Free SEND CPD worth knowing about - for SEN schools

Here's the honest starting point: most of the free national SEND training is built for mainstream schools working out how to meet needs they don't usually meet. If you lead an SEN school, a lot of it is pitched below where your staff already are.

That doesn't make it useless. It makes it useful for particular jobs - inducting staff new to specialist practice, giving a shared vocabulary to a mixed team, and equipping people who'll be working alongside mainstream colleagues. It's less useful as development for practitioners who have been doing this for years.

With that in mind, here's what we think is worth your time.

Whole School SEND - the train-the-trainer packages

Free. Registration required.

Hosted by nasen and funded by the DfE. The general CPD units here are mainstream-oriented and won't tell your experienced staff much they don't already know. The train-the-trainer packages are a different proposition.

Each one - autism and neurodiversity among them - comes with ready-made slides, activities, case studies and presenter guidance, so your SENCO or a senior practitioner can deliver a full session without building it from scratch. In a specialist setting the value isn't really the content; it's the structure. A professional-looking framework you can pour your own expertise into.

Two practical uses. First, induction for new TAs and staff arriving from mainstream, where the awareness-level pitch is exactly right. Second, if outreach into mainstream schools becomes part of your offer, these are the materials your staff would be working from anyway.

There are also 24 regional SEND leads offering local support and networks, which is worth knowing exists.

wholeschoolsend.org.uk

Check first: DfE-funded programmes are renewed periodically, so confirm what's currently live before building it into a CPD plan.

EEF - Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants

Free. No registration.

This is the item most relevant to a specialist setting, precisely because it concerns the part of the workforce you have most of.

The report draws on research finding that pupils receiving the most TA support have sometimes made less progress than similar pupils receiving little - with the strongest negative effects falling on those with the highest levels of need. It isn't an argument against TAs. It's an argument that deployment and training decide whether TA support helps, and that the common default of attaching the least trained adult to the child with the greatest need is the wrong one.

In a school where TAs make up the majority of the adults in the room, that's a leadership conversation worth having deliberately rather than accidentally.

educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk

Check first: it's a guidance report, not training. It needs someone to lead a discussion around it.

EEF - Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools

Free. Worth reading for a different reason.

The five recommendations won't be news to your staff. Read it instead as a statement of what mainstream schools are being asked to do, and what "good" is expected to look like there.

If the reforms play out as drafted, your staff will increasingly be advising mainstream colleagues working to this framework. Knowing what they have been told - and where the realistic limits of it sit - makes that a far more productive conversation.

NASS

Sector-specific.

For material actually written for special schools, colleges and alternative provision, NASS is the natural home rather than the national mainstream offer. It has been active on where the specialist sector sits within the reforms, including work on defining and evidencing provision, and is making the argument that if special schools and AP are in some cases expected to be the Experts at Hand, the sector needs its own support too.

Not everything is free, but the policy work and sector voice are worth following whether or not you're a member.

Autism Education Trust

Varies by area.

Tiered training, DfE-supported, delivered through licensed regional hubs. Well regarded, and useful for less experienced staff, but delivery and cost sit locally - some areas offer it free to schools, others charge. Worth a call to your hub rather than an assumption either way.

Council for Disabled Children

Free.

Less about training, more about staying current: policy briefings and guidance spanning education, health and care. Useful for anyone tracking what's happening across the system rather than only in school, which in a specialist setting is most of your leadership team.

Three practical notes

Match the level to the person. Most free national SEND CPD is awareness-level by design. In a specialist setting, that makes it strong for induction and weak as development for experienced practitioners. Using it with the wrong group is the quickest way to make staff cynical about CPD generally.

Registration is not the same as cost. Several of these need an account but no payment, and some organisations run free resources alongside a paid subscription. Worth checking which side of the line something sits on before circulating it.

Free CPD still costs time. The cheapest item here isn't the one with the lowest price, it's the one that saves your SENCO a weekend. On that measure, the train-the-trainer packages win comfortably.

NextGen Teachers works with SEN schools, colleges and specialist provision, recruiting supply and long-term teachers, teaching assistants, and behaviour, pastoral, SEN and SEMH support staff. If you would like help with hiring get in touch.