Loops, Leverage and the SEND Crisis

The crisis in special educational needs provision has dominated headlines and fractured council budgets. Drawing on brand-new findings from her 5-year research hub, Professor Christina Pagel explains how systems science can make sense of why accessing special needs education is so hard, and why well-intentioned reforms so often fail. Her lecture reveals three systems perspectives that together reveal leverage points where modest changes could produce outsized improvements, and uses these to explore how a range of current policy proposals might hinder or help.