← Notes from Nici
Reality check28 Aug 2026· 5 min read

£800m of training. and nobody asked what changes for the child.

the dfe has confirmed a send and inclusion cpd framework worth up to £800m. i've read the notice. it counts training delivered. it never asks whether anything reaches the child.

dark purple graphic. on the left, a black and white photo of a classroom seen from behind a pupil, with the teacher standing at the front of the room; the photo sits inside an orange and white checkerboard frame with a white stylus laid diagonally across it. on the right, large orange capitals read “£800m of training funding available”, and beneath them in smaller white capitals, “and nobody is asking what changes for the child.”
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the department for education has confirmed a national send and inclusion cpd framework worth up to £800m.

the numbers, from the department's own market engagement notice (find a tender 019184-2026, august 2026):

i have only been watching send funding properly since i started unbarrier. so i can't tell you this is the biggest number there has ever been. i can tell you it is the biggest one i have seen since i started looking.

this is a great investment in our send space. we need it, and we need it urgently. it is heading in the right direction, towards the people who need it most.

and then there is the absence. a glaring one. it is the thing that made me stop and think.

what the money buys

the notice sets out the scope in detail:

teachers. teaching assistants. early years practitioners. all named. all costed.

there is no mention of pupil voice. no mention of child outcomes. no measure of whether any of it changes a child's day.

the stated purpose is to "support the government's investment in send workforce development and provide a flexible route to market for both immediate and future send cpd requirements". a route to market. that is what is being bought.

this is not a complaint about the money

training staff is absolutely the right place to put money. teachers are being asked to hold a widening range of difference in the room, with less and less preparation for it. £800m aimed at that is a good instinct.

bridget phillipson's written ministerial statement (1 july 2026) commits "more than £200m over three years for our send cpd programme", framed inside a new teacher training entitlement under the every child achieving and thriving white paper. i am glad it exists.

i don't see a problem with the spend. i see a problem with what we have agreed to count.

trained is not the same as reached

i have written before that planned is not the same as received. a school can plan brilliantly and beautifully, and a child can still receive nothing.

this is the same gap, one step earlier in the chain.

trained is an input. it tells you a person sat in a room, or clicked through a module, and a certificate exists somewhere. it tells you nothing about whether the child in any one of our classrooms had a different tuesday.

and inputs are seductive because they are easy to count. you can report training days. you can report completion rates. you can report reach across a workforce and it will look like progress on a slide. money invested, training days completed = workforce + spend = ✅ 👏

six years from now, if the only thing we can report is how many people were trained, we will have measured the sector. not the children.

what the sector has already said

two people have said things worth reading properly, and both of them are sharper than me on the thing they are each looking at.

daniel kebede, general secretary of the national education union, welcomed the investment but said the union "is not convinced the funding is sufficient to deliver the quality of training required". he was specific about the form it should take:

"for too long send training has been provided through online courses – what is required is in person training with coaching and accreditation."

he also said the government must develop professional qualifications for teaching assistants supporting send students, and that this "is not something that can be done on the cheap".

that is the line i would underline.

i have spent the last year trying to build accessibility training aimed specifically at teaching assistants. appetite is not the problem. heads want it — put a session in front of them that is for tas, and it gets taken, because getting tas better at this is already on their list. the problem is that there is almost nothing out there to take. so few training opportunities aimed at tas that a free or £25 session is an obvious yes.

and it matters because of what the job actually is. a ta takes a child out for phonics or reading, and while they are out, the child misses whatever was happening back in the room. so the ta has to have something up their sleeve, every time, to make what the child gained worth more than what the child lost. that is a skilled judgement, made over and over, every week, by the adult we have invested in least.

alison peacock, chief executive of the chartered college of teaching, named the capacity problem:

"this will be happening alongside changes to curriculum, assessment and accountability measures, as well as a relatively new inspection framework, all of which make demands of school staff."

schools are being asked to engage meaningfully with a national programme in the same year they absorb curriculum change, assessment change and a new inspection framework. she is right too.

their lane is what the training looks like and whether schools can hold it. mine is what happens either side of it. voice is how we find out what was actually needed going in, and whether anything happened coming out.

two questions, one at each end of the chain

none of this needs a new inspectorate or another data return. it needs two questions added to the framework. not one, and not both at the same end.

start at the child and work backwards.

before — what is this training meant to change about a child's day?

not what staff will learn. what will be different on a tuesday, for a real child, in a real classroom. if nobody can answer that going in, there is nothing to check coming out.

after — six months on, did it change, and what did the child tell us?

or, just as useful: what did the child not tell us. the silence is data too. a child who never mentions the reading pen is telling you something about the reading pen.

that is not sentiment. a child can tell you whether the reading pen came out of the cupboard, whether anyone showed them how to use it, whether they would rather die than be the only person in the room holding one. no adult survey captures that.

the cost of asking late

here is the cost, named up front, which is the only way i know how to write about this.

the framework runs for up to six years. the measurement design is being written now, in the tender documents landing in september 2026. once a framework of this size defines success as training delivered, that definition holds for six years, and every provider bidding into it builds to that definition.

the window to ask a different question is open for about a month.

after that we will spend up to £800m, we will train a very large number of people, and we will not know whether it reached a single child. not because anyone was careless. because we never wrote down the question.

if you lead inclusion, send or cpd this term

take one question into your september inset. it is not a question about the framework. it is a question about your own school.

how would we know if this training changed a child's day?

if you can answer it, you are ahead of an £800m national programme. if you can't, that is worth knowing before the money starts arriving.

if you want a hand designing the answer, that is the work i do. unbarrier.voice is the measurement instrument behind it — seven domains, device-agnostic, starts at the child and works backwards. or just reply and tell me what you'd want to count.

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