Zachary Marsh

As students go back to school this September, headteachers across the country are being forced to confront a system in crisis. While children reconnect with their friends and swap stories of the summer holidays, an ever-increasing number will have a little ‘S’ next to their name on the register – for Send, or Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. Startlingly, one in five students in England are now recorded as having Send. Policy Exchange’s new report, Out of Control, finds that the number of children given Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) – designed to support those with the most severe needs that schools cannot normally provide for – has increased by 83 per cent since 2015. As a former teacher, I saw this spiralling crisis first hand.

History is an area of remarkable success in our schools thanks to recent education reforms. However, these impressive strides forward risk being undermined by a new wave of activism in classrooms. This process of ‘decolonisation’ in history is not necessary Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, 83 per cent of schools have made changes to ‘diversify’ or ‘decolonise’ their curriculums in recent years. In many cases, this shake-up has brought politicised and one-sided narratives into schools. Inaccurate and poor-quality teaching resources are being used to give students a mistaken impression of the past.