Labour doesn't seem to like Send schools for kids like mine – but here's what we'll lose if these precious places are forgotten | John Harris

An autism school in Wiltshire exemplifies what’s so different about education in a tailored environment, and the outcomes for children speak for themselves

I n the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy . About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”

Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years , no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.

Back in 2020, amid the chaos sown by the pandemic, my son James began his first day at another of the West Country’s state autism schools, 13 miles from where we live. From its small class sizes to soothingly curved walls – not to mention the calm expertise of many of the staff – it was a thoroughly modern place, offering inspired answers to what is now known about the needs of autistic people. Within months, he had made his third proper friend and had played a set of Beatles songs to an appreciative crowd of kids gathered outside their classrooms on an idyllic spring afternoon: Yellow Submarine, unsurprisingly, was the standout.

Just over five years later, as Keir Starmer’s government tipped into being a directionless wreck, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, launched her department’s schools white paper with an impressive speech in Peterborough. It was focused on England’s system of support for kids such as my son, and reforms to provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send), some of which had already attracted noisy and righteous opposition , not least from thousands of parents (including me).

There were predictions of a Labour revolt, but Phillipson had done the requisite work with her more anxious colleagues. She was also helped by the endless distractions of the unfolding Peter Mandelson scandal. But the key appeal was how proudly Labour-ish most of it sounded. One of her clearest messages was that, more than 15 years after David Cameron had pledged to end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream settings, Labour was set on a 180-degree turn, so that ordinary local schools would be the first option for most Send kids: a welcome change on paper, given the exodus from mainstream schools that took root in the coalition years, and the large number of Send kids being excluded from schools.

About £4bn, Phillipson said , was to go on making sure that regular schools would have innovations such as “inclusion bases”. The vision was almost utopian: a picture of many more children “educated at a great local mainstream school, with their friends, close to their family, part of their local community”. And then, the kicker: “That’s what’s best for them.”

All this and more is now to be included in the “education for all” bill, which will soon begin its passage through parliament (it’s easy to forget, perhaps, that this completely broken government still has some semblance of a policy agenda). To many, its emphasis on maximising inclusion may look like nothing but a good thing for an array of reasons, from the eye-watering fees charged to councils by special schools owned by profit-making interests, to considerations that are very rarely mentioned: successful inclusion, for instance, should also be about non-disabled and neurotypical kids appreciating human difference as an everyday reality.