AI and SEND: What Three School Trusts Are Learning

Picture a special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) on a Thursday evening with a stack of reports, three review meetings booked for the morning and a dozen support plans to update. Most of that pile is copying, summarising and rewording. Very little of it is time with children. That is where the most sensible work on artificial intelligence (AI) for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is happening, and these AI and SEND tools look a lot less dramatic than the sales pitches.

In short: three school trusts in England have built small, tightly focused AI tools for SEND work. One organises pupil records and caseload summaries, one helps staff draft targets for individual support plans (ISPs), and one suggests adaptive teaching strategies to teachers in the moment. Each insists the teacher stays in charge. A new governance guide from the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) says SEND decisions are exactly where that human control matters most. My view is that this narrow, teacher-owned approach is the right one, and schools should copy the discipline before they copy the tools.

What three trusts are building

Tes reported on 15 October how three multi-academy trusts are using AI to ease SEND pressures. The backdrop is a CST survey in which just 6 per cent of academy trusts said they were not using AI at all.

Records and caseloads at Bourne Education Trust

Bourne Education Trust, which runs 31 schools across Surrey, Hampshire and South London, is piloting an AI assistant for SEND teams. Chris Goodall, its director of data and digital innovation, says it “streamlines and organises a child’s SEND record, produces structured caseload summaries and helps to complete form fields from documents already held in school.” The aim, in his words, is “to cut the heavy administrative burden on SEND teams, meaning skilled staff spend more time with children rather than on paperwork.”

Goodall says the biggest challenge has been helping staff understand that the tool is not a finished product, because they are, in effect, beta-testing it. And the trust judges it on accuracy first, usefulness second. Its SENCOs report that it is releasing time for provision.

Support plan targets at Learning Academy Partnership

Learning Academy Partnership, with 22 academies in the South West, has a SENCO-led AI agent that helps staff set ISP targets. Emma Bone, the deputy trust lead, explains the problem it tackles: writing “precise, measurable and achievable targets can be difficult and time-consuming”, and approaches vary between teachers and schools. She describes the agent as acting “like a knowledgeable colleague”. The hardest part so far has been “being really tight with the prompts”. Running several agents across the trust costs around £30 a month in total.

Adaptive teaching ideas at Creative Education Trust

Creative Education Trust’s agent, AdaptEd, began with vice principal Louisa Burnett at The Hart School in Staffordshire. Ash Mudaliar, the trust’s director of information technology and edtech, says it addresses the “timing problem” in adaptive teaching, where teachers have seconds to decide how to respond to different learners while managing a whole class. It was built in Copilot Studio in around 15 to 20 hours. After formal feedback from 60 teachers, plus 29 responses at an inclusion conference, most said it gave them strategies they could use immediately or helped them adapt lessons. It is now used across all the trust’s schools.

Why AI and SEND tools need tight limits

Look at what these tools do not do. None of them decides whether a child has a need, what provision they get or whether a plan is working. Goodall put it most clearly:

“The teacher must own the process from start to finish and take full responsibility for the outcome, with the AI acting as a support to professional judgement rather than a replacement for it.”

That matches the CST’s new guide, Governing AI in school trusts, published this month. It separates everyday uses from high-impact ones, noting that drafting a communication “is materially different from using AI to influence recruitment, safeguarding, SEND provision, pupil intervention” and similar decisions. Those uses need meaningful human oversight, transparency and a route for challenge, because “accountability cannot be delegated to an algorithm.”

There is a practical reason too. A target that sounds measurable can still be wrong for the child. Suppose an AI agent suggests that a Year 5 pupil will “read 20 words per minute faster by Easter”. Only the adults who know that pupil can say whether reading speed is even the right goal, or whether the barrier is anxiety about reading aloud. A good tool gets you to a sensible first draft quicker. It cannot know the child.

The paperwork is about to grow

In the National School Trust Report 2026, run by the CST with Edurio, 75 per cent of trust leaders named inclusion and SEND provision as their main focus for this year. Some 37 per cent had struggled to fill SEND roles in the last academic year. One trust leader, describing how AI is used across their trust, listed “SENCO and colleague work efficiency and effectiveness”.

The Department for Education’s schools white paper, Every child achieving and thriving, proposes that all schools create digital ISPs for every child with identified SEND. The plans would record barriers to learning, day-to-day provision, reasonable adjustments and intended outcomes, be written with parents and be reviewed at least once a year. As Tes reported on 19 October, the consultation response has not yet been published, but schools would take responsibility for ISPs from 2029. That is a lot of writing, and trusts are sensibly testing tools before the duty arrives.

The same white paper offers a warning worth pinning above the staffroom kettle. It says “simply using general-purpose AI in education often has negative outcomes”, while tools built for an educational purpose show more promise. The three trust tools fit the second description. Pasting a pupil’s history into a free chatbot fits the first.

What schools can do this term

You do not need your own developer. You do need some honesty about what is already happening. The CST guide recommends a low-stakes, no-judgement survey to uncover “shadow AI”, meaning tools staff use without approval, and it cites a survey in which 36 per cent of professionals said they use AI tools their employer has not authorised. If a teaching assistant is already using a chatbot to reword support plans at home, you want to know, and you want them to feel safe telling you.

From there, a few steps make sense:

• Start with one named problem, such as target writing or summarising reports, rather than buying a general assistant.
• Keep identifiable pupil information out of any tool your school has not approved, and complete a data protection impact assessment before you put it into one that has.
• Write down who checks every output and who signs it off. In SEND work that should always be a person who knows the child.
• Judge the tool on accuracy before speed, as Bourne did, and ask SENCOs whether the time saved actually goes back to pupils.

The Department for Education’s generative AI product safety standards already expect filtering to adjust for users with SEND. Its new EdTech Testbed Programme, worth £24 million over four years, will test products, including generative AI tools, in more than 1,000 schools and colleges, with inclusion of learners with SEND among its priorities. The Education Endowment Foundation will run up to 15 randomised controlled trials as part of it. Until that evidence arrives, caution is the professional position.

For background, see our overview of the most common special educational needs and our guide to effective learning support in schools. Our piece on AI and teacher workload asks whether time saved really comes back to staff.

My take

I am more optimistic about this than about most AI in schools, because the problem is real and well defined. A tool that drafts a caseload summary for a human to check is a fair trade. A tool that quietly decides what support a child receives is not, however polished it looks. The trusts in this story seem to understand the difference. The test for the rest of us is whether we build the same habits before the ISP paperwork lands.

Is your school using AI for any part of SEND work yet, or have you decided to hold off? I would love to hear what you are trying and where you have drawn the line, so please share it in the comments.