, CEO of Dingley’s Promise, warned that creating specialist provision in early years has been an overlooked policy area until now.
She leads the largest specialist provider of nursery education to children under five with SEND in England, running nine centres.
“When it comes to creating units, specialist provision has never been properly considered in the early years,” she told Tes.
Ms McLeod said this was strange given the prominence of such provision in schools, and suggested that in the past, there have been concerns that specialist provision in early years works against ensuring inclusion in mainstream.
But she added: “I think people have to get their head around the idea that actually, if you get in early, you give the right intervention, you can actively move that child into the mainstream.”