Summary
In 2026 the government is going to make big changes in how schools handle behaviour, SEMH and inclusion.
The question is: are we ready for what that actually means?
In this episode, we makes a series of predictions about where the system is heading next year - not based on politics or policy promises, but on how schools really work when money, policy and classroom reality collide.
Some of these predictions may make you uncomfortable. Others may feel uncomfortably familiar.
But if you want a grounded, experience-led perspective on what’s coming - and how to lead through it without burning out this episode will help you see 2026 more clearly before it arrives.
Share your thoughts on these predictions (or share your own!) through Linked In or Facebook:
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Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
If you want to know what's actually headed your way in schools for behaviour and SEMH in 2026—not the headlines, not the press releases—but what's likely to actually land on your desk and in your classrooms on a wet Tuesday afternoon, this episode of School Behaviour Secrets is for you. Because I've spent the last 18 years working inside hundreds of schools, supporting leaders and teachers with behaviour, SEMH, and inclusion, and what I've learned is this: systems don't behave the way politicians describe them on the news and how they're written on paper. And there are big changes coming in 2026. You have to look beyond the words and beyond intentions to see how changes like the government's SEND review will actually be implemented in the real world. We have to be prepared for this.
So, in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to walk you through what I think is really coming down the line next year, where the pressure points will be, what will probably go wrong, and what you can do now so that you're prepared and 2026 feels manageable instead of overwhelming. By the end of this episode, you will have a clear idea of what's likely to be ahead and how to lead your school successfully through it.
Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and I am literally the man who made a New Year's resolution and had broken it by 10 past midnight the same evening. And yet, despite that, I've decided to have the audacity to focus this week's episode on my predictions for what will happen with behaviour and SEMH in schools in 2026. Yep, they say that only a fool predicts the future, and I am that fool. So, if you're up for a slightly sceptical take on what schools will be dealing with this year in terms of supporting kids with social, emotional, and mental health needs and behaviour, and what I think should happen if we want things to actually improve, then you are in the right place.
This episode is going to be my take on where the system's heading in 2026, what the unintended consequences are likely to be, and what I think would actually help school staff and pupils in the real world in terms of the very real SEND reforms that are happening later this year. And just to be clear, this is not a political rant. It's not about certain political parties or political personalities. I'm not particularly political. I'm not pro one party or another. I like to be fair, so I dislike all of the parties equally. And despite that, I do believe that most politicians go into politics for the right reasons to do theright thing.
So, while this episode is my prediction about where government policy will go, this episode really is about the incentives, the money, the systems, human behaviour, and what tends to happen when good intentions meet real-world policy constraints. So, maybe I'll be right on this. Maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe the government will prove me wrong about my expectations for the future. Maybe things will be different this time. But this is where I am right now. I'm going to share it with you, and hopefully, it will help you prepare for the year ahead successfully. And if I'm wrong, well, you've got full permission to mock me in 12 months' time.
And I should say my other resolution for 2026 is to get the book Emma and I are working on, a practical guide to supporting pupils who get dysregulated in school, published. And as I record this, we're speaking to a publisher, so hopefully, that is a prediction that will come true.
Before we start, I'd like to ask a quick favour. If you find this podcast useful, hit subscribe or follow in your app so you don't miss future episodes. And if you've got 20 seconds to spare, literally 20 seconds, please leave us a quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast, because it really helps other teachers and school leaders find the show. And if you think this episode would be useful to a colleague or a friend so that they can be prepared for the changes that will affect them in 2026, please share it with them too. That's how this stuff spreads and can do good in the educational community. Okay, let's get into it.
Prediction number one: 2026 will be the year of inclusive language from government, but not the year of inclusive funding. Because this year, we're going to hear a lot about inclusive mainstream, belonging, supporting children in their locality, keeping them in place, keeping pupils inside their communities, reducing exclusions. And all of that, you know, at a surface level, sounds right, and maybe a lot of it is right. But here's the uncomfortable truth: inclusion is expensive.
It costs money, time, training, staffing, supervision, specialist input, experts, physical resources, and emotional work on behalf of the staff. And a lot of this inclusive talk, well, you've got to suspect it's coming from the treasury looking to make savings rather than a thought-through educational approach that's there for the good of the kids. It's about money, not philosophy. And do you know what? Fair enough. We live in the real world. Money makes the world go round. You may like that, you may not, but that is the truth.
That assistive tech your kids with communication needs need to use? Someone had to pony up for that. The TA who supports kids delivering emotional support programmes, her salary's got to be paid. We can't expect her to just turn up for work for free. Her kids need food and shelter as much as yours and mine do. And to the people who now write to me and say, "Well, when it comes to kids, money shouldn't matter." Well, I bet you're probably someone who doesn't have to balance a school budget, doesn't have to pay staff salaries, or try to make the numbers work in a school with rising needs and flat funding.
So, the truth is, inclusion is expensive. It involves additional work, additional resources. And when those aren't funded, it doesn't always fail, obviously and loudly. Often, what happens is it fails in the background. And you see it through stretched staff, through diluted support, through lower expectations, through people getting burned out, through staff attrition, through students not coming into school because they don't feel like it's a friendly, supportive, successful environment, through good people leaving the profession quietly because they can't do the job they felt they came into teaching to do. So, my prediction is this: the language about policy and the talk on inclusion will improve faster than the resources and the infrastructure. And that gap between intention and schools' capacity to deliver it is where a lot of the pain will sit in 2026.
Prediction number two: EHCPs will evolve, but not in the way that families and schools were hoping. Now, I don't think EHCPs will be abolished, but I do think they'll be reshaped. And I think the name will stay because there's been too much pressure from parents' groups saying they want EHCPs to remain. So, I think the name EHCP will stay, but what they actually deliver and what they mean, that will shift. So, the government will be able to say, "We've listened to you. We've kept EHCPs," but the legal weight behind them may well change or be gradually removed over time.
I think eligibility criteria may tighten, so thresholds might rise for pupils who need to access special school places. But I do think new tiers may appear so schools can access lower levels of funding. And when we think about why, well, it's because the system, as it stands currently, is unsustainable. I mean, look at the number of tribunals. If things were working, we wouldn't see thousands of tribunals every year from parents trying to get support for their kids. Those tribunals are expensive, and local authorities lose most of them. I think the last figure I saw was local authorities lose over 98% of tribunals when they go to court. The volume of EHCP applications is rising faster than the system can cope with, so somewhere, something's got to give. I'm not saying the right decisions will be made, but there is a point we've reached where something needs to change. Clearly, the system's unsustainable as it stands.
But here's the deeper issue for SEMH, and I think this has been the truth for a long time now. EHCPs and statements as they were are slow, and SEMH needs, they change fast. They're not static. They shift with lots of factors, things like adolescence, family breakdown, trauma, mental health needs that just fluctuate, exploitation by gangs or family members, friendship collapse, changes in identity. A child can go from coping to crisis in half a term. But the EHCP system, well, that takes a year just to document a graduated approach. Never mind delivering the money and the support the pupil needs. It's like SEMH needs change in the blink of an eye, and the EHCP system, it works on like geological timescales. So, we end up with children waiting for help that arrives too late in a form that no longer fits.
What would actually help here, in my opinion, is schools having access to rapid SEMH funding, emergency response pathways, flexible support that adapts in weeks, not years. It's a system that would be built to cope with volatility, not long-term evolving needs. And I think that's the missing piece of the SEND system, especially when schools are under so much SEMH pressure. And within that, there could still be good practice and rigour around how those funds are delivered. It doesn't have to commit to long-term funding forever, but it needs to be more responsive.
Prediction number three: teacher training will be reformed, but it will still miss the point. We'll get new frameworks, new standards, new guidance about how early career teachers should be taught and prepared for entry into the classroom. But it will still be heavy on knowledge, and it will be light on skills. Knowing about trauma is not the same as knowing how to co-regulate a distressed child in front of 29 others. Knowing about ADHD is not the same as knowing how to structure a classroom activity, so working memory overload doesn't escalate behaviour unnecessarily. Knowing about attachment is not the same as knowing how to repair a relationship when a pupil becomes overwhelmed and storms out of class. We keep teaching students theory, and it's not like you can learn SEMH from a PowerPoint and nothing else. In the real world, we need to be preparing people with skills that they develop over time. And unless that changes, ECTs will still be saying in 2030 what they've been saying for decades. I wasn't prepared for this. You didn't set me up for success with behaviour in SEMH. I've entered the profession. Two years in, I'm already overwhelmed and looking at other jobs.
Prediction number four: teaching assistants will increasingly have their work focused on SEMH support. And to be honest, they already are SEMH-focused in many schools now. Teaching assistants are the ones sitting with distressed children, walking with them through corridors, calming them down, helping them with their anger or their fear or their sadness. They do enormous amounts of emotional work. Emotional for the child and emotional for them too. When you're doing that work, it's draining and tiring, and it's really skilled labour if you want to do it well. But often, teaching assistants don't get the ongoing training, the professional supervision, the protected time to process and plan for their students and their students' needs. And they don't get the pay that reflects the complexity of how the role has shifted.
So, the job they're given to them feels undoable. They get disillusioned when they don't see pupils making progress. They feel judged by parents and school leaders because they sense that they're failing at their work. And when a job feels undoable, when people feel like they aren't being successful, what do they do? They leave. Not because they don't care, but because they don't feel they can carry on. You cannot prop up an underfunded SEMH system on the goodwill of underpaid, undertrained, unsupported people and expect it just to work. And not to expect them to leave the system in their droves for similarly paid jobs in places like retail, supermarkets, and factories.
Prediction number five: Ofsted will raise the bar while resources, well, they don't. The new framework, I think, from Ofsted is actually a genuine step forward. Inclusion and SEMH are more visible. They thread through all the different elements of an inspection. I like that. I'm pro that. I think that matters. But, you knew there was a but coming.
Interpretation from different teams of what that framework means will vary. Why do I think that? Because it always has, regardless of the framework that's been in place. Whatever Ofsted say about consistency, the reality is, for decades, that inspection teams are still engaging in a human process carried out by people using their own judgment, priorities, and biases. And that means outcomes will differ depending on who walks through the door. It has been the truth for years that the report you get and the grading you get from Ofsted often depends on the composition of the team that you get on the week.
And here's the uncomfortable bit. Ofsted has enormous power over schools. To this day, it can make sweeping judgments about quality, about leadership and culture. But, and this is the bit that I find shocking to this day, and I don't know why anyone hasn't done anything about it, it's not required to publish the underlying evidence base it collected for those judgments in a way that schools can meaningfully interrogate it or challenge it. In any other high-stakes system, that lack of transparency would make us nervous. Imagine if the court system worked on those principles.
And I think the real problem with that lack of transparency, it's not that inspection teams have bad intentions, but it erodes trust between inspectors and schools and how the system is working and whether the system is fair or not. So, even if the framework looks better on paper about inclusion, and I do think it does, the lived experience for schools will depend heavily on how that framework is interpreted and applied in practice in their school by the team that visits them. And that variability is what undermines confidence, even when the intent is good.
Anyway, the result of all that and all that ranting, some inspection teams will be thoughtful, nuanced, and fair. Others will be rigid and more reductive.
The quality will vary. And that inconsistency, well, that will undermine trust in the system, which means leaders are going to be squeezed between higher expectations around inclusion, having more complex pupils in class, and the same or shrinking budgets and capacity and resources to meet those expectations, and then a framework for inclusion that might vary depending on the inspection team that turns up. Now, that's not a recipe for improvement. That's a recipe for a pressure cooker work environment and could actually lead to risk aversion and kind of like defensive practice in some schools rather than innovation. So, what's the thread running through all of these predictions? It's this: systems and policies without support and resources, they don't create progress. They don't move things forward for inclusion.
They create pressure. Inclusion without funding becomes overload. Money is important. Reform without resources, that leads to instability and disenchantment in the profession. Expectations without the capacity to deliver them, that's tyranny and burnout by any other names. And none of this fails, I believe, like genuinely, because people don't care, politicians don't care, school leaders don't care. They do.
It fails because systems are being asked to do work that they weren't properly designed or resourced to do. To get inclusion right and SEND right, we need to have a vision, the resources behind that vision, and implementation that are all lined up for this to be done right, to move things forward. And my guess is they won't be.
So, what should, from my perspective, happen in 2026? Well, we should either fund inclusion properly or be honest about the trade-offs. We shouldn't promise parents the world, but then deliver, you know, like a pound shot version of inclusion. We should build rapid SEMH response systems, not just slow legal ones. The way EHCPs are delivered needs a real rethink about responding to, you know, needs that change quickly for children with SEMH. We should train staff and teaching students in practical skills, not just theoretical concepts. We should support and supervise the people on the front line doing the hard work, often teaching assistants.
We need to set them up for success, not put them in a room with six children with complex needs and hope for the best. We should align accountability from Ofsted with capacity for schools to meet it, and that accountability needs to be delivered in a consistent way where we can look at the evidence that judgments were based on. If 2026 is the year we finally say the right things about SEMH, then it also has to be the year that we start building inclusion systems that can make those things real and concrete. Otherwise, we're just renaming, rebranding inclusion instead of tackling why it hasn't worked in the past. Rant over. Anyway, before I finish, if you found this episode useful or interesting, please subscribe or follow the show so you don't miss future episodes. Leave a review as well if you can.
It really helps. And if you know a colleague who's wrestling with the kind of pressures that we've been talking about today or on previous episodes, then please remember to share this episode with them. Your podcast app will make that useful. There's a simple share button with each and every episode. And I'll end where I started. Only a fool predicts the future. And ladies and gentlemen, I am that fool.
I hope the government proves me wrong. I hope things will be different in the future, and I hope the investment comes. And I hope my resolution next year lasts more than 10 minutes, but I'm doubtful on all fronts. Thank you for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments on this. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Simon Currigan.
Or leave a comment on our Facebook page. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
