(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
It is almost a tautology to describe the Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (henceforth, SEND) system in England as in crisis. For many SEND Coordinators (SENDCos), waiting for the Labour government’s SEND reform was like waiting for Godot. Headlines largely focused on a system which is ludicrously expensive (focusing almost exclusively on children with Education Health Care Plans), ineffective at improving student outcomes, unhappy parents and a deficit model in which parents and/or schools have to prove (and therefore focus on) their children’s ‘weaknesses’, rather than their strengths. All of these are legitimate and worrisome concerns for parents, teachers, policy makers and politicians. However, what is lacking is a cohesive philosophy which can underpin any discussion of SEND reform. Here the philosophy of Iris Murdoch can offer insights into how to meaningfully change the SEND system for young people and their families.
Murdoch (1970) grounds her philosophy in the orientation towards the good, which she describes as the ‘magnetic but inexhaustible reality’ (p. 41) which drives us towards better action. The Good is not a rule, a virtue, or a measurable outcome. It is a transcendent ideal that guides moral effort, but is fundamentally beyond out full comprehension, but toward which we can (and must) continually strive. Murdoch (1970) insists that the Good is the ‘real object of attention,’ (p. 54) and that moral progress consists in the purification of our vision so that we see others more truthfully.
Debates around SEND education commonly focus on the intricacies of top-up funding, provision mapping, statutory obligations and reviewing EHCPs. Whilst none of these things are bad in of themselves (and some are vital for supporting students with SEND), the problem is the starting point; SEND pupils are viewed as a problem to be solved or managed through the mechanisms or tools at a SENDCo’s disposable. Ultimately, it is this thinking which is erroneous.
Employing Murdoch’s philosophy, England’s current approach to SEND is a failure of moral vision. Moral agents tend to see other through the inaccurate lens of our own needs. As Murdoch (1970) writes, ‘the psyche is a place of illusion’ (p. 91). In contrast, the SEND system is cloaked in bureaucratic categories of outcomes and top up funding with the pressure to fit children within pre-existing institutional structures of conformity. This is not necessarily malicious, but these categories present us from seeing children as they really are, and instead what we want or require them to be.
Furthermore, Murdoch’s philosophy challenges us to look again, this time as a new attention. Attention here is defined as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 34). This gaze is challenging because we must look upon the individual without being obscured by our intruding ego, but a willingness to be changed by what one sees. Here Murdoch gives the example of M and D. M, a mother, initially sees her daughter‑in‑law D as ‘pert and familiar’, but through sustained reflection she gradually comes to see D as ‘delicate and youthful’. Nothing about D, in an actual sense, changes. What changes is M’s vision. Murdoch writes that M ‘looks again’ and ‘her vision becomes clearer’ (Murdoch, 1970, pp. 36-37). This is morality slowly at work; it is slow, attentive and re-orients one’s perception of reality.
In SEND education, this kind of attention is already central to the practice of being a SENDCo. Teachers and support staff notice subtle changes in behaviour, interpret non‑verbal communication, and adapt tasks to individual needs. Yet the current system often systemically undermines this work. High‑stakes accountability, rigid curricula, and chronic underfunding leave little space for the slow, attentive engagement that Murdoch describes.
This is compounded by the modern discussion of SEND often centres itself on two opposing depictions of SEND pupils; SEND pupils are either inspirational outliners or deficits. SEND children are thus trapped in a binary of either soaring overachievers, or cumbersome and expense draining, underachievers. Murdoch’s concept of love challenges this binary of SEND. Murdoch understands love to be an extremely difficult realisation of that which we desire: ‘something other than oneself is real’ (Murdoch, 1959, p. 51). Love is therefore grounded in resisting reductive narratives, and instead realised through patiently understanding each child’s capacities, interests, and ways of flourishing.
For Murdoch, this radical love is a form of unselfing. As Driver (2020) argues, this is not about knowing everything about someone, but ‘seeing another clearly enough to understand and appreciate the beloved’s true self’ (p. 179). Through this lens, inclusion, in the truest sense, is a process of ‘unselfing’. It requires schools, educators and SENDCos to move beyond the norms of school life, and instead recentre and respond to the needs of SEND students. This is not merely a technical project, but a moral imperative in which the school community must be reimagined to support the children within it. This unselfing also challenges contemporary notions of reasonable adjustments. What counts as ‘reasonable’ shifts from not what was cost effective, but a moral commitment to seeing all children clearly and responding to their reality with humanity.
In the end, meaningful SEND reform cannot be achieved through technical adjustments alone. Funding mechanisms, statutory processes, and accountability structures matter, but they cannot substitute for a deeper reorientation in how we see the children at the heart of the system. Murdoch’s philosophy reminds us that moral progress begins with attention, and to allow our vision to be transformed. If the SEND system is to move beyond crisis, it must abandon the deficit‑laden assumptions that currently shape policy and practice, and instead cultivate a genuine commitment to seeing each child as fully real, fully present, and fully deserving of our attention. This requires unselfing at the level of institutions as much as individuals. Such a shift will not be quick, nor will it be easy. But without it, no amount of reform will address the deeper failures of vision that continue to define the system. Murdoch offers us a way to think again, by attending, by loving, and by recognising that the work of inclusion is, at its core, a moral task.
References
Driver, J., 2020. Love and Unselfing in Iris Murdoch. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Volume 87, pp. 169-180.
Murdoch, I., 1959. The Sublime and the Good. Chicago Review, 13(3), pp. 42-55.
Murdoch, I., 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. Oxford: Routledge.
