Where every support hour actually lands

Most trusts can tell you how much they spend on SEND support. Budgets are signed off, hours are allocated, and teaching assistants are timetabled. The harder question is the one that matters most: where does all of that support actually land, and does it reach the pupils with the greatest need?

The gap between funded and felt

Support is funded centrally but felt in classrooms. Between those two points sit dozens of small decisions: which pupil a teaching assistant sits with, which intervention runs this term, which class absorbs a timetable change when someone is off. Each decision is reasonable on its own. Added together, across a trust, they decide whether your strategy survives contact with the timetable.

The trouble is that nobody holds the whole picture. The SENCO knows their school. The business manager knows the budget. The trust only sees a summary months later, by which point the term has already happened.

Make the invisible visible

The first step is not a new intervention. It is simply seeing what you already do, clearly and in one place:

• Which pupils are on the register, and at what level of need
• How many support hours each pupil actually receives
• Where those hours come from, and what they displace
• Whether the pattern matches your stated priorities

Once that picture exists, the conversations change. You stop arguing from anecdote and start looking at the same view together.

You cannot direct support you cannot see. Visibility is not the strategy, but no strategy works without it.

A shared view, not another report

None of this should mean more spreadsheets. The aim is a single view that the SENCO, the head and the trust can all trust, updated as things change rather than rebuilt every term. That is the work we are focused on, and it is where every later measure begins.